Inferno in Chechnya

The Russian-Chechen Wars, the Al Qaeda Myth, and the Boston Marathon Bombings

Brian Glyn Williams

• Publisher: ForeEdge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611688016
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In 2013, the United States suffered its worst terrorist bombing since 9/11 at the annual running of the Boston Marathon. When the culprits turned out to be U.S. residents of Chechen descent, Americans were shocked and confused. Why would members of an obscure Russian minority group consider America their enemy? Inferno in Chechnya is the first book to answer this riddle by tracing the roots of the Boston attack to the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia. Brian Glyn Williams describes the tragic history of the bombers' war-devastated homeland—including tsarist conquest and two bloody wars with post-Soviet Russia that would lead to the rise of Vladimir Putin—showing how the conflict there influenced the rise of Europe's deadliest homegrown terrorist network. He provides a historical account of the Chechens' terror campaign in Russia, documents their growing links to Al Qaeda and radical Islam, and describes the plight of the Chechen diaspora that ultimately sent two Chechens to Boston. Inferno in Chechnya delivers a fascinating and deeply tragic story that has much to say about the historical and ethnic roots of modern terrorism.

1

First Blood

The Chechens are a numerous people, but they have no aristocracy. “We are all princes” is the proud contention of the Chechen. They are a people who have no superiority of rank, and never had, and into whose language the word “command” cannot be rendered . . . They are always in a chronic state of feeling themselves insulted by their fellow-creatures, and maintain that nobody can be considerate enough to them as a completely free people.

—Essad Bey, Twelve Secrets of the Caucasus, 1930

Cattle-lifting, highway robbery, and murder were in this strange code, counted deeds of honor; they were openly instigated by the village maiden, who scorned any pretender having no such claims to her favor; and these, together with fighting against any foe, but especially against the hated Russians, were the only pursuits deemed worthy of a grown man.

—John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, 1908

Wolves The Ancient Highland Tribes

The Chechen national symbol is the gray wolf, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this emblem has appeared in their poems, on their battle standards, and on their national flag, and it has come to symbolize the Chechens’ stubborn defense of their homeland. The Chechens like to compare themselves to the gray wolf that has roamed the primeval forests of the Caucasus Mountains since the beginning of time. According to the mountaineers, the gray wolf does not attack humans unless they trespass on its lair, and in this behavior, the Chechens see a parallel to their own relations with the Russians.

As any Chechen will tell you, their ancestors never set out to conquer Russia; the troubles with their empire-minded neighbors began when Russia’s generals set their sights on the Caucasus and brought fire and sword to the Chechens’ homeland in the late eighteenth century. It was the Chechens’ bloody experience of “pacification” at the hands of Russians—to use a nineteenth-century tsarist euphemism for ethnic cleansing, scorched-earth campaigns, and a decades-long war of attrition—that was to poison the relations between these two peoples. While many nonexperts discovered the Chechens after 9/11 and see them only in this context, one cannot claim to know the Chechens without first being familiar with the tragic story of their conquest by Russia’s armies in the nineteenth century.

Prior to Russia’s imperial adventures in the lands of the Chechens and neighboring tribes, this mountainous land on the distant fringes of Europe had been something of an unknown land for most in the West. Western Christian civilization ended in the lowland shadows of this mighty mountain barrier that separated Europe and the southern borders of the empire of the Orthodox tsars from Asia and the Islamic lands of the Turks and Persians. Forming the highest mountain chain in Europe, the mighty Caucasus range extends 650 miles from the shores of the Black Sea to the landlocked Caspian Sea, and its highest peaks are covered in snow year-round. This rugged rampart dwarfs the Alps in its scale, and its average height is over ten thousand feet.

The massive Caucasus chain has some of the most inaccessible mountain valleys and highland pastures in the world and has served as a refuge for fleeing tribes and ethnic groups since the dawn of history. The hardy highlanders whose cliff-top auls (villages) clung tenaciously to the sides of the mountains lived in settlements built on the edges of sheer precipices and guarded by stone towers. In these impenetrable highlands, a village could hold off an army as its warriors defended the narrow path along a dizzying cliff.

In the misty depths of time, when the Indo-Europeans (the forebears of the modern nations of Europe) first arrived in the region, they forced the ancient mountain people already living in the Caucasus lowlands to flee deeper into the wooded valleys of the northern slopes. In the process, the easily defended mountain peaks and impenetrable valleys of the north Caucasus came to serve as a sanctuary for some of the oldest races of Eurasia.

In the twentieth century, long after the older races had been pushed into the mountains, modern anthropologists and linguists would find traces of tribes that had disappeared from history long before the birth of Christ. The origins of some of these races extend back to the ancient peoples of pre–Old Testament Sumeria, Elam and Uratau.

