Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall

As Issa’s mother swept, Shvedov stubbed out another papirosa in the tin coffee can on the sofa. After he got up slowly from the old couch and disappeared into the coolness of the house, Sabrat continued to sweep. A month later Issa would call and tell me that his mother’s heart had at last given out.

ELEVEN (#ulink_1c98ebf7-7055-5ea6-ab28-1e32da9bdfff)

ILYAS CAME TO SEE me after dark. Darkness unnerved the Russian soldiers in Chechnya but liberated the locals.

“Why do they say,” he asked, “that every journalist who comes here now is a spy?” Ilyas was a fighter and not afraid to probe. Chechens are, without effort, obsessed with spies. Cultural legends and historical mythologizing were one thing but in Chechnya there was a veritable industry in conspiracy theories. The war was not Moscow’s fault alone. Washington, Wall Street, world Zionism had also colluded against the Chechens. Intelligence agencies – the CIA, Mossad, MI6–loomed large everywhere. The plots and subplots were infinite but followed one story line. “They have hijacked our fight for freedom,” Ilyas said, “in a global geostrategic fight for our oil.”

The worst culprits of course were the journalists. In the Zone every reporter was a fifth columnist in poor disguise. Sitting with Ilyas, I was not in a particularly comfortable position. (At the time Issa had announced with unsettling confidence that he thought I was the only foreign correspondent in Chechnya.) I had never worked with Fred Cuny, the Texan genius of emergency relief, who had been killed in Chechnya in 1996. But I knew well several people who had. They remained convinced Cuny had been killed by Chechens acting at the behest of the Russian security service. Moreover, every day I was made amply aware of the price tag on any foreigner’s head in these parts.

Ilyas lived in Urus-Martan, the third-largest town in Chechnya and a place known as a center of the new Wahhabism. He agreed to meet in Gudermes, in an apartment with little furniture and less light, one short block from the Russian military headquarters. Although he moved about the city freely and was unafraid to meet a foreign correspondent, Ilyas said it was better to meet at night.

At first we sat in silence. I tried a few entreaties without luck. Ilyas was short and stocky, with wavy hair that curled long behind his ears. A reddish brown beard was coming onto his square cheeks. Failing to engage him in small talk – where he was from (“here and there”), what he did (“this and that”)–I decided to up the ante.

“Why do they call you an amir?” I asked.

“Because I lead a group, a group of fighters.”

I had heard the term amir before. In Afghanistan, in the summer of 1996, weeks before the Taliban took Kabul, their leaders in Kandahar spoke reverently of their amir, their leader, the one-eyed mullah Muhammad Omar who had taken to calling himself the Amir ul Momineen, Commander of the Faithful. When I met Ahmed Shah Massoud, the military genius who stood behind the Afghan government then clinging to Kabul, Massoud spit the term out.

“No one can call himself the amir,” Massoud said. “It is sacrilege to all Muslims.”

In Chechnya being an amir meant Ilyas had gone Wahhabi. “Wahhabism, ” at least in Chechnya, is an imprecise term. Religiously, it could mean nearly anything. Yet militarily, its meaning was clear: It meant Ilyas had joined Jama’at, the fighting arm of the would-be Islamic fundamentalists who were now claiming recruits across Chechnya – even in Gudermes, the Russians’ administrative center. Being an amir meant that Ilyas, though scarcely twenty years old, controlled six fighters, who, as he put it, “would do anything I ask.”

“The Wahhabis,” Ilyas explained, “are anyone who believes in the need to cleanse our nation and who will sacrifice himself in the jihad against Russia,” and, he politely added, “against the United States and its allies as well.”

In Kandahar that summer of 1996 the Taliban had convened a gathering of mullahs, one of the largest ever. In the dark of night, their high-pitched prayers woke me. I had never heard a more terrifying sound. To me, their cries did not ring of piety, but of a dark passion laced with bloodlust. Later I told a UN worker, a gentle Somalian who had survived the worst of Mogadishu, what I had heard. The Somalian pulled me aside and whispered: “You have heard the sound of evil. You may think me paranoid, but these Talibs are dangerous. They will only grow and foster more evil. You must warn your government, tell them not to support them. They will take this country and turn it into the world’s terrorist camp.”

