Ugly news out of Moscow where two female suicide bombers detonated explosive packed vests in two separate and very crowded subway stations this morning. The death toll from the two blasts separated by about 40 minutes currently sits at 37 with more than 100 injured. The suicide bombers were reportedly from the “Caucasus Emirate's 'Black Widows,' a female suicide bomber cadre, mostly widows and daughters of fighters killed in the wars against the Russians in Chechnya.
As always, Bill Roggio over at the Long War Journal is on it and provides some good detail on the al-Qaeda linked Caucasus Emirate and the Black Widows. Female attackers from the Black Widows were involved in both the 2003 Nord-Ost Moscow theater attack (129 killed) and the attack on a Beslan school in North Ossetia (334 killed).
Russian security forces reportedly recovered the heads of the suicide bombers at the blast sites (I saw this oddity a few times over in Iraq, a suicide vest typically shreds the torso and lower body of the bomber but often leaves the head either completely or semi-intact).
Caucasus Emirate’s leader Doku Umarov threatened suicide attacks in the heart of Russia in a February interview with a pro-terrorist publication Kavkaz Center. The Chechen insurgent group reignited the long running war with Moscow last spring with a wave of suicide bombings across the Caucuses, Roggio says.
Roggio provides the following quote from Kavkaz:
"Blood will no longer be limited to our (Caucasus) cities and towns," Umarov continued. "The war is coming to their cities. If Russians think the war only happens on television, somewhere far away in the Caucasus where it can't reach them, inshaAllah (God willing), we plan to show them that the war will return to their homes."
-- Greg
