MOSCOW -- When Russia's prime minister made a surprise visit to Dagestan Friday he handed out medals all around to the fighters who had driven a band of Islamic rebels out of the mountains and back into Chechnya, but no one is pretending that the latest war in the Caucasus is over.
The rebel leader, Shamil Basaev, had ordered his men to pull back from the villages they had seized in western Dagestan after they took a pounding from Russian planes and artillery, but he vowed last week to take the fight to Russia in other ways and other places. And it appears he has begun to do so.
As it enters this next stage, Russia's latest war in the Caucasus promises to be nasty and violent. Basaev, one of the heroes of Chechnya's war for independence three years ago, may be something of a wild man, the Russians argue, but he has powerful forces behind him.
And this fight concerns more than Dagestan: It has to do with Caspian Sea oil, with comfortably entrenched criminal gangs in Moscow, and with Russia's electoral politics. It has to do with divisions in Russia's Muslim community -- but more important, the Russians say, it comes down to a direct confrontation with international Islamic terrorist organizations. Russian intelligence officers say that the Chechens have direct links to Osama bin Laden, the millionaire Saudi fugitive who was accused by the United States of directing the bombings of two embassies in Africa a year ago.
Bin Laden, now in Afghanistan, is said to have helped maintain training camps for mujahedeen in Chechnya, and to have provided arms and supplies to Basaev.
"Chechnya itself doesn't produce anything of this kind," said Vladimir Lutsenko, a former KGB officer who now runs a security agency in Moscow. "If they didn't have this support from the outside, how could they exist?"
He said a relative of bin Laden's was believed to have been fighting with Basaev in Dagestan.
Russian officials believe that they are facing a campaign of terror as opposed to the military assault they've just beaten back.
Indeed, even before Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin had showed up Friday in the remains of the mountain village of Botlikh to shake hands with Russian soldiers and Dagestani free-lancers gathered there, gunmen briefly seized a television station in Nazran, a city to the west of Chechnya.
One of the attackers, who was later killed, reportedly told a station employee that they had just come from the fighting in Dagestan, on orders of Basaev's chief lieutenant, a Saudi who goes by the name Khattab.
Later in the day, it was reported that Chechen militia leaders had put a price on Putin's head.
"And this is what you might call a prelude," said Ilyaz Kayaev, deputy chairman of the Dagestan Peace Fund.
Link to bin Laden
Khattab, a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, is said to be the link between the Chechens and bin Laden, whose goal is the spread of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Muslim world.
Bin Laden, heir to a construction fortune, cut his teeth among Afghans who fought off the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Through Khattab, the Saudi millionaire reportedly funnels money, supplies and fighters to Chechnya.
Ben Venzke of Pinkerton Global Intelligence in Arlington, Va., an American specialist on bin Laden, said he "would be surprised if there was not" a connection between bin Laden and the Chechen rebels.
"It fits his pattern," he said. "He's out to support these causes, wherever they may be."
A newspaper in the Caucasus called Severny Kavkaz reported that bin Laden had visited Chechnya earlier this summer. There's even been a suggestion that the attack on Dagestan was a result of such a visit.
Basaev does not share bin Laden's religious zeal, according to Lutsenko. "Basaev is not a fanatic about fundamentalism. It's a convenient way to get money from these Arabs."
But he does share his hatred of the Russians. On Chechen television, in an interview broadcast Aug. 17, Basaev declared, "We will besiege all Russians and kill them."
"But Khattab," said Lutsenko, "is like a separate phenomenon. He's an international terrorist."
Lutsenko said Khattab was responsible for a series of bombings last February in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, which led to a severe crackdown by the government there.
Neither Basaev nor Khattab enjoys the open support of the Chechen government, but it was powerless to do anything about their expedition into Dagestan.
Basaev is an adherent of the Wahhabi branch of Islam, the official doctrine of Saudi Arabia but in the minority in the Caucasus. Khattab has a Dagestani wife, and both men apparently expected Wahhabis in Dagestan to flock to their side.
It didn't happen. A Dagestani opposition leader, Nadir Khachilaev, who is hiding in Chechnya, refused their offer of leadership of the rebellion. Residents of the villages captured by the rebels slipped away. Those villages were then obliterated by Russian bombardment in two weeks of fighting; Dagestan now has 12,000 refugees.
The Russians say they lost 59 soldiers; the rebels report losses of 37. Each side claims the other actually suffered more than 1,000 killed.
Dagestan is one of Russia's poorest regions, with 80 percent of its budget subsidized by Moscow. Despite strong feelings against the Russians, members of Dagestan's 30 or so ethnic groups were in no mood to plunge into a civil war wrought by Chechens.
More than 2,500 men accepted the Russian offer of free automatic weapons to use against Basaev's force if need be. Russians may one day regret having given out so many arms, but for now they have kept Dagestan within the federation.
By last week, Basaev had recognized that a popular uprising on his side was not forthcoming, and his forces -- numbered at 2,000 by the Russians -- melted back across the border. But they have the will and the resources to fight again.
Money from gangs
In addition to support from abroad, Russian security experts believe, the fighters also rely on money from Chechen criminal organizations throughout Russia, and especially in Moscow.
Chechen gangs here reputedly control sales of cars and gasoline, and dominate the casino and hotel business. In Moscow, no business as prominent as a hotel can operate without the active cooperation and oversight of the city government -- and that may help to explain why law enforcement officials believe the political will to fight these gangs doesn't exist, even while they are financing rebellion in the Caucasus.
Others potentially stand to gain from unrest in Dagestan. The biggest pending issue for the entire region concerns Caspian Sea oil, and the pipeline that will be built to carry it to the West.
Russia has probably already lost the chance to build the major Caspian oil pipeline across its territory, noted Vakhit Akaev, a Chechen academic who has studied the region's ethnic and religious conflicts. But there is still no agreed- upon route. A long-lasting low-level war in Dagestan and the surrounding region could clinch the decision in favor of those countries south of the Caucasus, and keep Russia out of the top rank of oil powers.
"The Caspian oil factor is always there. Who profits? Turkey? Azerbaijan? Georgia? Those Arab countries that might, in the next millennium, lose their leading role in the extraction of oil?"
Many suppose that politicians in Moscow will try to exploit the fighting. There could be something dramatic -- the declaration of a state of emergency, possibly even the canceling of elections -- or there could just be the quiet diversion of uncontrolled emergency budget expenditures.
The rebellion is bad for Russia, said Valiulla Khazrat Yakupov, an assistant to the Islamic leader, or mufti, of Tatarstan, a Muslim region on the Volga, "but, well, of course, one political grouping or another could benefit from this."
As Putin was handing out decorations Friday, turmoil in the Northern Caucasus region of Karachai-Cherkessia over a disputed election had spilled into the streets. Kyrgyzstan, in Central Asia, was appealing to Russia for military help in putting down its own rebellion, by Islamic fighters from Uzbekistan who may be connected to Khattab's network.
It seemed trouble was brewing all over, and then military intelligence reported that maneuvers had been detected inside Chechnya near the Dagestan border.
Putin was shown on television offering a somber toast to the soldiers gathered around him in a tent in the Dagestan mountains. "We know what our foes are planning," he said. "We cannot show weakness for a second. Otherwise, those who were killed died for nothing."