Cover Story Unbridled Terror
The older and the healthier children are still walking on their own. They walk, or, to be more precise, they stumble and hurry into the shadows of armored vehicles and ambulances. The youngest and the injured are carried, as quickly as possible, under gunfire and grenade launcher attacks. A few are still wearing the explosive belts attached to them by the terrorists.
Last Friday, at 1:05 p.m. local time, when two explosions in a gymnasium loaded with explosives and packed with hostages in the small North Ossetian city of Beslan brought the hostage crisis involving more than a thousand children and adults to a dramatic climax, the horrific images in and around the building of School Number 1 were as gruesome as any fictional scenes in a horror film.
These images of half-naked, terrified children, some covered in blood, being rescued from their heavily armed tormentors and brought to safety by troops, marked the beginning of a new calendar in the rebellion being fought against the central government in Moscow by Chechen rebels and their Islamist allies – a time in which war and terror, deliberately and preferably directed against children, are considered a legitimate means to an end.
Nothing comparable has ever happened before, not even during the long and bloody history of Moscow's conflict with its renegade southern autonomous republic. Children have certainly been victims of combat, and have numbered among the 200,000 civilian dead since the first Chechen war began in 1994.
Officially, almost 5,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in a single year. The number of dead rebels is impossible to estimate.
But to use children, including toddlers, first-graders and adolescents, as hostages to serve the cause of popular liberation and possibly even in the name of Allah?
Until now, this would have been an inconceivable scenario, even in the Caucasus region, where it is not unusual for 13-year-old boys to be treated as adults and used for reconnaissance missions, transporting bombs, and laying mines.
However, there have already been indications in the past that terrorism against children will be used as a last resort. In the Caucasus city of Mineralnye Wody, a bus containing 30 schoolchildren and a few teachers was kidnapped in December 1988. The kidnappers demanded three million dollars, weapons and an aircraft for their escape to Israel. The hostage crisis ended without bloodshed.
In December 1993, a terrorist group took 15 students hostage at School Number 25 in Rostov on the Don. The terrorists demanded a helicopter and crew to fly them to Iran. This crisis also ended without bloodshed.
The "Day of Knowledge," a day of singing, a day as if custom-made for hostage-takers.
But such a cold-blooded and carefully planned attack such as that in Beslan, during which the hostage-takers threatened to kill hundreds of children if the state refused to meet their political demands, has not occurred in the more recent history of terrorism worldwide. The name of this town in northeast Ossetia will remain linked to this act of terror for a long time.
It is the "Day of Knowledge," which marks the first day of school, on September 1, throughout Russia. It is a day when children and adults dress up and gather in school buildings, a day of singing and recitation. It is also a day that could have been custom-made for hostage-takers, a day that enables them to take as many hostages as possible and garner as much public attention as possible by occupying a single building.
The two to three dozen hostage-takers of Beslan make their demands known very quickly. They want the Russians to withdraw from Chechnya. To prove that they mean business, they show a few of their young hostages in a window. One of the survivors later remembers a hostage-taker holding the corpse of a man he has just shot. He warns: "If any child makes any noise at all, we'll kill the next one."
No food or water is delivered to the hostages for 53 hours. Alla Gadijewa, a mother who was taken hostage with her seven-year-old son, later says that she first thought of "exploding balloons" when the hostage crisis began. The terrorists herded their prisoners together, collected their cell phones, and threatened: "If we find only one additional cell phone, we will kill twenty people immediately."
There is still a little left to drink on the first day, but no food. On the second day, a few children begin drinking urine to avoid dying of thirst. Soon the first victims begin to faint. "The kidnappers just laughed," the survivor reports. "People all around us were praying, and whoever didn't know to pray - we taught them how."
And then, with no advance preparation, the fighting begins.
Two enormous explosions rock the school at 1:05 p.m. Survivors later report that the terrorists had apparently smuggled explosives into the school before the hostage crisis began, even attaching explosives to the baskets on the basketball court. Later, homemade bombs are found that contain three kilograms of metal fragments, bombs designed to kill and maim with deadly shrapnel.
A large section of the gymnasium roof collapses, and immediately an intense firefight begins between security forces and the Chechen rebels. A group of about thirty women and children takes advantage of the chaos to flee, and the kidnappers make good on their threats to shoot the escapees. A few are hit, while others manage to make it to safety.