The forest-clad mountains of the Caucasus are home to dozens of ethnolinguistic groups and serve as a storehouse, preserving the ethnic residue of all the passing waves of invaders who have swept through this region since the beginning of time. In some areas each village speaks a different language that, like the pages of history, can be read back in time to provide a historical account of the various tribes of conquerors that ebbed across this tumultuous land. Similar to the rings on a tree, the layers of races in the north Caucasus tell us the history of the mountains.

The Dagestan region, which is located in the northeastern Caucasus to the east of Chechnya, for example, is home to more than thirty different ethnic groups, most of whom speak unrelated languages. The confusing array of languages left by previous invaders in the Caucasus led the medieval Arab Muslim conquerors, who believed that fierce jinns (demons) lived in this cloud-covered realm, to name this rugged land the Jabal Alsuni (Mountain of Languages).

As history tells us, waves of horse-mounted Scythians, who drank fermented horse milk and wine from their enemies’ skulls, Zoroastrian Iranians bringing their ancient worship of fire, savage Huns on their way to ravage Rome, Arab warriors spreading their new Islamic faith, Jewish horse-mounted Khazar nomads, world-conquering Mongol Tatars, empire-building Ottoman Turks, Shiite Persians, and many others lapped up against the mountain barrier of the Caucasus and left remnants of their peoples amid the older races already ensconced in their mountain valleys.

As a result, in the northern Caucasus today you find the half-pagan, half-Christian Ossetians, who worship carved wooden poles in much the same fashion as their distant ancestors, the Alans, who partook in the great barbarian migrations that brought down the Roman Empire. You also encounter the Cherkess, the pitiful remnants of the once-mighty Circassians, who provided slave warriors and the most comely of women for harems of the caliphs of medieval Baghdad. In the eastern plains of the northern Caucasus you also find small pockets of Nogai Tatars, the sheephearding descendents of Genghis Khan’s mighty nomadic Mongol armies.

As one leaves the plains of the Nogai steppe and probes deeper into the mountains, however, one finds ancient ethnic groups whose origins are even older than these previously mentioned races. These include the fierce Jewish highlander tribe known as the Tats, whose origin goes back to the original Old Testament dispersal of the Jews in the eighth century BC. You also find other groups who inhabit the bleak mountains of Dagestan (a region whose name translates to “Land of the Mountains”), such as the Dargins, Avars, Lezgins, Laks, Aguls, Rutuls, Tabassrans, and countless others, who fiercely defended their lands against outsiders over the centuries.

Most of these ancient groups, who continued to fight with sabers, shields, and medieval-style armor up until the late nineteenth century, were unknown to the Western world, whose ethno-geographic horizons ended in the more familiar lands of the Orthodox Russians and Ukrainians.

Among the oldest and most powerful of the north Caucasian races are a farming and cattle-breeding people known as the Vainakh, who have inhabited the forested slopes of the northeastern Caucasus for millennia. Made up of dozens of independent teips (clans) and known for their industriousness, refusal to submit to any authority, skill in the time-honored sport of cattle raiding, and love of freedom, the unruly Vainakh were divided into two separate tribes by the Russians, who first began to encroach on their lands in the late 1700s. The Russian Cossacks, the “cowboys of Russia,” and later Russian imperial administrators called the western Vainakh the “Ingush.” Those Vainakh residing in the east, near a village known as Chechen Aul, were called “Chechens.” Over time, the two Vainakh tribes, who spoke mutually comprehensible languages, internalized these ethnonyms and became distinct groups. Today the Chechens and the much smaller Ingush people are recognized as separate nations in spite of their close ethnolinguistic links.

When the Russians first shared their accounts of the mysterious Chechen highlanders to the outside world, they spoke of a primordial mountain people who were ruled over by a council of tribal elders known as the Mehq-Qel (the Council of the Land). These wise elders were chosen by their clans (teips) to represent their interests in community councils. Councils of the people were called to mediate blood feuds, organize the defense of the ka’am (the “nation,” or more precisely “people” in a premodern sense), and uphold the ancient traditions of the people, which were based on a blend of ancient pagan customs and the later imposition of Islamic law. Traditionally, the Chechens have given great respect to their clan elders, and all Chechens direct their loyalty to their clan first and then to their tukhum (their larger tribal alliance).

Interestingly, there was no class of nobility among the egalitarian Chechen people, and one observer noted:

The equality among the people of the Eastern Caucasus is clear-cut. They all possess the same rights and enjoy the same social position. The authority with which they invest their tribal chiefs grouped within the framework of an elected council is limited in time and power . . . Chechens are gay and witty. Russian officers nicknamed them the French of the Caucasus.¹

Islam, it should be mentioned, arrived late in the lands of the Chechen and Ingush, and many of this people did not convert to the religion of the Prophet Mohammed until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even then, Robert Schaefer writes, “Chechnya was not particularly devout.”² Prior to the advent of Islam, this people worshipped Yalta, the god of wild animals and patron of hunters; Seli, the god of fire; and myriad other supernatural denizens of the snow-covered alpine peaks and forested slopes of the Caucasus. Among the woodland sprites worshipped by the Chechens were ghostly forest creatures called almas, who lived in springs and rivers. Lesser gods included Khi-Nama, the “Mother of Water”; Darsta Nama, the “Mother of Snowstorms”; and Moh Nama, the “Mother of Winds.”

