Russian troops raised their flag yesterday in two adjacent villages in Central Dagestan where daily battles have raged for the last two weeks.

The troops were conducting "mopping up" operations today, searching for mines, abandoned weapons and other potential hazards in the two villages, Karamakhi and Chabanmakhi.

The villages were the strongholds of a group of Wahhabis, a fundamentalist Islamic sect that had driven out secular authorities and imposed its rigid version of Islamic law for the past year.

Militants have left the villages and many were believed to be hiding in a nearby gorge, according to military spokesman Gennady Alyukhin.

Four Russian troops were killed in yesterday's battle, and Russian soldiers found the bodies of 10 more troopers who had been missing, the spokesman said.

The Muslim militants are seekingto create an Islamic state in southern Russia and have been battling Russian security forces in Dagestan for more than a month.

With the Russians in control of one front, they will now focus their attention on Western Dagestan, where the rebels still hold several villages captured when they invaded from neighbouring Chechnya at the beginning of the month.

Fighting was reported in and around four western villages on Tuesday and war planes were again bombing rebel positions, the military said.

A top rebel commander threatened yesterday to take the campaign elsewhere in Russia.

"From now on we will not only fight against Russian fighter jets, tanks and such," a Jordanian warlord who goes by the name of Khattab told the Associated Press. "Let Russia await our explosions blasting through their cities."

Some Russian officials believe the fighting in Dagestan is linked to a blast at a Moscow apartment building on Thursday that killed more than 90 people.

However, Khattab's chief partner in thefighting in Dagestan, Shamil Basayev, said yesterday that the militants he commanded were not responsible for last week's attack.