Airport bombing shakes Russia

A suicide bomber killed 35 and injured more than 100 this week in an attack on the international-arrivals hall of Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport. No group claimed responsibility for the bombing, but Russian authorities linked the attacker to Russia’s volatile North Caucasus, home to Islamic militant groups. In March, a pair of Muslim female suicide bombers killed 40 on the Moscow subway. This week’s attack, on Russia’s busiest international airport, targeted arriving foreigners; Austrian, German, British, and Tajik nationals were among the dead. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin vowed “revenge” for the attack, while President Dmitri Medvedev blamed airport managers and “passive” policing for inadequate security.

Medvedev and Putin have only themselves to blame, said Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova in TheDailyBeast.com. Putin rose to power in 1999 on the promise of eradicating terror following apartment bombings in Moscow and south Russia that had killed almost 300 people. He ruthlessly subdued Chechnya and sanctioned kidnappings and extrajudicial killings across the Caucasus. The result: Islamic radicalism “metastasized like a cancer.”

Medvedev, Putin’s handpicked successor, tried a softer approach, said Simon Shuster in Time.com. In an attempt to develop the economy and reduce unemployment, he invested billions in the North Caucasus. But the bombing shows “you can’t buy these people off.” Air travel—in Russia as in the U.S.— will remain dangerous as long as it’s the terrorists’ “target of choice,” said Patrick Smith in Salon.com. But short of turning airports into maximum-security prisons, with barricades and automatic weapons, little can be done.

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We could imitate the Israelis, said Ashley Halsey III in The Washington Post. The U.S. has spent billions to prevent terrorists from blowing up aircraft, but it has done little to secure soft targets, such as crowded passenger areas. In Tel Aviv, people must pass two checkpoints before entering the terminal. The Moscow suspect, a “dark-skinned man” carrying a suitcase into the arrivals hall, would have set off alarms in Tel Aviv.