Brian glyn williams, p.29
Brian Glyn Williams, page 29
Russians, and the number of 317 dead hostages was widely added to the
Chechen terrorists’ list of victims. A typical unnuanced account of the
event that was to come out years later would state:
In 1995, Chechen Islamists attacked a hospital in the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk and took 2,000 hostages—including women and their
newborn infants. (More than 100 hostages died.) A decade later, Chechen
and Ingush gunmen attacked a school in the town of Beslan and took over
1,000 hostages—including 777 children. Almost 400 people died. This
is terrorism of the most hideous form: Even al-Qaeda does not make a
practice of targeting elementary schools and maternity wards.126
By this time, Basayev had been declared a terrorist by most Western
countries, and his continued impunity had become a bitter pill for Putin and his people to swallow. With a bounty of $10 million on his head, many Russians asked how the one-legged terrorist managed to continue to
carry out terror attacks from Moscow to Beslan to tiny Russian-occupied
Chechnya. As the pressure on Putin, the army, and the fsb mounted, kill-
ing Basayev became a national obsession for Russia.
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Wolf Hunt The Killing of the Chechen Leaders
It was only a matter of time before the most prominent Chechen rebels
were hunted down and killed by the massive Russian force in Chechnya,
which had the insider cooperation of Ramazan Kadyrov and Yamadiyev’s
pro-Russian Chechen militias. These pro-Russian Chechen militias had
begun a policy of kidnapping the families of rebels and torturing them to find their whereabouts.
The first rebel to be killed was the notorious Wahhabi, Arabi Barayev,
who was killed by Russian forces in a shoot-out in Alkhan Kala on June 22, 2001. The villagers in his hometown refused to allow the sadistic kidnapper to be buried in their village, and his widow subsequently was killed as one of the Black Widows in the Dubrovka Theater incident.
The next leader to be killed was the “Black Arab” Amir Khattab, who
had once seemed immortal (he survived a heavy caliber bullet wound
to the stomach, a land mine explosion, and the loss of several fingers on his right hand to a grenade). But the larger-than-life Khattab’s time ran out on March 19, 2002, when he opened a poisoned letter from one of his
trusted couriers in his mountain hideout. The Russian newspaper Argu-menty i Fakty (Arguments and Facts) would record the death of this jihadi terrorist as follows:
Having taken the envelope containing the letter from the courier, Khattab went into his tent. “He came out a half hour later with his face pale,
rubbing his face with the stump of his arm, and he then fell into the arms of his bodyguards.” Feeling temporarily improved, Khattab gave an order
to let Ibragim [the courier], who, along with five others, had been put
under arrest, go: “He has to get back to Baku.”
An hour later Khattab again felt bad. “He fell into some bushes, and a
moment later he was dead. Khattab’s people searched for Ibragim in Baku
for almost a month. It turned out that [Shamil] Basaev had personally
ordered his execution. The bound body of the courier was found in the
city outskirts with five bullets in the head.”127
Photographs of Khattab being buried in an earthen grave were subse-
quently posted on qoqaz.net, the first online global jihad site, and were cause for mourning among many young Arab men who had idolized him
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as a holy warrior. The media-savvy Khattab, who was seen as much more
of a frontline warrior by Arab online followers than the elderly bin Laden, had become famous through his online biopic “The Life and Times of
Khattab,” which is still available.
Khattab’s role as the head of the decreasing number of foreign fighters
in Chechnya, estimated to be no more than fifty, was taken by his naib amir (deputy commander) Abu Walid.128 He was, however, killed on April 16, 2004, when his unit was surrounded by forces from the pro-Russian
Yamadayev brothers’ militia known as Vostok. He was killed in combat and beheaded by his enemies. Abu Walid, a Saudi who previously had
fought in Bosnia and had joined Khattab in the Dagestan raid, was then
succeeded by a Jordanian named Abu Hafs al Urduni, who was himself
killed by Russian forces in a gunfight in Khasavyurt, Dagestan, on November 26, 2006. Urduni’s demise, combined with the increasing difficulty
of getting into the southern mountains of Russian-controlled Chechnya
and the rise of a more accessible jihad closer to home in us-occupied
Iraq, led to a gradual disappearance of the Arab Wahhabi fighters in the Chechen conflict.
The next Chechen “wolf” to die was Salman Raduyev, aka “Michael
Jackson,” the leader of the Pervomaiskoe raid into Dagestan and constant thorn in the side of Aslan Maskhadov. He was arrested by the Russians in 2000 in his hometown of Novogroznensky and sentenced to life in prison
for his crimes against Russia. But in December 2002 he died from “in-
ternal bleeding” in his prison cell in Siberia. Considering the inhumane treatment of Chechens in Russian prisons, it was assumed by most that
he had been beaten to death by his Russian captors.