The Chechens and Ingush owe their submission to Allah to the neighboring tribes of the northeastern Caucasus region known as Dagestan. Dagestan, a foreboding mountainous tableland that separates the more gentle slopes of Chechnya from the shores of the Caspian Sea, had been conquered by the Arabs during their great period of Islamic expansion in the eighth and ninth centuries. For this reason the people of Dagestan were familiar with the preaching of the Prophet Muhammad from an early date. In Dagestan, mullahs (Islamic clerics) who spoke Arabic and Persian delved into the scriptures of the holy Qur’an, the chant of the muezzin (the prayer caller) drifted from the minarets across the mountain valleys, and camel caravans brought the goods of the greater Dar al-Islam (the Islamic Realm) to the villagers inhabiting their well-fortified mountain auls.

Over the centuries, mystic Islamic holy men wandered from Dagestan into the neighboring forestlands of the animistic Chechens and preached their tolerant, frontier version of Islam, known as Sufi Islam. Many of these Muslim mystics were purported to have worked miracles in order to convert the pagan Chechens to Islam. The sites of these miraculous events subsequently became places of pilgrimage, although some of these sacred spots were clearly pre-Islamic holy places. The Chechens converted to this mystical Sufi version of Islam, in part, because it allowed them to keep many of their ancient, pre-Islamic traditions.

Muslims from the Middle East who visited the vales of Chechnya in the late nineteenth century found that Chechen women did not wear the full veils worn by women living in Wahhabi-dominated Arabia. On the contrary, the laws of the land were dominated by adat (ancient, pre-Islamic custom) more than shariah (Islamic law). In the Caucasus, mystical chants and dances known as zikirs were performed to assist the Chechens in attaining Allah’s grace and imitate the movement of the cosmos. In this frontier region, tolerance toward neighboring Christian or pagan peoples (such as the Orthodox Christian Cossacks or the animist Ingush, who did not convert to Islam until the mid-nineteenth century) was widespread.

In other words, many of the austere facets of puritanical Wahhabi Islam of the sort being spread by the Saud family in nineteenth-century Arabia were not found on this fluid mountain frontier between Islam, Christianity, and traditional native animism. It was only in response to the Russian conquest that an increasingly xenophobic form of warlike Islam spread among the outnumbered warriors of this tolerant Sufi mountain people.

In addition to their adherence to an indigenous, mystical version of Islam, the Chechens also were known for their fighting skills. In a land where blood feuds (known as kanli), raids, and clan warfare were a way of life, Chechen boys grew up mastering the deadly sharpshooter’s rifle, the wicked kinjal blade, and the hardy mountain steed. The swaggering Chechen highlander who arrived in the Russian lowlands for trade, with his saber dangling from his side, rifle over his shoulder, breast pocket bandoleers brimming with bullets, and tall fur hat placed rakishly on the back of his head, was given a wide berth.

Not surprisingly, this people’s culture glorified feats of combat and bravery. Highlander raiders known as abreks proved their manhood by engaging in dangerous raids on the neighboring people. While the Russians deplored the highlanders’ “evil deeds, raids and robbery,” the Chechens lionized famous abreks, who proved their daring by slipping past the enemy’s patrols and seizing booty. In his analysis of abreks in the Caucasus, Russian scholar Vladimir Bobrovnikov writes, “The main hero of their culture—the so called abrek, i.e., professional bandit—was a figure who was praised for engaging in a profession that was seen as noble and honorable, in the fashion of Robin Hood.”³

Another quality recognized among the Chechens was the supreme importance they placed on providing hospitality. A visitor was considered family, and an injury done to a protected guest could lead to a blood feud. In many respects, the premium placed on hospitality by this warlike people, who at the same time prided themselves on their raids on their neighbors, resembles the tradition of hospitality manifested by the Aryan Pashtun tribes of distant Afghanistan.⁴

Thus this proud, warlike, Sufi mountain people may have remained, living in relative isolation on the edges of Christian Europe, engaging in their timeless pursuits of raiding lowlanders and farming. But in the nineteenth ce...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. First Blood
• 2. Resistance
• 3. Genocide
• 4. The First Russian-Chechen War
• 5. Chaosistan
• 6. The Return of the Russians
• 7. The Chechen Ghost Army of Afghanistan and Syrian Battalion
• 8. The Strange Saga of the Boston Marathon Bombers
• Notes
• Index