“You Russians only see the war on television and hear about it on the radio, and this is why you are quiet and do not react to the atrocities that your bandit groups under Putin’s command carry out in the Caucasus. I promise you that the war will come to your streets, and you will feel it in your lives and under your skin.” This was the grisly message Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov conveyed two days after the suicide bombings in Moscow.

One week ago, on March 29, two female suicide bombers detonated explosives in the Moscow metro system. The two attacks were carried out during the morning rush hour while the trains pulled into populated stations and the doors were just opened. 40 people were killed and many others were severely injured.

Suicide attacks are not a new phenomenon in mainland Russia. The separatist terrorist movement in Chechnya copied them from Arab fundamentalists in 2000, along with the notion of a “global jihad.” The situation was believed to have relaxed after 2004, when attacks remained in the southern provinces bordering on Chechnya and were concentrated on the Russian police there.

The concept of female suicide bombers is not new either. Since the early 2000s, many young women from the Caucasus region have become suicide bombers. Whether or not their motivation was religious is doubtful, though. Known as “black widows,” they decided to carry out the attacks because their husbands had been killed by Russian security forces.

In this case, the two young women happened to be black widows. One of them, the 17-year-old Dzhanet Abdullayeva, had been married to an Islamist rebel leader who had died on New Year’s Eve during a shootout between separatists and the Russian police. Novoye Delo, a newspaper in Dagestan, reported that the couple met on the Internet when Dzhanet was 16. The recruitment of young women is a common tactic in this movement because it is easy to lure them into Islamist thought. The girls meet their husbands on the Internet and get married at a young age because of the romantic ideal to marry a hero who fights for a cause. If their husbands die, they either marry another rebel or become black widows.

The recent attacks seem to have been a statement against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his hard-line approach of dealing with the separatist movement. One bomb exploded in the Lubyanka subway station, next to the headquarters of the Federal Security Service (F.S.B.), the successor agency to the Soviet-era K.G.B. that was led by Putin in the late 1990s.

President Dmitry Medvedev’s approach to the social unrest in southern Russia has been a softer one. He appointed a new leader in Ingushetia, another Muslim region, who agreed with him that violence would only lead to more violence. Medvedev believes that first, and foremost, the root issues for terrorism in those regions—poverty, unemployment and low education levels—need to be resolved.

Experts fear, however, that if there will be further attacks in mainland Russia, Russian citizens will demand a rougher course of action, more aligned with Putin’s old politics. With at least two further bombings in southern Russia after the attacks in Moscow and with Doku Umarov’s threat of bringing the war into the cities, analysts fear that the old unrest might have reinflamed.

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