Chechen Jihad

Al Qaeda's Training Ground and the Next Wave of Terror

Yossef Bodansky

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061740565
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this authoritative look at the roots of modern terrorism, Yossef Bodansky, one of the most respected—and best-informed—experts on radical Islamism in the world today, pinpoints the troubled region of Chechnya as a dangerous and little-understood crucible of terror in the struggle between East and West. In his number one New York Times bestseller, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, published before 9/11, Bodansky was among the first to introduce American readers to Osama bin Laden. Now in Chechen Jihad he returns to alert American readers to the lessons to be drawn from the terror campaign in Chechnya—and its ramifications for the global war on terrorism.

The final years of U.S.-Soviet relations left Chechnya a fertile breeding ground for Islamic terrorism, and in the past decade an uneasy alliance of native Chechen separatists and militant jihadists have joined forces to help al Qaeda and the greater Islamist movement pursue its war against the West. As Bodansky points out, "the Chechens are professional fighters—disciplined and responsible, with a combination of skills, expertise, and character that has made them the most sought-after 'force multipliers' in the jihadist movement." Bodansky traces the secret history of the two Chechen wars, illuminating how the process of "Chechenization" transformed the fight from a secular nationalist struggle into a jihadist holy war against Russia and the secular West. And, in the most instructive message for Western audiences, he reveals how the Chechen rebellion was eventually crippled by a schism between the jihadists and the Chechen people whose nationalist rebellion they had co-opted—an object lesson in the potential vulnerability of Islamist campaigns around the world.

Drawing on mountains of previously unseen intelligence from Islamist movements and other military and intelligence sources from throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, as well as senior officials in many of the affected nations, Chechen Jihad offers an intimate and startling portrait of the jihadist movement that is astonishing in its detail and chilling in its implications—but one that points to a new way forward in the struggle to answer the challenges of international Islamist terrorism.

Chapter 1

WHY SHOULD WE CARE?

TO MOST AMERICANS, THE “WAR ON TERRORISM™—THE POPULAR euphemism for the series of U.S.-led military campaigns all over the world—had a distinct starting point in the spectacular terrorist strikes against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001.

In reality, however, these strikes were milestones in what was already an ongoing global war. The Islamists’ quest to dominate Islam and control the Muslim world, as well as to cordon off the Islamic world from Westernized modernity until it could be taken over by the Islamists through a fateful jihad, has been unfolding in various degrees of intensity since Napoleon set foot on Egyptian soil in the late eighteenth century. At present, the primary “front” of the Islamist jihad is the Hub of Islam—the Middle East along with South and Central Asia—where the jihadist movement is trying to confront Western modernity while preserving the Islamic sociopolitical character of society. Rather than adapt to the ethos of the information age and globalization, the jihadists see controlling and dominating the West as their only salvation.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the jihadists resolved to pursue three historic axes of advance into lands within reach of the Hub of Islam, lands that have been claimed by Islam since its ascent: the Caucasus (the historic avenue into the heart of Russia and Eastern Europe), the Balkans (the historic road to Western Europe), and Kashmir (the entrée into the Indian subcontinent). By the mid-1990s, the Islamists were already escalating their jihad in each of these regions. During the same period, the United States was involved in conflicts in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan/Pakistan—a series of entanglements that were problematic for U.S. interests at the time and quite counterproductive, in retrospect. In each of those regions, Washington was pursuing near-term political interests while disregarding historic and global megatrends. So the idea that Washington “discovered” the jihadist menace on 9/11, and has since been leading the global campaign to defeat and reverse the phenomenon, simply ignores the crucial role played by key regional powers who have battled Islamist-Jihadism for more than a decade.

