Revealed: the undercover war to wipe out Chechen rebels
Mark Franchetti, Grozny.
Snow clouds were gathering when Musa Gazimagomedov, one of the most hated men
in Chechnya, approached his homeland as night fell last Sunday. After surviving
four attempts on his life, he was taking no chances. He tensed behind the darkened
windows of his speeding jeep and prepared to switch vehicles.
Headlights flashed twice behind us, a bodyguard braked hard and Gazimagomedov
leapt out, a pistol in one hand and a machinegun in the other. He jumped into
a saloon car in front and roared off down the narrow, perilous road to Grozny,
the Chechen capital.
There are 10 checkpoints on this 50-mile stretch of highway, but the Russian soldiers
manning them waved our vehicles through. The Russians know Gazimagomedov well:
they pay him handsomely to do one of the most dangerous jobs in a region renowned
for treachery, torture and unusually cruel killing.
The snow was falling heavily by the time he reached Grozny, a proud city of 500,000
people before Russian rockets pulverised it eight years ago. After crossing the
ruined centre, his car swept through the gates of a fortified barracks and stopped
behind a high perimeter wall of reinforced concrete.
From this stronghold Gazimagomedov, 38, commands 300 Chechen officers in a police
special forces unit known as Omon. Their mission: to hunt down and liquidate fellow
Chechens fighting for independence from Russia.
The pressure for results has become all the harder since a group of Chechens led
by a prominent young rebel, Movsar Barayev, seized hostages in a Moscow theatre
in October.
Over vodka and boiled beef, Gazimagomedov talked about the war he is waging.
"I tell my men not to waste time trying to take the rebels alive," he said. "In
most cases I give the order to kill them. These are not people who surrender and
there is no point in taking them prisoner."
His forces have killed 160 rebels in two years and detained hundreds more. But
they have paid a heavy price, losing 60 men in ambushes, gunfights and assassinations.
In April last year three powerful landmines exploded under a bus packed with his
men, killing 17 of them. Gazimagomedov's 18-year-old secretary was shot dead with
16 bullets simply because she worked for him.
A chain smoker who likes to sing patriotic songs to an old guitar, Gazimagomedov
is a former regular police officer and Communist party member.
"There are a lot of people who want me dead and every day I make new enemies,"
he said, toying with a handgun at his desk beneath a
Chechen flag.
Outside, the faces of slain Omon officers engraved on granite plaques hung in
solemn rows across a memorial wall, staring out across the entrance of the base
towards the remains of the city beyond. If the funerals continue at the present
rate, the memorial wall will soon have to be extended.
"This is no ordinary job that you can just leave when you get fed up," said Gazimagomedov.
"Once you join the Omon, it's for life. There is no way back. I and my men, we
are all suicide fighters because to join is to face a death sentence by Chechen
terrorists. We know what death means, but there is no shortage of recruits."
The rebels are not running out of new recruits, either. One, a 16-year-old boy,
was in a cell in the basement. He had been given electric shocks to make him talk.
"He looks like a little kid but don't be fooled," said an Omon officer with heavy
stubble on his face.
"The sad thing is that he is already a hardened criminal who has been brainwashed
by terrorists."
Picking up a pronged stun gun and turning it on with a crack and a purple flash,
he explained how he had used it on the boy.
"I gave him an electric shock in the back of the neck and then several in the
kidneys. Then I put a sack on his head, took him out into the night and told him
I was going to execute him.
"I cocked my gun and shot in the air, but I still got nothing out of him. I then
put a spy into his cell — one of our guys with a long beard posing as a
rebel — and this kid boasted that he had told us nothing."
The "kid", Akhmed Essambayev, was picked up nearly two weeks ago outside Grozny.
He had been using a two-way radio concealed under his jacket to tip off a group
of 30 rebels about the movements of Russian patrols. The rebels had paid him barely
£3, with the promise of a new pair of boots for the winter as a bonus.
His Omon interrogator wanted their names, but all he extracted was the boy's motive.
Nine months ago Essambayev's 21-year-old brother was taken away by Russian soldiers
during a random security sweep and disappeared. He was almost certainly executed.