In Putin’s War, Kremlin aides and Russian generals had grown fond of spinning tales of “thousands of Taliban fighters” flooding into Chechnya to aid their brothers. Although the Chechens had boasted of the aid their Islamic brothers had provided, chiefly mercenaries and money, the ties among the Chechen rebels and the Taliban and Al Qaeda were shadowy. So as we sat across a small table, cupping our hands around thin glasses of tea, I asked Ilyas if he could refute Russia’s claims.

“It’s nonsense,” he said. “We have no Taliban here. Did we have Arabs fighting on our side? Yes. But a hundred or two at most. Do we support the Taliban? Of course. They are our spiritual brothers. They, too, are fighting to purify Islam and liberate it from its oppressors.”

As we sat together in that corner of Chechnya, the horror of September 11, 2001, lay a year in the future. But the Kremlin had long emphasized reports of Khattab’s ties to bin Laden.

“Khattab is our amir,” Ilyas said. “He is a man of great purity who knows how to bring Shari’a to our land.” But as pro-Chechen Web sites had long made obvious in numerous languages, the Black Arab’s expertise was not restricted to religion. An adept commander, Khattab had become renowned as the mastermind of one of the first war’s deadliest ambushes. Russian and Western intelligence agencies also considered Khattab an able fund raiser, reaping financial support, if not large numbers of mercenaries, from Islamic radicals around the world.

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“New money comes every week,” Ilyas boasted, refusing to name the country or organization of its origin. “For this we can thank Khattab as well.” Ilyas did not disguise the fact that some of his fellow Wahhabi fighters had come from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere across the Arab world, but the majority, he insisted, were Chechens. And their arms, he added, were Russian. Russian officers and soldiers were more than willing, for a price, to keep the enemy well armed.

Ilyas had clear ideas about the future, his own and his people’s. As we sat in the dank apartment in Gudermes, and scattered gunfire pierced the night air outside, he laid out for me – in far more detail than I felt safe knowing – the fighters’ plans. I pulled out my well – worn map of Chechnya and spread it on the thin carpet. Ilyas’s eyes danced. In Soviet times such maps were restricted to government eyes. I’d bought it from a street vendor in Moscow, a block from the Lubyanka. But like many fighters, Ilyas had never seen a map of his land.

Excited, he charted, town by town, gorge by gorge, where the resistance forces now bided their time. He traced the roads in and around Grozny. He knew where each curve and hill lay. His voice quickened as he talked of the rebel leaders Basayev and Khattab, and the lesser field commanders now spread across Chechnya. His fingers danced over the map as he shared his best estimates of how many men each commander controlled. Tasks differed, he said, from assassination to suicide bombing to intelligence, but one mission united the fighters: to carry the war on, to keep the occupiers in a vise, to ensure they suffer a slow, but constant, loss of life.

“We have no other choice,” he said when I asked why he had chosen the Wahhabi path. “Once we believed our elders. We believed it when they told us moral virtue would bring victory. But we are a new force, and we know we must purify the soul of our nation. Today. Before it is too late.”

Ilyas was educated, intelligent, and impatient. He wore a Swiss mountaineering watch, a state-of-the-art piece that boasted a digital compass, a barometer, and an altitude gauge. He had a clear sense that the struggle would be long, perhaps even without end. Yet he was convinced it was just. Fighting the Russians, he said, was the only way for a morally pure Chechen man to live and the most righteous way to die. Ilyas was not a big fighter, just one of thousands in the new scaled-down resistance. Small teams, young, well armed, and dedicated to the ghazavat, were now forming to run sabotage and reconnaissance missions. They would take out Russian soldiers in the markets. They would take out Chechen traitors in their sleep. They would blow up checkpoints. They would ambush convoys at will.

