Clashes Kill Over 20 People In Russia's North Caucasus Region

More than 20 people were killed in violent clashes in Russia’s North Caucasus region in the last two days, including a mysterious attack on seven women in a sauna, underscoring the Kremlin’s continued struggles to bring the volatile area under control.

In one of the first attacks on Thursday night, about 10 men opened fire with automatic weapons on a police post in the city of Buinaksk in Dagestan, killing four officers, the investigative branch of the prosecutor general’s office said in a statement. The gunmen then entered the sauna complex a short distance away and killed seven women who worked there, in a rare attack on unarmed civilians.

“After the crime, the unidentified men fled the scene with weapons stolen from the murdered police officers,” Nimizam Radzhabov, a spokesman for the Dagestan prosecutor’s investigative team, told Channel One, a Russian TV station.

In neighboring Chechnya, a gun battle between the police and two men suspected of belonging to a militant group erupted at almost the same time, investigators said. Both suspected militants were killed in the fight. Four police officers also died, and four others were wounded.

On Friday, gunmen killed two traffic police officers in Dagestan’s capital, Makhachkala, Interfax reported. Three suspected militants were also killed in Dagestan on Friday in a separate episode.

The clashes were among the bloodiest to hit the largely Muslim region in recent months, though bloodshed occurs almost daily, particularly in Chechnya, Dagestan and another North Caucasus republic, Ingushetia. This week, Ingushetia’s construction minister was killed by gunmen in his office, just as the republic’s president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, was planning to return to work after being seriously wounded in a suicide attack on his convoy in late June.

Most of the violence centers on fighting between the police and various radical Islamist or more secular separatist organizations, some of which are remnants of the militant groups that fought federal forces in Chechnya’s two wars. Also common is violence among organized crime groups and competing ethnic clans.

Although civilians are targets less frequently, three human rights workers were murdered in Chechnya in the last month. Just this week, the leader of a charity that helped children scarred by the war there was kidnapped and murdered along with her husband, who also worked for the organization. And in July, Natalya Estemirova, who for years had documented the abductions and kidnappings that continue to plague Chechnya, was kidnapped and killed.

No suspects have yet been named in these cases or in many other murders of prominent human rights workers focused on the Caucasus carried out in recent years.

Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, reiterated during a meeting on Friday with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, his commitment to solve these and other high-profile murders.

"I have given all the necessary orders, as I did last time, to find the murderers, bring them justice and punish them," he said. "This is the priority task of all law enforcement agencies."