The children, some looking grotesquely exhausted, latch onto adults who greet them with screams and cries. As soon as they have reached safety, the children grab water bottles and drink voraciously. A few talk about what they have seen: "One woman blew herself up right in front of us."
Another survivor reports: "We pushed all the children out of the windows. Everyone who was there did the same thing." Injured children are to be brought to nearby hospitals as quickly as possible. But there are too few ambulances. The authorities have not taken advantage of the past two days to prepare themselves for a sudden end to the hostage crisis.
Another powerful explosion is heard at 1:19 p.m. The firefight intensifies. Screaming teachers and relatives are taken out on stretchers. A boy with a bandage around his head reports: "I broke a window to get out." In front of the school, "the people were running wildly all over the place. The rebels were shooting at us from the school roof." A few minutes later, the head of the security forces issues the following statement: "In connection with the situation in the school, the military forces feel it is necessary to act appropriately." Translation: Government forces are abandoning their previous policy of exercising restraint. The elite troops come into play.
1:30 p.m.: Rumors circulate in the city that parts of the school roof have collapsed. Tanks have been brought in. Alarmed by the shooting and by wild speculation, dozens of relatives leave their cars and make their way toward the school. Traffic in this small city of 35,000 inhabitants descends into chaos.
Four helicopter gunships circle above the school. Plumes of smoke emerge through the roof. While the fighting continues on one side of the building, rescuers are already trying to help on the other side. A British TV reporter discovers dozens of bodies among the burning debris on the school floor. Later there will be reports of 200 dead in the school alone.
1:38 p.m.: A few armed rebels storm their way through the crowd of relatives standing in front of the school. Russian troops open fire on the rebels. The terrorists remaining in the school apparently begin shooting randomly at people and the building.
1:52: Special forces from the interior ministry, the Omon, force their way into the school building. The skirmishes continue. The rebels, who, just before the shooting began, had been arguing heatedly over whether to continue negotiating with the Russian authorities, have split into two groups. A few are still trying escape with the survivors before they can be recognized. As soon as escaping hostages identify them as terrorists, soldiers begin shooting at them. There is now perfect chaos: Family members have overrun all the barriers and are now intermingled with Russian military units. Everyone is trying to help, and everyone is in the way.
2:17 p.m.: Sergey Shoigu, minister for catastrophic events, reports that a few of his rescuers have been killed and a cameraman for Polish television has been wounded. A little later, a representative of the interior ministry for North Ossetia reports that two female terrorists, presumably "black widows," have fled, disguised as nurses. Other hostage-takers, wearing their hostages' clothing, have apparently also escaped.
2:49 p.m.: Using targeted explosions, military forces blow a huge hole into the wall of the schoolyard, in an attempt to give the escaping hostages another route to safety. In front of the wall, the escapees are met by family members searching for their relatives. "My girlfriend is a teacher at this school," says one man, "but I haven't heard anything from her since the attack. We will go from hospital to hospital to find her."
4:30 p.m.: Contrary to earlier reports, it has become increasingly apparent that skirmishes are continuing inside the school building. Hostage-takers have barricaded themselves and their victims in other buildings and in the school's basement. As the shooting continues, rescuers bring more and more children to safety.
4:59 p.m.: More than 100 bodies are found in the gymnasium.
5:40 p.m.: Valery Andreyev, the head of the domestic intelligence agency for North Ossetia, FSB, announces that "no measures by the security forces were considered." According to Andrejev, the Russian troops were only deployed "after the first hostage had been executed."
7:30 p.m.: Officials in charge of the rescue effort announce that ten citizens of Arab countries, including one black man, have been found among the dead hostage-takers.
9:05 p.m.: An advisor to President Putin, Aslambek Aslachanov, announces that the number of dead is currently expected to be far more than 150. There are reports of 646 wounded, including 332 children. The inhabitants of Beslan who surround the emissary from Moscow are furious. Once again, the administration has done what it usually does at first impulse. It has lied. On the morning of the same day, there had been talk of only 328 hostages.
10:19 p.m.: The press secretary of the president of North Ossetia announces that three hostage-takers have been arrested, and that the interrogations have already begun. General Victor Sobolev, commander of the 58th Army, admits that a few "bandits" have tried to disappear among the local population: "However, most of them have been destroyed. We even had to shoot from tanks." Shots, presumably targeted at fleeing hostage-takers, are heard throughout Beslan late into the night.
