December 30, 2013

A massive suicide-bomb explosion ripped through a packed trolleybus in Volgograd, Russia, this morning. The attack came less than 24 hours after a suicide bombing in the city’s main train station left 17 people dead. Today’s blast at the height of the morning rush hour killed 14 people and seriously injured some 20 others. Among the injured are a pregnant woman, two teenagers, and a six-month-old baby whose parents are assumed dead.

The twin attacks raise the specter that militant groups may be ramping up violence to mar the 2014 winter Olympic Games in the resort city of Sochi in February. The Olympics venue is close to Russia’s volatile north Caucasus region. Experts on the domestic situation in Russia have pointed out that it was highly risky to stage the games so near to the troubled republics of Chechnya and Dagestan. A leader of the Islamist insurgency in the two Caucasus republics, Doku Umarov, has called on his supporters to use “maximum force” to disrupt the “satanic” Olympic Games. Islamic separatists have carried many terrorist attacks in their attempt to establish Islamic states in the Caucasus region. Hundreds of people were killed, including many children, in attacks on a Moscow theater in 2002 and a school in the southern Russian town of Beslan in 2004.

In the Soviet Union, winter weather and the determination of the army and the people stopped the German advance at Stalingrad (now Volgograd) during World War II. (AP/Wide World)

The experts also suggest that the terrorists chose Volgograd for a reason. The city, which is about 560 miles (900 kilometers) south of Moscow and 435 miles (700 kilometers) northeast of Sochi, is of huge symbolic importance to most Russians. Volgograd (then the Soviet city of Stalingrad) was the scene of one of the most strategically important battles of  World War II (1939-1945). The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from Aug. 23, 1942, until Feb. 2, 1943, was the first time in the war that an attacking German army, which many believed invincible, was forced to turn back.

Additional World Book articles:

• World War II (1942) (a Back in Time article)
• Europe (1943) (a Back in Time article)
• Russia (1994) (a Back in Time article)
• Russia (2002) (a Back in Time article)
• Russia (2003) (a Back in Time article)
• Russia (2004) (a Back in Time article)