The next figure to be killed was to be widely mourned in Chechnya
(unlike the previous terrorists and jihadis) and was the popularly elected president of Chechnya, Aslan Maskhadov. He had just declared a ceasefire with the Russians and was still hoping to negotiate an end to the
Russian quagmire in Chechnya, which had cost the Russians thousands
of soldiers’ lives in its second round, when he was tracked down. A Rus-
sian report stated of his March 8, 2005, death: “Today [we] carried out
an operation in the settlement of Tolstoy-Yurt, as a result of which the international jihadist and leader of armed groups Maskhadov was killed,
and his closest comrades-in-arms detained.”
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The Russians’ cynical misrepresentation of Maskhadov as an “inter-
national jihadist leader” deliberately overlooked the fact that the Che-
chen president actually had called for the expulsion of Khattab’s foreign jihadi fighters from Chechnya and was a moderate secularist, not a jihadist extremist. He apparently was killed by one of his own bodyguards, his nephew, when their house was surrounded by Russian troops and he was
wounded by a Russian grenade. Maskhadov’s nephew, who was subse-
quently captured, would state: “My uncle always told me to shoot him
if he is wounded and his capture is imminent. He said that if he is taken prisoner, he would be mistreated.”129
Maskhadov’s death symbolized the death of the dreams of the vast
majority of his countrymen, who had hoped for a secular, democratic,
independent state at peace with Russia. Movladi Udugov’s Kavkazcenter
.com website would state of his death: “By martyring Maskhadov, the
Kremlin killed the last illusion of those Chechens who, despite every-
thing, still believed in a so-called ‘international law’ and civilized forms of communications with the Moscow thug regime.”130
While the Russians celebrated the death of President Maskhadov, he
was hailed in obituaries in the West as a tragic figure and a moderate
who had been caught between the extremists on both sides. Tragically,
in death the Russians declared him a “terrorist” and refused to return his body to his grieving widow and family.
Maskhadov would be replaced as president of Chechnya by his vice
president, Abdul Halim Sadulayev. Sadulayev was a theologian who had
worked to spread Islam in his hometown of Argun and had fought in Ar-
gun’s militia during the first and second wars. He personally knew the
horrors of Russia’s zachistkas. His wife had been taken by the fsb and executed when his attempts to ransom her failed.131
In 2002, Maskhadov selected Sadulayev, who was loyal to Maskhadov
in his struggles against the Wahhabis, as his vice president. With the
death of President Maskhadov in 2005, President Sadulayev began a
policy of creating a Caucasian Front to spread the resistance to Russia
to neighboring Muslim republics in the region. This Caucasian Front
united jihadi-fighting jamaats in the lands of Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachai-Circassia, Ossetia, and Adyghe.
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and put an end to hostage takings and suicide bombings.132 On June
17, 2006, however, Sadulayev was killed in a firefight with Russians and pro- Russian Kadyrovtsy militamen, but only after he and his bodyguards
fought back and killed several Russians.
The killing of Sadulayev, who had brought a halt to Basayev’s terror
campaign, was, however, to be a strategic mistake for the Russians as he was replaced by Doku Umarov, an Islamist commander who played a key
role in both Chechen wars (it will be recalled that he was wounded in
the breakout from Grozny). Umarov was to relaunch the terror campaign
against Russian civilians with a vengeance (except for a brief hiatus designed to thank Russian protestors for marching against Putin in 2012)
and ultimately was to earn the moniker of “Russia’s bin Laden.” He an-
nounced his intentions, stating: “Blood will no longer be limited to our cities and towns. The war is coming to their cities . . . If Russians think the war only happens on television, somewhere far away in the Caucasus
where it can’t reach them, then God willing, we plan to show them that
the war will return to their homes.”133
Umarov was also to continue the policy of working with the various
local Caucasian jamaats or larger vilayets (administrative regions) to spread jihadi terrorism throughout the north Caucasus. Most important, he was to make the momentous decision to subsume the Chechen
struggle for national independence into a wider Caucasian jihad against
Russia. He would officially do this on October 31, 2007, when he declared the abolishment of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and the creation of
the Caucasian Emirate, with himself as emir (military leader).