Critical, in these years, was Russia’s role in combating Islamist terrorism on the Caucasus jihadist front, in a drawn-out conflict commonly referred to as the “war in Chechnya.” For the Russians, the importance of containing the jihad in the Caucasus went beyond their desire to control this small republic, with a population of slightly over a million and a land mass smaller than the state of Vermont. The rebellion in Chechnya may have begun as an indigenous nationalist movement, but it was soon co-opted by the international Islamist movement as an element of its global jihad. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the jihadists were well on their way to transforming the Caucasus into a springboard for strikes into Russia and Europe, and a site of sociopolitical transformation that threatened to affect the entire Hub of Islam and beyond.

In order to comprehend the process that has become known as “Chechenization,” its role in the Islamist-Jihadist movement, and what it tells us about the potential vulnerabilities of jihadist activity elsewhere in the world, it is critical to examine the course of the Islamist jihad as it has played out in the Caucasus in the last decade.

 

Chechenization is a relatively new concept, still whispered about by experts on Islamist-Jihadist terrorism and attacked by Western politicians, mainly American, who are loath to face the reality of the conflicts their countries are mired in—or to acknowledge Russia’s preeminent role in the worldwide war on terrorism.

Chechenization refers to the profound transformation of a predominantly Muslim society from its traditional, largely pre-Islamic structure to one dominated by Islamist-Jihadist elements that historically have been alien to that society. Chechenization involves not only the Arabization of that society’s value system, social structure, and way of life, but a near-complete abandonment of a society’s own cultural heritage in favor of subservience to pan-Islamic jihadist causes, even if those causes are detrimental to the self-interest of that society.

The process of Chechenization—which is now arguably at play in significant parts of Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, and Indonesia, as well as several Muslim communities in both Central Asia and the Balkans—was named for the jihadist campaign in Chechnya in the mid-1990s. There, the national liberation struggle of a secularized Muslim population, inspired by a rich historical legacy of quests for self-determination, was taken over from within by the Islamist-Jihadists—transforming the liberation struggle into a regional anti-Russian terrorist jihad, at the expense of the Chechens’ own self-interest. The process—which included the intentional destruction of Chechnya’s own socioeconomic infrastructure and the forfeiting of Chechnya’s ability to benefit from agreements with Moscow—could not have been accomplished without lavish funding from charities based in Saudi Arabia and several Persian Gulf states. Since the mid-1990s, the radicalization and transformation of Muslim societies from within has bred and nourished the waves of the Islamist-Jihadist terrorists, which not only kill their own kin but also strike out at the heart of the West.

Today, the Chechenization of other regional conflicts, subversions, and insurgencies around the world is fast becoming the key to al Qaeda’s rapid expansion and further consolidation, despite the U.S.-led war on terrorism. The Islamist-Jihadists see Chechenization as the profound transformation of a “jihad front” (to use their own term) from a besieged community on the defense to a springboard for the expansion of their fateful onslaught on Western civilization. The first cycle of Chechenization saw the jihadists’ struggle for the heart of Asia and the Caucasus cross a major milestone. The Islamists were no longer intent merely on consolidating their hold over the Muslim states of South and Central Asia, or on “liberating” traditionally contested territories such as Russia’s northern Caucasus, Indian Kashmir, and the state of Israel. Rather, the Islamist-Jihadists launched an offensive into Russian territory aimed to transform the very shape of Eurasia. Given the strategic and economic potential of the Caucasus and Central Asia, it was the sponsoring states of this Islamist-Jihadist upsurge—not the peoples of the Caucasus—who would reap the primary benefits of this strategic upheaval.

