The War of Dagestan occurred from August to September 1999 when Islamist paramilitary forces from Chechnya invaded Dagestan to support the Wahhabist Islamic Djamaat of Dagestan's uprising against Russia. The Russian and Dagestani governments crushed the separatist rebellion, and the war was the casus belli for the Second Chechen War that same year.
Background[]
From 1996 to 1999, the newly-independent Chechen Republic of Ichkeria descended into chaos and economic collapse, and President Aslan Maskhadov was unable to prevent warlords from taking control of Chechnya. Maskhadov's moderate government was undermined by the strong Islamist faction led by Shamil Basayev and Arab foreign fighter Ibn al-Khattab, and Maskhadov was forced to dissolve the Chechen Parliament in March 1999 and implement sharia law as a concession to the extremists. In April 1999, Avar Wahhabist leader Bagauddin Magomedov appealed to the "Islamic patriots of the Caucasus" to liberate Dagestan and the Caucasus from the Russian colonial yoke. Ibn al-Khattab began to form an "Islamic Legion" with foreign Muslim volunteers, and this evolved into the Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade.
War[]
On 4 August 1999, several Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) servicemen were killed in a border clash with Magomedov's fighters. On 7 August, Basayev and Khattab launched an invasion of Dagestan with up to 2,000 fighters, and, on 10 August, they proclaimed the "Islamic State of Dagestan". However, the local Dagestanis did not see Basayev and Khattab as liberators, instead seeing them as invading religious fanatics. The border areas saw a mass mobilization of volunteers against the invading Islamist army, and, as local resistance to the invaders stiffened, Russian artillery and airstrikes came into action. The rebels were stalled by the ferocity of the bombardments, their supply lines were cut, and the Russians scattered remotely detonating mines along the Islamists' routes. This gave time for Russian general Viktor Kazantsev to plan a counterattack, and the war saw the first use of the T-90 tank. On 4 September 1999, in the first of the Russian apartment bombings, 64 people were killed when a car bomb destroyed a militant housing building in Buynaksk. On 5 September, a second invasion of Dagestan occurred, and intensive fighting continued until 12 September, when federal forces finally forced the Islamist forces back into Chechnya. The Russians suffered 279 dead and 987 wounded during the war.