Tuesday, October 30, 2007

A view from the ground on the thwarted attack

A terrorist attack was thwarted here on Monday, and it's getting some play in the news and the blogosphere. The attack has temporarily shut down the British Embassy and greatly reduced operations for American concerns in Baku.

There are a few interesting aspects to the event as I see it here. The first is the Shiite angle, which does a few interesting things. Iran certainly is a neighbor, but I think it is probably not the driver of this attack. Despite a certain growth in religious self-identity in the country since the Soviet collapse, I don't see much indication that it has penetrated very deeply, or turned toward radicalism. In the south, Wahhabi mullahs are making inroads, but from what I've seen, they're viewed with suspicion. Beards are not only not worn, for example, but seen as slightly suspect. The north has a greater number of Sunni adherents, and although that could suggest ties to Daghestani and perhaps Chechen Sunnis, I've seen little sign of that, either. Most of the religious influence seems to be coming from Jordan and Turkey, and especially in the case of Turkey, seems more directed at fostering stronger inter-governmental ties than at fostering any kind of fundamentalism.

Moreover, border control seems fairly strong. It's hardly surprising to me that the would-be terrorists used local weapons (which lead to the timely discovery that these weapons were missing): drug interdiction efforts are very strict (hardly a day goes by when we don't see some drug runner getting caught on the 5 o'clock news), and guns are even harder to get in, due to worries about said weapons getting to Garabagh.

The north is equally quiet. I know a police officer in a mountain town who got into a gunfight with a group of Chechens quite a few years ago. However, it was long ago, and the men were gangsters, holding up cars for money, not radicals. Since those four men were shut down, there haven't been any real problems that I'm aware of.

Another brief word about the military connection. Given the fact that every Azeri male must serve two years, it isn't impossible that some more or less fanatical young man might get access to weapons - as apparently happened here. But as this incident has illustrated, the corruption in the military seems to extend only to the huge sums of oil money being kicked toward the top brass. So it isn't surprising that when a weapons cache went missing, it was discovered fairly quickly. And the soldier in question marked himself even more conspicuously by deserting - a very major red flag for this country.

One other thing has struck me about this attack - that's the much-repeated quote about a "horrifying, large-scale attack." I can't really imagine an attack using 20 grenades, a few automatic rifles, and a machine gun as being terribly large-scale, especially if directed against two embassies (either simultaneously or not). I wonder what we're not being told in this regard?

The overall mood here seems very quiet, and not at all anti-American. I doubt, overall, that this will amount to much.

1 comment:

Brad V said...

Interesting analysis.