I had seen Ilyas’s handiwork up close. That afternoon, as Issa, Shvedov, Yura, and I were making our way from Grozny to Gudermes, four agitated young Russian soldiers bade us stop at their checkpoint near the town of Djalka, just ten miles from Grozny. At first we thought another convoy was coming and we would have to let it pass. But when I got out of the UAZik, I saw that was not the case. Half a mile or so beyond the checkpoint, in the dense woods that divided two brown fields, a firefight raged. I could hear the exchange of automatic rifle fire and, through the shafts of billowing smoke, see a trio of helicopters swoop down and fire into the woods. The Russian soldiers, suntanned OMON officers from Irkutsk, checked our documents. Shvedov asked what had happened. They shrugged their shoulders.

“Something,” one said.

“Nothing,” said the other.

They would not let us through, so we stood at the checkpoint and watched the spectacle.

After half an hour a bus that had crossed through the firefight approached. Issa went to talk to its driver.

“It’s the train,” he said when he returned. His wan smile revealed delight.

The Russians had recently started running trains again between Gudermes to Grozny to supply their headquarters with food, fuel, and weapons.

“They hit the train,” Issa explained.

As more cars joined the line behind us, Issa talked to the drivers. No matter where we went in Chechnya, Issa seemed to know everyone and everyone knew him. It was not always a comforting equation. He returned with details: guerrillas in the woods, remote-controlled bombs on the tracks, an armored car with a cache of Russian weapons blown up. “It will soon be over,” Issa announced, with the confidence of a man who had grown used to the timetable of guerrilla warfare. He was right. In an hour we were back in Gudermes, and several hours later I was sitting with Ilyas.

“You saw the remains of the train, didn’t you?” Ilyas asked. We had been going over the map when he paused an index finger on Djalka. “You must have been there when the train was hit this afternoon, no?” he asked, revealing a knowledge of both the attack and my whereabouts. It was a polite way of letting me know that his group had helped bomb the train. The ambush was effective. The train was hauling two carloads of soldiers and several wagons of materiel to Khankala, the Russian military headquarters at Grozny’s eastern edge, when four remote-controlled bombs exploded in succession. Six soldiers were wounded, and one woman, a cook, was killed. The train ground to a stop. The soldiers walked the ten miles to Khankala on foot and in fear.

“We will not give up,” Ilyas said. “We will hit them in small ways, but every day. Some colonel gets up to go to work, ties his shoes, puts on his coat, starts his car, and he is gone.”

Given the frequency of assassinations in Chechnya, I knew this was not a rhetorical flourish. In fact, as we spoke, another squad was moving through the darkness toward its target. In the early morning, a quiet Sunday in the town of Alkhan-Yurt, the town’s Chechen administrator, accused of serving the occupiers, was to be assassinated outside his home, shot by more than a dozen bullets.

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“When will it end?” I asked.

“When they leave.”

Like many Chechens, Ilyas did not refer to the Russian soldiers in their midst as anything but “they.”

As our talk stretched into its third hour, I sensed that if there were enough young men in Chechnya like Ilyas, the Russians might succeed in bringing a semblance of governance to the region but would never again rest comfortably as its guardians.

The hatred, Ilyas assured me, would always burn. A group of young men in Urus-Martan were now back in school, learning how to blow themselves up. The suicide bombers, he said, were not mentally disturbed, drug-addicted, or eager to earn money for their families, all motives the Kremlin had provided reporters in Moscow. They were Chechens, he said, who had been through the so-called filtration camps, the jails the Russians had established in the republic since the days of the first war, ostensibly to weed out terrorists from civilian men. The filtration camps were notorious locales for torture.

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They ram steel rods into your anus until they nearly kill you,” Ilyas said. “It would be better to be killed, because you come back to us humiliated. For a Chechen man there is only one thing to do: avenge.”

As the kettle boiled a second time, Ilyas fell silent. Then he raised his eyes and bore them into mine. “Are you a Christian?” he asked.