Captain's Quarters -

The war in Chechnya has not made headlines in the last several months, and that's because Vladimir Putin has willed that silence into being. The Russian autocrat recently declared the contest over after appointing a former rebel as the republic's president. However, the London Telegraph recently toured Chechnya with its new security forces and reports that the rebellion still operates, even if on a smaller scale:

Last month, Mr Putin named a former rebel, Ramzan Kadyrov, as the Chechen republic's new president.

The appointment was accompanied by a flurry of declarations from the Kremlin that the war was over and the last of the rebels had surrendered. But after witnessing the battle for Tazan Kala, The Daily Telegraph can reveal compelling evidence that a secret war is underway, and could last for years.

Sitting in his heavily fortified base in Chechnya's second city of Gudermes on the eve of the battle, the tracksuit-clad commander of the Eastern Battalion claimed there were well over 1,000 separatist rebels and foreign Islamic militants entrenched in the mountains.

"The war is not over," said Colonel Sulim Yamadayev, Chechnya's second most powerful loyalist warlord after Ramzan Kadyrov. "The war is far from being over. What we are facing now is basically a classic partisan war and my prognosis is that it will last two, three, maybe even five more years."

This isn't necessarily a bad development, despite Putin's accelerating efforts to consolidate power in Moscow. The nationalist uprising in Chechnya gave way years ago to radical Islamists, changing the nature of the war and in effect stealing the rebellion away from the rebels. They mostly faded away from the war, reconciling in some instances with the Kremlin, as Kadyrov did.

However, in some respects, the war reflects the nature of the head of state. Government forces have adopted brutal rules of engagement, with accusations of sexual torture and the execution of prisoners and civilians without much effort to distinguish between the two. Russia's allies in Chechnya don't necessarily refute those charges, instead claiming that the Islamists require heavy-handed treatment in order to suppress their terrorism.

In fact, Putin has many of the original rebels in the field representing Russia, which accounts for their tactics. They have proven adept at leveraging their experience fighting Russia against their new enemies, even if that takes a bit of work to overcome the cognitive dissonance of working to keep Russian sovereignty over their homeland. These Chechens have seen the force that could truly destroy the Caucasus and have realigned themselves accordingly.

If Putin wants to keep that secret, that's his choice -- but it should give encouragement that radical Islamists now find themselves on the defensive on yet another front.