Do The Russians Have an Islamic Jihad Problem?

Interesting stuff here at the article from Breitbart that details yet another ambush on Russian troops - there's a huge discrepancy on Russian troop losses with the Russian government saying they have lost 3 soldiers while other reports claim they have lost up to 50. And while this article barely mentions anything about WHO is responsible, I ask the question - does the motherland of Russia have an islamic jihad problem?

Here's some of the details from the article:

A third Russian soldier has died after a troop column was ambushed in the volatile North Caucasus region, an official said on Sunday, while unconfirmed reports said clashes had killed around 50 Russian soldiers.
The convoy of interior ministry troops came under fire from grenade launchers and automatic weapons on Saturday in the province of Ingushetia, where there has been a growing number of guerrilla attacks on security forces.

"All the soldiers in the convoy except for one were killed. The number of dead soldiers is around 50 people. The surviving soldier has been sent to Sunzhensky regional hospital," the official told Regnum.

There was no claim of responsibility for Saturday's violence in a region where there is deep-seated resentment against Russian authorities, who are often accused of human rights abuses and massive corruption.
Officials have blamed similar incidents on Islamist and separatist rebels.

It will be interesting to see if some group does claim responsibility for this in the next week but I'm willing to be that these are islamists - the ambushes are very "Taliban-like" and at the same time, this is an AFP report and they are never too quick to point any fingers at anyone related to the Religion of Peace.

These attacks have got to send some shivers down the back of Russian commanders and government officials who were around when the former Soviet Union was in Afghanistan and saw their troops decimated by these kinds of attacks. Whether the Russians have a full fledged islamic jihad problem is a good question but considering the muslim population of Russia that is exploding and the fact that islamic jihad has spread to every corner of the world, the Russians might just end up curtailing some of their own expansionist activities just to keep their own lands under control.

Russia confirms third death in Caucasus ambush

A third Russian soldier has died after a troop column was ambushed in the volatile North Caucasus region, an official said on Sunday, while unconfirmed reports said clashes had killed around 50 Russian soldiers.
The convoy of interior ministry troops came under fire from grenade launchers and automatic weapons on Saturday in the province of Ingushetia, where there has been a growing number of guerrilla attacks on security forces.
"Captain Senatorov, who was heavily injured, died as he was being transported to a military hospital," a spokesman for the main armed forces base in southern Russia in the city of Rostov-on-Don told the Interfax news agency.
The announcement brought the official death toll among Russian servicemen from Saturday's violence to three.
Russian officials have also said eight other federal personnel were injured in the ambush and an armoured personnel carrier and two trucks were destroyed.
However, a website run by opponents of Ingushetia's Moscow-backed administration on Saturday quoted an unnamed local interior ministry official and hospital sources saying "around 50 soldiers" were killed in three clashes.
If confirmed, the figure of 50 soldiers killed would represent one of the most deadly strikes against Russian forces in the North Caucasus region since the end of major combat operations in Chechnya several years ago.
Russian Internet news agency Regnum also quoted an unnamed local official from the interior ministry in the Sunzhensky region of Ingushetia where the attack took place saying that "around 50 people" had been killed.
"All the soldiers in the convoy except for one were killed. The number of dead soldiers is around 50 people. The surviving soldier has been sent to Sunzhensky regional hospital," the official told Regnum.
The official also said that three more soldiers were killed and five injured in an ambush on a convoy that came as a reinforcement after the first attack. The wounded soldiers are also in Sunzhensky hospital, the official said.
There was no claim of responsibility for Saturday's violence in a region where there is deep-seated resentment against Russian authorities, who are often accused of human rights abuses and massive corruption.
Officials have blamed similar incidents on Islamist and separatist rebels.
The wide divergence between the tolls reported by mainly state-controlled media and unconfirmed reports highlights the difficulty of obtaining independently verifiable information in an unstable region the Kremlin works hard to portray as under its full control.
"Casualty figures are always notoriously unclear in Russian reports," Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent security analyst, told AFP, adding that a cover-up by the authorities of the true extent of their losses was "a possibility."