Rebel attacks kill 10 soldiers

Rebel raids and landmine explosions killed at least 10 Russian soldiers and police in Chechnya, an official with the Kremlin-backed civilian administration said today.

Of this number, five servicemen were killed and another five were wounded in 21 rebel attacks on Russian positions since Thursday, the official said. Another two soldiers died and five were wounded yesterday when their vehicle was blown up by a rebel mine in the southern Vedeno region, he said.

In another attack in southern Chechnya yesterday, rebels ambushed a Russian armoured vehicle near the village of Shaami-Yurt, killing two and wounding six servicemen, the official said.

And in the Chechen capital, Grozny, a rebel attack on a checkpoint of the pro-Moscow local police left one officer dead and another one wounded, he added.

Russian forces and their local collaborators suffer daily losses from rebel mines and hit-and-run raids. Tens of thousands of Russian troops have been deployed in the region since September 1999, but they have failed to crush the resistance despite far superior firepower.

Russia’s combat jets and helicopter gunships continued pounding Chechnya’s forested southern mountains and heavy artillery barraged suspected rebel hideouts Friday.

Colonel Ilya Shabalkin, a spokesman for the federal forces in Chechnya, said today that Russian forces had carried out a successful raid against a rebel group led by warlord Doku Umarov in the Itum-Kale region on the border with Georgia, killing about seven rebels and taking several more prisoners.