Meanwhile, the integration of the Chechen jihad into the global Islamist-Jihadist movement made both native Chechen and Chechen-trained expert operatives and terrorists available to participating in other jihad fronts all over the world. (Foreign mujahedin who volunteered, trained, and fought in Chechnya and the northern Caucasus came to be referred to as “Chechen mujahedin,” an umbrella term that comprised all mujahedin native to the region—not just ethnic Chechens but Dagestanis, Avars, Ingushets, and so on—as well as Chechens and other Caucasians from Central Asia, and Circassians from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle East nations.) Despite their relatively small numbers, the Chechen mujahedin came to play an increasingly important role in the global jihad. Many of the Chechens had extensive military knowledge and expertise gleaned during their service in the Soviet and Russian military, including service in Afghanistan. Starting in the mid-1990s, the Chechens established an elaborate training system in which such Chechen veterans, as well as highly experienced Ukrainian and Balt mercenaries/volunteers, trained the Chechen mujahedin in sabotage, communications, military and combat engineering, logistics, intelligence work, information technology, weapons of mass destruction, and the like, offering a level of expertise that exceeded what was available in other Islamist-Jihadist training programs in South Asia and the Middle East. Many of the Chechen trainees, too, were professional fighters—disciplined and responsible, having a combination of skills, expertise, and character. Today, these trainees are the most sought-after “force multipliers” (to use the U.S. military term) in the Islamist movement—their unique fingerprints increasingly noted with each new phase in the jihad.

Another overlooked aspect of Chechenization was its growing impact and influence over the movement known as pan-Turkism. Originally a nationalistic trend with only vaguely Muslim overtones, pan-Turkism was co-opted as an instrument for the spread of jihadism in the Turkic lands from the Balkans to Xinjiang, China. In the early 1990s, the revival of nationalistic pan-Turkism in Turkey helped to destabilize the Caucasus, aggravating the Chechen revolt of 1994 by providing international recognition and support to the rebels. Pan-Turkism has grown in recent years in Turkey, supported by the military elite as a counterideology to Islamism; militant pan-Turkism is extremely popular with a military nostalgic for the glory of long-ago wars in the Caucasus and the days of the Ottoman Empire. Even though the Turkish military elite is essentially anti-Islamist, this pan-Turkic nostalgia has undergirded Ankara’s commitment to the Chechen revolt, and it endures despite the Islamist-Jihadist nature of Chechenization. A steady stream of Turkish volunteers—most of whom are highly trained military veterans—continues to fill jihadist ranks today, even as Ankara ignores the Islamist support for Chechnya and the drug trade that funds the jihad.

The growth of pan-Turkism also had major political ramifications for the West, and especially for the United States. Washington has long considered Turkey an ally, a status that survived even the crisis over access to Iraq that began in 2003. At first, this traditional alliance led the West to extend some support to the Chechen rebellion. Even today, this legacy provides a reluctant Bush administration with a fig-leaf excuse for not confronting the Chechen threat head-on, despite its immersion in a war on terrorism that has been aggravated by the spread of Chechenization.

Chechenization involves mobilizing a country, or a region, against the West, in large part by conditioning its local society to commit to the spread of jihad. For Russia, the Chechenization of its war in the Caucasus meant unleashing waves of jihadist terrorism at the heart of Russia—a terrorist campaign that has already taken hundreds of innocent lives and is far from over. For the United States and the West, the Bush administration’s mounting contretemps with Putin’s Russia has prevented the United States from understanding Chechenization or benefiting from the vast intelligence data and operational knowledge accumulated by the Russians. The increasing casualties in the American quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan testify to the self-inflicted ramifications of official Washington’s adamant refusal to confront, let alone learn from, the realities of the Caucasus and Moscow’s war on terrorism—at a time when the United States could hardly afford to ignore the experience of the rare nation that had battled the Islamists to a draw.

 

In this context, a somber word about the ongoing U.S. war on terrorism. Among other things, the unfolding global jihad should be understood as the latest, and most significant and intense, phase in the profound struggle within Islam over its interaction with Western modernity, and over its own future. Since the march of Western modernity is unlikely to be reversed or stopped, the war is unlikely to end until a genuine reformer—a Martin Luther—rises from the ranks of Islam to lead its followers into the twenty-first century. The United States may be an object of wrath for the Islamist-Jihadist movement, but it does not have a side in this conflict within Islam itself. That is why the United States could lose this war—if the Islamist-Jihadist movement triumphs—but cannot win it. Victory is solely in the hands of the Muslim world. Until then, it is in the interest of the West to understand, and combat, the strategy represented by Chechenization, in order to help the sane and responsible elements within Islam triumph over adversity while bringing modernity to their world.

