MOSCOW – President Putin ordered security forces yesterday to deal “more severely” with suspected Islamic insurgents in Russia’s restive south and praised a siege operation that left three terrorists dead.

Russia’s southern provinces have been plagued by violence – including the September school hostage-taking in the city of Beslan in which 330 people were killed – some of it spilling over from war-shattered Chechnya. In recent weeks, special military operations have increasingly targeted alleged extremists outside Chechnya.

Police killed a suspected insurgent trying to flee capture in the southern city of Karachayevsk yesterday, a day after security forces stormed an apartment building, killing three people inside in Nalchik, capital of Kabardino-Balkariya, to end a day-old standoff.

“You should work like this in the future, and treat them more severely,” Mr. Putin told Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev in a conversation pointedly shown on Russian television.

Mr. Putin rose to the presidency in 2000 on the strength of sending Russian troops back into Chechnya to root out insurgents in 1999 when he was Boris Yeltsin’s prime minister. But the terrorist’s spillover from the still ongoing war has plagued him since. In the first Chechen war, from 1994-96, the rebels fought the Russian forces to a standstill.

Mr. Putin’s latest call for tough actions suggests he is sticking to the course he set ahead of the second Chechen war when he famously resorted to criminal slang and said he would “wipe (Chechen rebels) out in the outhouse.” The Kremlin has justified its tough response by saying it is all part of the war on international terror.

The president’s get-tough order came two days before the February 23 anniversary of Stalin-era mass deportation of Chechens to Central Asia – in a possible anticipation of disorders.

In the Nalchik operation, police sealed off an apartment building after learning of armed men inside, and stormed the apartment on Sunday.

Two of three killed were ethnic Russians and the third an ethnic Karachay from the predominantly Muslim region of Karachayevo-Cherkessiya, said Alexei Polyansky, spokesman for the Russian Interior Ministry’s southern regional branch. It was unclear whether the two Russians were adherents of Islam or simply mercenaries, Mr. Polyansky said.

Fundamentalist Islamic groups have methodically recruited followers among Russia’s 20 million Muslims since the Soviet collapse, focusing their efforts not only in Chechnya but also neighboring regions

Sergei Ignatchenko, spokesman for the Federal Security Service, said yesterday an Al Qaeda liaison, Abu Dzeit, a Kuwaiti national, blew himself up last week after security forces killed two of his accomplices and found him hiding in an underground bunker at Dagestan.

Mr. Ignatchenko said Dzeit was involved in funding and planning several attacks, including the June 2004 raid in Ingushetia and the Beslan hostage taking.

A nationalist newspaper editor and Kremlin critic, Alexander Nagorny, warned yesterday that Mr. Putin could “choke” on the persistent violence in the Caucasus – much as America is struggling with the insurgency in Iraq.