The creation of a loosely organized, pan-Caucasian Islamic state, or
emirate, at the expense of the goal of creating a narrower, secular Che-
chen republic clashed with the goals of exiled Chechen Foreign Minister
Akhmed Zakayev, who was a secularist living in London, and Chechen
nationalists (President Dzhokhar Dudayev’s widow also called it a be-
trayal of her slain husband’s dream).134 In essence, it meant that the
earlier generation of Chechen nationalists had been replaced by Salafi-
Wahhabi Islamists who wanted to establish a pan-Caucasian shariah
law state. It also signaled the adoption by Emir Doku Umarov of a more
global jihadist rhetoric, even if this was not translated into reality. On one occasion Umarov stated that “all those waging war against Islam and
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Muslims are our enemies,” a far cry from the Chechens’ strict traditional focus on Russia.135
But for all of Doku Umarov’s boilerplate jihadi rhetoric, which on oc-
casion even mentioned distant Britain, Israel, and the United States, the Caucasian Emirate remained a localized insurgent struggle against Russia, not an Al Qaeda affiliate (as in the case of such bona fide Al Qaeda affiliates as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, i.e., North Africa; Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula; Al Qaeda in Iraq; or the Nusra Front in Syria). Tellingly, the Caucasian Emirate commander of Kabardino-Balkaria back-
pedaled somewhat from Umarov’s global jihad rhetoric and declared:
“Even if we threaten America and Europe every day, it is clear for any-
body who understands politics that we do not have any real clashes of
interests (with the West). The people in the White House know very well
that we have nothing to do with America at the moment.”136
In this sense, the Caucasian Emirate umbrella group had many sim-
ilarities with the East Turkistan Liberation Organization, a regional
ethnic-jihad insurgency of Turkic Mongol Uighurs residing in eastern
China’s Xinjiang Province, who were fighting Beijing for an independent
Islamic Uighur state.
Under Umarov, the flames of resistance to Russia were to spread from
Chechnya to Dagestan in the east and the other small Muslim ethnic re-
publics to west, especially Ingushetia, even as the war in Chechnya gradually came to an end and was replaced by more targeted Russian raids
or a “silent war” on real or suspected rebels’ homes. By 2008, Dagestan
in particular had become a scene of violence, as Wahhabis from the
corrupt, impoverished region carried out scores of bombings and assas-
sinations against local authorities. These terror attacks led to harsh crackdowns and arrests of hundreds of young men suspected of being Islamist
insurgents or terrorists. The Dagestani news was full of stories of young Islamists or Wahhabis who “went to the forest” (i.e., joined the jamaat rebels of the larger Vilayet of Dagestan) or had their houses besieged and destroyed by Russian security forces.
Tragically, Umarov also restarted the Riyadus Salihin terror war on
Russia. The war recommenced with the bombing of a high-speed train
known as the Nevsky Express, traveling between Moscow and St. Peters-
burg on November 27, 2009. The bomb derailed the train and led to
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the death of twenty-six people. In a sign of the growing importance of
non-Chechens in the Caucasian Emirate, the Russian government subse-
quently charged twelve ethnic Ingush for involvement in the terror attack on the train.137
Two Dagestani Black Widows then struck with a suicide bombing
during rush hour in Moscow’s metro system, killing forty people on
March 29, 2010. One of the bombers was a seventeen-year-old widow of a
slain Dagestani militant, who posed with him in a picture holding a pistol before their deaths.138 Doku Umarov claimed that the bombing was in
retaliation for the massacre of Chechen and Ingush villagers, who were
gathering garlic outside the village of Arshty where they were attacked by Russian special forces. Umarov warned the Russians: “The war will come
to your street . . . and you will feel it on your own skins.”139
The Caucasian Emirate stuck again, this time on January 24, 2011, at
Russia’s busiest air terminal, Domodedovo International Airport. In this bombing, 35 people were killed and 180 injured by an Ingush suicide
bomber. Several of those killed in the attack were foreigners. As with the previous bombings, condolences poured in from across the world along
with condemnations of the terrorists. Prime Minister Stephen Harper of
Canada, for example, stated: “The use of violence against innocent peo-
ple must never be tolerated, and we condemn those responsible for this
horrible act.”
In January 2012, Doku Umarov called for a moratorium on terror at-
tacks, but on July 3, 2013, recommenced his campaign after claiming that the Russians had seen his truce as a sign of weakness. He used the upcoming Winter Olympic Games to be held in nearby Sochi, Russia (scene
of the final massacre and retreat of the defeated Circassian highlanders in 1864) as a catalyst for the commencement of his terror campaign. At
the time he ordered “all mujahedin fighters in the region and Russia’s
other subjects not to allow Satanist games to be held on the bones of our ancestors, on the bones of many, many Muslims who died and are buried
on our territory along the Black Sea.”140
On October 21, 2013, a Dagestani Black Widow blew herself up on a
bus in the southeastern Russian city of Volgograd, killing seven. This
attack was followed by two suicide bombings on December 29 and 30
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people. In the case of the December 2013 bombings, the two Dagestani
male bombers issued a martyrdom videotape of themselves stating that
the bombings were a “present” to Putin.
As the February 2014 Winter Olympic games approached, many feared
that the Caucasian Emirate would attack this global spectacle, which was Putin’s pet project and was designed to show a new face of Russia to the world. But despite fears of Black Widows having infiltrated the games,
there were no attacks on the festivities that cost Russia $50 billion to stage and protect. Some have suggested that the Caucasian Emirate’s failure to attack this showcase of Putin’s power may have been because Umarov
