WASHINGTON, Nov 18: With Muslims in America having to come to terms with heightened surveillance and racial profiling since the Sept 11 attacks, reports have appeared of a series of mass skinhead attacks against Muslims in Moscow that have claimed three lives and prompted more than 300 arrests in the past two weeks.

Some of attacks were said to have been directed at Afghans living in Moscow.

A report in the latest issue of America’s independent weekly, The Nation, describes the attacks as “pogroms” and says the most serious of these took place on Oct 30 in Moscow’s southern Tsaritsino region where a crowd of more than 300 shaven-headed teenagers — apparently fans of the soccer team Lokomotiv — attacked dark-skinned people outside a street market. When police intervened, part of the crowd dispersed and travelled by subway to the nearby Kakhovskaya region where they descended upon Sevastopol hotel and attacked some two dozen Afghan residents, among others, as they came in and out of the building.

The Nation points out that there is a small Afghan population in Moscow, mainly ethnic Afghans who were born and raised in ex-Soviet territories bordering Afghanistan: Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan. Some are immigrants from the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Many are migrant shuttle-traders who live in hotels, and as such share the unpopularity experienced by other non-Russian preyezhiye (arrivals) who inhabit Russia’s street markets.

In the Oct 30 incident, police determined that the teenagers had first gathered in a wooded area of Tsaritsino and held a meeting before heading to the market. Sergei Shevtsov of the city police press office even went so far as to say that investigators had determined that the original targets of the attacks were anti-globalist protesters in the city centre, where the last day meetings of the Davos economic conference were being held. Only when “advance scouts” determined that there were no anti-globalist protesters there at that time, Mr Shevtsov told Izvestia, did the crowd settle on the dark-skinned workers at the market as a target.

The attacks “were clearly organized and carefully planned, and not some spontaneous outburst by a group of teenagers,” said Geidar Jamal, leader of the Islamic Committee of Russia. “The behaviour was both more ferocious than usual, and more controlled.”

Official estimates of Russia’s Muslim population range between 12 million and 13 million, while Muslim organizations claim that the number is closer to 20 million. There are several powerful semi-autonomous Islamic regions, including Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, and the Putin government has taken pains to assure Russia’s Muslims that its support for the US bombings in Afghanistan is not an anti-Muslim campaign.

The Nation says that on Oct 31 a Dagestani man was shot outside the McDonald’s on Bolshaya Dorogomilovskaya Street, across from the Radisson Slaviyanskaya hotel. Witnesses said the shooters were young men with shaved heads. On Nov 1, on Bolshaya Naberezhnaya Street in the northwest region of the city, about 100 skinheads rioted, causing minor injuries to bystanders both Slavic and Caucasian. On Nov 3, about 150 teenagers were arrested in five or six different violent incidents in the city.

According to the Moscow chief of police, Vladimir Pronin, minor riots broke out outside four Metro stations and in the southern region of Orekhovo-Borisovo Yuzhnoye. Pronin told the Ekho Moskvy radio station that he believed the incidents were organized and “definitely” connected to the Oct 30 pogrom.