Of 10 other Chechens rounded up with him, six were found dead by a roadside a
few days later, their bodies badly burnt.
Emerging from his cell to collect his daily loaf of bread and bowl of soup, Essambayev
looked terrified. He was filthy and moved like a whipped dog, lowering his head
as soon as anyone approached him. He spoke in such hushed tones that he was barely
audible.
"I thought it would be cool to help the rebels," he said. "I was given a walkie-talkie
and felt like a big guy. And I wanted to help. The Russians killed my brother
and I hate them for that. We all heard about Barayev and the hostages in Moscow
and to me and my friends he is cool because he pulled off what nobody else had
ever done."
Gazimagomedov decided to set him free but both knew that the boy could not go
back to his home village.
"I will have to leave Chechnya," said Essambayev. "The rebels will be suspicious
when they see that I was released. The next time there is a Russian raid in our
village and someone is seized they will think that I gave them away and will kill
me. I have nowhere to go now."
Essambayev's story is commonplace in Chechnya. The rebels often use adolescents
to plant boobytraps and mines. Nor is his brother's fate anything out of the ordinary.
There are no more full-scale battles in Chechnya: instead the Russians hunt for
fighters in sweeps known as zachistki.
No Chechen male aged between 16 and 60 is safe. Anybody can be arrested and taken
away on suspicion of being a rebel, a sympathiser or a distant relative of a fighter.
Few return. According to numerous reports compiled by witnesses and independent
observers, hundreds of Chechen men have disappeared in the middle of the night.
About 100,000 people have been killed in the Chechen wars of 1994-96 and 1999
to the present day. A Russian force of more than 60,000 soldiers now controls
almost all of Chechnya except for remote mountainous areas in the south where
a hard core of rebels is concentrated. But about 2,000 rebels are still active
across the country.
Not only is their struggle for independence attracting a growing number of Islamic
fighters with ties to the Arab world; it is also winning over a generation of
Chechen adolescents who have received little education and have been brutalised
by war.
Without the help of native Chechens, the Russians are unlikely ever to be able
to end the fighting and start rebuilding. Yet many of the Chechens who do choose
to work with the Russians effectively sign their own death warrants.
Hundreds who sided with Moscow have been abducted, tortured and murdered. Last
week masked gunmen burst into the home of Malika Umazheva, the former pro-Moscow
mayor of a small Chechen town, and shot her three times in the head. The mayor
of a village in southern Chechnya and two of his neighbours were abducted by rebels
next day.
According to Gazimagomedov, rebel commanders have promised a $150,000 (£95,000)
reward to anyone who manages to kill him.
A year ago three of his deputies were blown up in a car that the rebels thought
was taking him to a meeting. "They missed me by only a few minutes," he said.
"The scene was terrible when we arrived. One of my deputies had lost both his
legs but was still alive. He was flown out of Chechnya by helicopter but he died
on the way to hospital."
Two months ago Gazimagomedov took a 10-man escort to another meeting at a restaurant
north of Grozny. A bodyguard lifted up the couch where he had been invited to
sit and found 4lb of TNT wired to a remote control device.
He has since had a Volga car fitted with armoured plates. But the rebels' attempts
to eliminate him are becoming more sophisticated. Last month he was temporarily
paralysed after eating a poisoned meal from a takeaway restaurant that supplied
much of his food.
He has become a virtual prisoner in his barracks. He sleeps in his office while
his wife and four children live sealed off in his home village, constantly guarded
by eight of his men and protected by the surrounding homes and families of his
clansmen. He sees them once every 10 days for a brief visit.
"I never tell anyone that I am preparing to go see my family — not even
my wife," said Gazimagomedov. "I just get up and go so that those who want me
dead have no time to plan anything. I travel at night, undercover, so as not to
attract attention. I just turn up and never stay for long. I tell my loved ones
that it's better to see me
once in a while for a few hours rather than every day and then never again."
Every other day the bombed-out apartment blocks closest to his base are searched
for snipers. The rebels know the names of his men and are said to pay hefty rewards
for each officer killed.
Only relatives of serving Omon officers are allowed to join the ranks to replace
the men who are killed — and then only after stringent screening. Two of
Gazimagomedov's brothers serve under him and 13 of the dead in the past two years
were his relatives. Each officer is paid up to $400 (£250) a month, eight
times the average local wage.
