Since the mid-1990s, without much success, the Russian government justified its actions in Chechnya – actions universally criticized as heavy-handed, even brutal — as part of a crackdown on global terrorism. Outsiders have nit accepted Russia’s version of events, preferring to portray the Chechen war as part of a bitter, simmering conflict between Moscow and a restless, largely Muslim, region in the North Caucasus that went back to the nineteenth century. Still, a close examination of the Chechen conflict shows, as is often the case in such situations, that there actually was a grain of truth underlying the Russian allegations, especially since the end of the 1994-95 first round of Russian military operations in Chechnya.