Chapter 2

LEGACY AND ROOTS

THE WESTERN UNDERSTANDING OF THE SITUATION IN CHECHNYA, and the Caucasus as a whole, has been distorted and complicated for decades by a legacy of romanticized accounts of Russia’s involvement with the Caucasus. In the West, the violence in Chechnya and the Caucasus is commonly associated—by the media and most governments alike—with the legacy of Imam Shamil and his anti-Russia rebellion in the mid–nineteenth century. Shamil was an Avar, not even Chechen, but Western eyes still consider the myths surrounding his rebellion as a yardstick for assessing the contemporary struggle in Chechnya. The enduring impact of accounts such as Lesley Blanch’s masterful 1960 epic history, The Sabres of Paradise, influenced generations of Western would-be experts and analysts, offering an alluring interpretation of Shamil’s struggle against Russia’s advance into the Caucasus. Indeed, the modern Chechen jihadist Shamil Basayev made an intense effort to associate himself with Imam Shamil—even taking his name—thus conflating the jihad of the mid–nineteenth century with that of the early twenty-first.

In order to comprehend the real war that has transformed Chechnya in the last two decades, it is important to understand the actual legacy of Imam Shamil (also spelled Shamyl or Schamyl in older books) and his nineteenth-century struggle against Russia.

Imam Shamil (1797–1871), a Muslim and a powerful national military leader, commanded a Caucasian guerrilla force for twenty-five years, from 1834 to 1859. In The Sabres of Paradise, Blanch, the romantic chronicler of the Caucasus wars, stressed the centrality of Shamil’s personality and leadership to the revolt in the mountains of the Caucasus:

To Shamyl, who straddled these mountains like a legendary giant, they were his birthright, his kingdom. From their shadows he first unfurled his black standard. In the name of Ghazavat! Holy War! he wielded the dissenting mountain tribes into the implacable army of fanatics whose private feuds were submerged in their common hatred of the Infidel invaders. For twenty-five years, he dominated both land and people. For twenty-five years, the Caucasians accepted lives of bleak abnegation and hardship for Shamyl. His Murids revolved around his dark presence with the slow set circling of planetary forces. In life and death his word was law. All of them were vowed to resist Russia to the death.

Despite such monumental efforts, however, the impact of Shamil’s revolt would have been marginal at best if not for larger political and social dynamics at play during his times. Indeed, the strategic impact of Shamil’s revolt peaked during the Crimean War (1853–1856) because the revolt in the Caucasus affected Russia’s ability to wage war against both Turkey and Great Britain. The Caucasus theater was a minor front in the Crimean War, one that had only limited influence on the greater conflict. Yet the story of Shamil left an indelible mark: Even today Moscow sees the Caucasus as the archetypal hotbed of dangerous local revolt, and as a reminder that Turkish forces might one day support a local uprising in the Caucasus. Modern Russian and Soviet military studies stress that the most important legacy of the Russian military operations in the Caucasus during the Crimean War was the effect that fighting the Shamil uprising had on Russian military performance against the Turkish army.

Indeed, Shamil’s impact on Russian strategic decisions transcended his actual military capabilities. In the early 1850s, when fighting between Russia and Turkey erupted in the Caucasian theater, Shamil so intensified his activities that by the fall of 1853 the Russians were hard-pressed to commit sufficient troops to the Turkish front because so many were required to hold off Shamil. By mid-1855, Shamil was engaging some two hundred thousand Russian troops, who were needed at the Crimean front.

Yet Shamil’s greatest influence on Russian military operations was a direct outcome of his regional popularity as a Muslim leader. The Caucasus theater of the 1850s was basically identical to that of the 1828–1829 Russo-Turkish War. Despite the Russians’ successful experience in fast-maneuver attack in the area—and despite the inferiority and insufficiency of the Turkish fortifications in Kars—Russian general N. N. Muraviev chose to engage in conventional, protracted siege warfare. It was a cautious strategy, born of fear that a failed Russian attack, or any setback for Muraviev’s side, would encourage both the Turks and Shamil’s rebels, emboldening the Chechens to intensify their attacks on the Russians’ already strained lines of communication on the few mountain roads.