Some of his officers fought with the rebels against the Russians at the beginning
of the first Chechen war, but defected after they became disillusioned. A small
minority have criminal records, but many were driven to join the unit by death
sentences imposed in blood feuds among Chechen clans.
One of Gazimagomedov's most trusted officers was in hiding for three years before
he was recruited. During a Chechen wedding, it is customary to celebrate by firing
rifle rounds into the air. The officer accidentally shot a friend who was enjoying
the festivities on a seventh-floor balcony. The victim's family vowed to kill
him in
revenge.
"There is no way back for any of us," said Ali Arsanukayev, Gazimagomedov's 32-
year-old deputy, who has killed dozens of rebels in shootouts and raids and always
has several grenades and at least two pistols strapped to his waist.
"If I left, I would not survive for more than a week. This is not just a job for
us. It's a personal war."
Almost every day small groups of Omon officers leave their base on missions to
kill rebels hiding in Grozny or elsewhere in Chechnya. They act on tip-offs from
spies and occasionally on intelligence from the Federal Security Service (FSB),
the former KGB. There are also joint raids with the Russians.
Two weeks ago a patrol led by Arsanukayev was ambushed in the middle of Grozny
on its way to a house suspected of being a rebel hideout.
Two cars suddenly pulled up, one on each side of the patrol vehicle, then gunmen
riddled it with bullets. Two Omon officers were killed.
In a new phase of the Chechen conflict, which has been stepped up since the Moscow
theatre siege, the Russians have used death squads to track down and eliminate
suspected fighters. Hundreds are said to have disappeared in the middle of the
night.
Typically, the Russians deny having the men in custody. But increasingly the people
who were detained are found dead, in shallow graves or dumped by the roadside,
some with fingers and ears hacked off, others decapitated, many with execution-style
wounds.
Gazimagomedov is concerned about the repercussions. "In 80% of cases when ordinary
Chechen men disappear in the middle of the night like this, neither we nor the
Russians have any information to suggest that the seized men are rebels," he said.
"This is a real problem because it provokes people into joining the rebels to
seek revenge. It's producing a new generation of radical fighters."
Increasingly, the task of finding the people who vanish has fallen on Chechnya's
women. There are anti-Russian demonstrations nearly every day by mothers, wives
and sisters of men who have disappeared. Last week alone more than 250 Chechens
were detained in sweep operations.
The Kremlin has also begun to evict tens of thousands of refugees from camps over
the border in Ingushetia, forcing them back into Chechnya. Refugees have complained
of random beatings and robberies at army checkpoints and some young refugees have
joined the ranks of the disappeared.
Many people have no home to return to. In Grozny, they find a city that resembles
scenes from the second world war. Except for three buildings that have been renovated,
every house, shop and apartment block on the city's main street bears the scars
of the heaviest air and artillery bombardment in Russia for more than half a century.
Walls are riddled with bullet and shrapnel holes, while huge mounds of collapsed
concrete slabs and twisted metal mark the spot where
apartment blocks once stood.
An estimated 120,000 people now eke out an existence in bombed-out buildings with
no running water, heating or electricity. In one of the city's most surreal scenes,
oil lamps flicker faintly at night from gutted and crumbling apartment blocks
that could collapse at any moment. It seemed unthinkable that people could still
be living
there.
Grozny appears to be decades away from a return to normality. There are more than
50 Russian army checkpoints inside the city perimeter. Harassment and demands
for money are the norm. At best, the shortest of journeys can take hours. At worst
it can end with another name added to the list of the disappeared.
Barely a day passes without one or more Russian soldiers being killed in an ambush,
by a landmine, a boobytrap or in a shootout. According to the Russians, 4,500
soldiers have died in Chechnya in the past three years. The real figure is believed
to be nearly double that.
"Moscow has boxed itself into a corner and doesn't know what to do any more,"
said Gazimogomedov. "Unless we can bring stability back to this place within the
next 12 months, the people who want to turn Chechnya into a centre of terrorism
will succeed. Chechnya could yet become the next Afghanistan."