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Heavy Russian air strikes hit Chechen mountains

GUDERMES: Russia unleashed furious air strikes on Chechnya's militant-held southern mountains on Thursday and struck lowland villages housing guerrillas who had retreated from the fallen capital, Grozny.

Interfax news agency said Russian helicopters and planes had flown about 200 sorties over the past 24 hours, more than double the average, as Thursday dawned bright and clear over the militant region Russia has fought for the last four months to subdue.

With Grozny's fall, Russia now says it will cut back its force in Chechnya, sending some conscripts home while paratroops and marines remain to pursue the militants in the highlands.

The capital has been reduced to rubble. Journalists who visited this week saw wraith-like civilians, survivors of months of relentless bombardment, emerge from cellars into a landscape of the worst urban devastation since World War Two.

Valery Manilov, first deputy chief of Russia's General Staff, said on Wednesday that Russia would keep about 50,000 troops in Chechnya to fight in the mountains, slightly more than half the force Russia said it had there last week.

The rebel website kavkaz.org described heavy fighting near the mouth of the Argun gorge, one of two main steep ravines that lead up into the mountains from Chechen lowlands to the north.

Russia has also dropped paratroops on peaks to the south of militant positions and sent marines over passes into Chechnya's mountains from neighbouring Dagestan region to the east.

Kavkaz.org said the Russians had occupied high ground near the remote village of Dai in the south and fighting was under way near Tsa-Vedeno, a mountain village in the east.

Parts of the Russian-held Chechen lowlands have also seen chaotic fighting over the past week as militants fleeing Grozny fanned out into towns and villages to the west.

Interfax reported air strikes at Katyr-Yurt, a western Chechen village where fleeing militants had holed up. Details of the fighting there were not immediately available.

Russia says its focus in the lowlands will now be on returning life to normal. Acting President Vladimir Putin told a government meeting in Moscow that Russia would now spend about $80 million over the next two years to rebuild Chechnya.

Russian troops brought a small group of journalists on Thursday to Gudermes, a muddy eastern Chechen railway junction of concrete apartment blocks which Moscow has made into a temporary capital for the region now that Grozny lies in ruins.

The town is now a showcase for Russia's peaceful occupation. Knots of men lingered on streets in the central square. The Russian tricolour flag flew atop administrative buildings.

Mystery still surrounded the fate of Andrei Babitsky, a war reporter for U.S.-funded Radio Liberty whose treatment by Russian authorities has drawn outrage from the United States.

Russia arrested Babitsky last month in the war zone and later said it had turned him over to militants in a prisoner exchange, but he has not made contact with his family.

Television footage of Babitsky surfaced on Wednesday in which the reporter gave the date as February 6, but colleagues said the pictures raised more questions than they answered.-Reuters