Since 1850, when Shamil had emerged as a significant threat, the Russian command had been determined to contain and eventually defeat him. Although Shamil’s heartland was Dagestan, the bulk of his troops were Chechens, and the Russians attempted to destroy Shamil with a series of devastating assaults on Chechen villages, destroying the uprising’s economic base and Shamil’s greatest source of popular support and manpower. The Russians followed these raids with a wide-scale settlement effort, seizing the most fertile lands and forcing the Chechens to plead for compromise. Fearing a loss of his Chechen support, Shamil launched a series of harsh punitive raids against his former allies, who in turn sought and received Russian protection. By 1852, most Chechen citizens were settled under Russian protection—yet the mountains remained beyond Russian control.

When Turkey declared war on Russia in 1853, both sides realized the potential significance of Shamil. The Turks encouraged him to intensify his struggle under a unified banner of Islam, and the British rushed weapons and ammunition to his forces. Despite this support, Shamil’s irregulars were still no match for the experienced, skilled Russian troops, who had superior firepower and an advanced grasp of tactical warfare. Still, the Russians overreacted to the potential threat Shamil posed. Fearing that the now-pacified Chechens might rejoin their past leader, the Russians launched a series of preemptive raids, destroying Chechen villages and literally driving their inhabitants into the mountains. In the fall of 1853, Shamil tried to revive the rebellion, capitalizing on the Turkish advance and scarcity of Russian forces. He gathered a large force and launched a major attack in the direction of Tbilisi. However, his undisciplined troops eagerly attacked the Georgian villages, looting and burning them. The locals organized their own irregular bands, which immediately started instigating skirmishes against Shamil, eventually forcing him to stop and reorganize his troops. As he fought off the spontaneous Georgian resistance, the Russians took the time they needed to regroup for battle.

By now, Imam Shamil was the most powerful leader in the Cauca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• Chapter 1: WHY SHOULD WE CARE?
• Chapter 2: LEGACY AND ROOTS
• Chapter 3: EXPLOITING THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION
• Chapter 4: FIRST STEPS TOWARD JIHAD
• Chapter 5: THE ASCENT OF ISLAMIST JIHADIST CHECHNYA
• Chapter 6: INTERLUDE
• Chapter 7: ESTABLISHING A TERRORIST STATE
• Chapter 8: ESCALATING AND WAITING
• Chapter 9: THE SLIDE TO CRISIS
• Chapter 10: THE SLIDE TO WAR
• Chapter 11: THE SECOND CHECHEN WAR
• Chapter 12: WAR AGAIN
• Chapter 13: THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE JIHAD
• Chapter 14: A “NEW” WAR
• Chapter 15: MONEY MATTERS
• Chapter 16: THE ROUTINE OF WAR
• Chapter 17: CHECHNYA AND THE PALESTINIAN PROBLEM
• Chapter 18: THE CHECHEN JIHAD AFTER 9/11
• Chapter 19: CHECHENIZATION IN AFGHANISTAN
• Chapter 20: MOSCOW STRIKES BACK IN CHECHNYA
• Chapter 21: STRIKES IN MOSCOW AND IN WESTERN EUROPE
• Chapter 22: THE BLACK WIDOWS
• Chapter 23: THE ROAD TO BESLAN
• Chapter 24: SELF-DEVOURING
• Chapter 25: GOING INTERNATIONAL
• Chapter 26: IN THE THEATER OF GLOBAL JIHAD
• Chapter 27: PACIFICATION IN CHECHNYA, ERUPTION IN THE CAUCASUS
• Chapter 28: CENTER STAGE IN GLOBAL JIHAD
• Chapter 29: END GAME
• POSTSCRIPT
• A NOTE ON SOURCES AND METHODS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• SEARCHABLE TERMS
• About the Author
• Also by Yossef Bodansky
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher