Terrorism Experts Say School Siege Similar To Russian Tragedy is Unlikely
By Frank Devlin, The Morning Call (Allentown, Penn.)
As Americans reflected on the three-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks last weekend, they also lamented the terror that killed at least 330 hostages -- half of them children -- at a Russian school this month.
In addition to sympathy for the Russians, though, there were questions. Did the murder of children establish a new low for terrorist activity?
And could such a strike be carried out in the United States with similar results?
Experts on Russia in the United States say the answer to both questions is probably no. But they caution that not much comfort should be taken from those answers.
Comparing the situation here to Russia, Michael Radu of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia says, “We are safer but not safe.”
If al-Qaida could manage to put together a team of commandos somewhere in the United States and seize a school “they would,” he says. “Of course.”
But the logistics would be more challenging than in the Russian strike.
It would be difficult for the al-Qaida operatives assumed to be in the United States to avoid capture while training for such an operation -- a reported 30 terrorists stormed the Russian school -- or while en route to it.
Southern Russia is a different story. There, the breakaway, terrorist-spawning republic of Chechnya is not far from North Ossetia, the Russian republic where the school was seized.
And people are generally free to move back and forth across the border that separates Chechnya from the rest of Russia, he says.
The hostage takers reportedly arrived at the school in a military truck they hijacked in Ingushetia, which is sandwiched between North Ossetia and Chechnya.
The operation likely also benefited from Russian incompetence and corruption, Radu says.
The militants passed through a region dotted by checkpoints designed to keep Chechen violence from spreading. Hostages told journalists that the kidnappers said they had bribed their way past checkpoints. But a police spokesman in Russia said the terrorists used roads that weren’t patrolled.
If terrorists managed to assemble and then travel to an American school, Radu says, he cannot imagine that local and federal authorities would botch the situation as badly as he says the Russians did.
From the Sept. 1 start of the raid, he says, authorities failed to maintain a tight cordon around the school.
Reports say vigilante parents firing guns mistakenly killed several Russian troops when the standoff devolved into explosions and chaos Sept. 3.
According to the Russian government, the first explosions that went off in the gymnasium, where about 1,000 hostages were being held, were accidental. But Radu says another theory is that a vigilante parent could have prompted the terrorists to detonate their bombs by shooting into the building.
“I can’t imagine that the FBI and the police here can do everything wrong” the way the Russians did, he says.
To be sure they don’t, President Bush last week ordered the re-evaluation of hostage-taking responses to make sure the nation is prepared if an attack like the one in Russia happens here.
“The president said to all of us: Just make sure you know what you are going to do, who is going to be doing it, where we are going to be doing it, what resources we are going to apply,” U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said.
However the massacre happened, Radu says it’s important to stress that the terrorists are to blame.
The tragedy points up the nature of terrorists, he says, who shot the Russian children in the back as they tried to flee when the gymnasium roof collapsed.
“These people are rabid dogs,” Radu says.
Some commentators have called North Ossetia a new low in terror.
But James Goldgeir, director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, says children have often been victimized by terrorists.
But the Russia attack “is so striking to us because what you find at a school are children,” he says.
It may have been striking to some of the terrorists, too. Reports say leaders of the attack shot participants who protested beforehand when they found out their target was a school.
If terrorists struck an American school, Goldgeir says, “you would see a swing back” to the post-Sept. 11 months when “people would not criticize the president.”
“People would say ‘Do what you need to do to stop this from happening,”’ Goldgeir says.
But, like Radu, Goldgeir says Russia’s struggle with Chechen rebels -- regardless of reputed ties to al-Qaida that Russian President Vladimir Putin stresses -- is different from America’s war on terror.
For one thing, Goldgeir says, al-Qaida seems focused on hitting symbolic U.S. targets. A school “does seem like it’s a different kind of target,” he says.
And while careful not to excuse terrorism for any sake, Radu and Goldgeir both say recent terror in Russia -- including the downing of two planes and the bombing of the Moscow subway -- tap into anger over Russia’s clampdown in Chechnya.
“The use of force by the Russian military against the population of Chechnya … there isn’t the kind of care to avoid killing women and children that the U.S. and NATO forces employ,” Goldgeir says. “The way the Russians have gone about leveling the city of Grozny does not appear to be making an effort to hit only military targets” in Chechnya, he says.
Russian officials have angrily deflected foreign criticism of their forces’ reported abuses.
Putin, in a meeting with Western scholars last week, acknowledged that Russian forces have committed abuses. He compared the brutality of Russian soldiers to the abuse of prisoners in Iraq by U.S. forces.
The conflict began in the early 1990s “as a Chechen war of independence” from Russia, Radu says. Russia pulled its forces out of Chechnya in 1996, Radu says, granting “de facto independence.” But it invaded in 1999 after terrorist strikes in Moscow were attributed to the Chechens.
Chechen grievances against the Russians go back two centuries to when the Russian Empire annexed the Caucuses region, Radu says. In 1944, Stalin deported 500,000 Chechens and Ingush to Central Asia, Radu adds. Many died in the process.
“Some of the leaders of the present conflict were born in exile in Central Asia,” says Radu. “It didn’t make them very pro-Russia.”
However, Radu says, getting back to the school siege, “we should stop even thinking about what brings people to do these kinds of things.”
“Rabid dogs you don’t pet,” he says. “You shoot them.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.