Leaders of Chechen separatists plan no large-scale operations

Chechen rebels are not planning any large-scale combat operations on the territory of Chechnya in the near future, said a representative of the separatists' command. The main task of the rebel leaders is to prepare guerilla bases for the winter, he added.

"Actually, in winter time we do not conduct active battle operations. There are many reasons for it, both objective and subjective ones. We expect there will be difficulties in supplying, maintaining the squads with food, ammunition, etc. during the winter season in the mountains. It does not mean that our command will absolutely refuse to conduct operations in Chechnya and the combatants will prefer to rescue in hiding places in the mountains. We are going to continue our guerilla tactics, hit-and-run subversive actions, but there will be no large-scale combats," the unnamed representative of the Chechen rebels said.

According to the Interior Ministry, the separatists leaders just are in shortage of ammunition and personnel and do not have forces to conduct combat operations on the territory of Chechnya. "Their leaders urgently need people, weapons, munitions, food, etc," affirms an officer in the Interior Ministry. "The militants suffered serious casualties these spring and summer. Besides, we have detected and demolished dozens of hiding places and caches with weapons and ammunitions. It has, naturally, caused troubles for the militants."

"Maskhadov, Basayev and other field commanders prefer to disappear in hiding places out in the mountainous districts so that not to be detected. They apply hit-and-run tactics attacking the federal forces and police as they are not able to do anything else. They just have no forces to conduct active operations, but they prefer not to speak about it," believes the officer.

According to him, the militants apparently suffered loses when the law-enforcement agents had found and destroyed a large weapons cache in the Nesterovskaya village of Ingushetia's Sunzha district in October 2003. "That appeared to be Basayev's and Abu Al Valid's weapons cache. There were several hundreds of complete sets of winter camouflage uniform, tents, Strela and Igla anti-aircraft missiles, Fagot anti-tank missiles, machine guns, assaults rifles, more than 700 shots to grenade launchers and lots of other ammunitions. The total sum of the seized weapons and equipments was approximately 2 million US dollars. The loss of the cache was a hard blow to the militants. So they will hardly recover very soon," says the policeman.