Summer is the traditional fighting season in the North Caucasus, but this year has been particularly bloody. Chechen separatism has been replaced by an increasingly vicious Islamist insurgency that has struck in republics across the region. The security services like to point to foreign fighters, but most strategists acknowledge that the deciding factor is local: a generation of young men brought up to war, with no employment prospects and a grudge against the brutality of federal forces.

The death toll is still rising from this morning’s bomb attack in Nazran. At the time of writing it had reached 20. The details are still hazy, but it appears that a suicide bomber drove a Gazelle truck into the courtyard of the police headquarters in Nazran, the capital of Ingushetia, as officers lined up for a change of shift. The blast was powerful ­ Kaloi Akhilgov, an Ingush government spokesman, told Reuters that “practically all the cars and buildings in the yard of the police headquarters were completely destroyed.” More than sixty people were injured, including children.

The attack in Nazran caps a bloody several days in Russia’s North Caucasus. On Friday, gunmen murdered four policemen and seven women in the town of Buinaksk in Dagestan. On Wednesday, the Ingush construction minister was shot dead in his office. And today’s attack was at least the third suicide bombing since the attack on Ingush President Yunnus-bek Yevkurov’s motorcade on June 22 (the other, involving a bomber on foot, killed five senior police officers in the Chechen capital Grozny on July 26). And this is only a small sample.

For a few years the insurgency in the North Caucasus seemed to be on its last legs. The relative increase in violence in Ingushetia was seen as a symptom of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov’s success in crushing the rebels in Chechnya. Kadyrov himself would make regular statements about how few rebels still held out in the forests and mountains. If the rebels could be pushed from Chechnya to Ingushetia, presumably they could be crushed.

But somehow that has not happened, and it is not clear why. The former-rebel president’s outlandishly brutal approach to counter-insurgency, and the Kremlin’s willingness to overlook it, could be to blame. Or the dire economic situation. Or, as some, including the president of Chechnya, believe, it’s the work of mind-controlling drugs (following the attack on Yevkurov, Kadyrov told the Interfax news agency that a captured fighter had provided information about “tablets” that make a man “like a robot.” The peddlers of these zombie pills were, he hinted, the Western special services).

According to the United Nations Development Program unemployment in some of the North Caucasian republics may reach as high as 70 or 80 percent. And, as Anatoly Tsiganok, the head of the Center for Military prognosis pointed out, when fighting terrorism the most important thing is the economy. “No matter which strategy you follow, you have to find people work,” he said. “The difficulty of finding work in the North Caucasus is the first problem.”

Whatever the combination of causes, it is clear that Kadyrov’s claims that there are only 20 to 40 fighters clinging on in the mountains were at best willfully optimistic, and at worst misleading. According to Tsiganok, the police and the Federal Security Service reckon there are between 500 and 600 terrorists in the North Caucasus. That estimate is partly based on the amount of money the security services think is supporting the insurgency. “If there was more sponsorship, it would allow more fighters,” said Tsiganov.

The official Russian line as that many of these “sponsored” fighters come from abroad, mostly from the same countries Western governments blame for supplying Islamic extremists - Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. It is certainly true that the surge in violence this summer, especially the suicide attacks, have given news from the North Caucasus a similar flavor to the one the world has become accustomed to hearing from Iraq and Afghanistan.

But like most insurgencies, working out where foreign involvement stops and local disaffection begins is almost impossible. It is not foreigners who are affected by the lack of employment options in the North Caucasus. And most analysts accept that there are other local factors fueling the insurgency. “There are children who are currently 17 or 18 years old, who have grown up only in the conditions of war, and they do not know anything else apart from military action,” said Tsiganok. “And then there are a lot of fighters who have lost many of their relatives through the actions of the federal forces.”

Both Human Rights groups and some military strategists say that the “Kadyrov model” of counter-terrorism, which has seen security forces conduct house burnings, abductions and extra-judicial executions, is counter productive. But even boosters of Yevkurov’s rival strategy of reigning in the security services in order to win back the public’s trust acknowledge that it does not bring “such short-term results.” The question is whether the federal government will have the patience to stick with the longer-term strategy.

There are already signs of frustration in Moscow. Late Monday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev fired the Ingush Interior Minister Ruslan Meyriev over the Nazran attack.

Conventional military thinking is that the violence of the past several weeks is partly seasonal. Fighting in the Caucasus usually ends in autumn, when colder weather and the falling of foliage forces fighters to return to the towns and villages to take up more peaceful employment (if they can find it). Winter, in theory, should be a calmer season. But this will be small comfort to those who lost loved ones in Nazran on Monday morning. And there is still a month and a half until October.

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