10:34 p.m.: The first aircraft sent by the ministry for catastrophic events takes off from Moscow, nine hours after the fighting began. The Ilyushin-76 departing from Domodedovo Airport is being sent to fly injured children to Moscow. A second aircraft is also scheduled for takeoff.
An internal Russian conflict turns into a tactical battle with Islamist involvement
11:37 p.m.: The number of victims lying in hospital beds in Beslan, Vladikavkas and Ardon is now revised upward to 704, including 259 children. Doctors spend the night fighting to save the lives of almost 100 severely injured children. Early Saturday morning, officials in charge of the rescue effort confirm that 27 terrorists are dead. "Eight hostage-takers were killed on the school grounds, and the rest in surrounding residential areas." It seems likely that these figures will also be preliminary. President Putin arrives in Beslan on Saturday morning.
The bloody showdown in this hostage crisis, chaotic and ruthlessly fought to the end by both sides, takes place a little more than twenty kilometers from the capital of North Ossetia, Vladikavkas, in an autonomous republic on good terms with Moscow. Vladikavkas translates as: "Rule the Caucasus."
The name of the city characterizes Moscow's claim to dominance over the southern Russian frontier region. But rarely has it been so drastically apparent, and within only eight days, just how broad the chasm is between claim and reality in Putin's realm.
The hostage crisis in Beslan marked the end of a bloody week unlike almost any week preceding it in Russia's more recent, violent past. Only one day before the terrorists attacked in this small city in the northern Caucasus region, Chechen Rosa Nagajeva blew herself up in front of the "Richskaya" metro station in Moscow. Ten people were killed in the suicide bombing.
Just seven days earlier, Rosa Nagajeva's sister Amanta and her friend Sazita (both identified by a passport found with Nagajeva) had killed 88 people in a carefully choreographed attack, when they blew up two Russian domestic airliners almost simultaneously, using the explosive hexogen.
On August 22, all three suicide bombers had left the Chechen capital Grosny, where they had worked in market stands, in the direction of Moscow.
In Russia, these young women are referred to colloquially as "black widows," ever since they played a critical role, veiled and armed, in the bloody hostage crisis at the Northeast Musical Theater.
Like aircraft kamikaze Amanta Nagajeva, many of these female terrorists have lost family members in the war between the central government in Moscow and Chechen units, which, with only one interruption, has lasted since 1994. Many have also lost the roots of their own culture.
Moscow's brutal campaign against the mountain inhabitants of Chechnya during the past ten years has shaken the society to its very foundations. One of the consequences is a change in strategy, among the rebels, to one which legitimizes the use of suicide attacks, previously unknown, as a means of generating attention for a war in which tens of thousands have been killed. The recent series of Chechen suicide attacks began on June 7, 2000, when two girls driving a heavy Kamas truck blew themselves up - together with 15 soldiers - at the local military headquarters at Alchan-Jurt, ten kilometers south of Grosny.
The truck was driven by 17-year-old Chava Barajeva. Before the attack, she videotaped the following message: "Sisters, our hour has arrived. Where the enemies have killed almost all the men, our brothers and husbands, all that remains for us is to avenge their deaths. We must become Shahiden (suicide attackers) on the road to Allah. We will not stop."
Islamist extremists normally use these kinds of videos to recruit future fighters and generous donors, especially in the Arab world. In her book titled "Brides of Allah," journalist Juliya Jusik describes in detail the circumstances under which young girls in the Caucasus become the suicide attackers known as "black widows," who by now are spreading fear and terror throughout Russia. "The women do not blow themselves up," writes Jusik, "they are blown up" - by the male organizers of the bloodbaths, who themselves prefer the job of activating remote detonators.
Immediately following the amateurishly executed terrorist attack, speculations begin to circulate that the hostage crisis may been planned by Chechen rebels associated with field commander Shamil Bassajev.
The one-legged, black-bearded Bassajev, by now referred to as "Terrorist Number One" in the language of the Russian intelligence service, serves as an example of the mistakes and confusion that characterize the relationship between the Russian state and Chechen rebels.
Bassajev, trained by Russian military intelligence, of all things, disappeared, allegedly after having lost eleven relatives during the war with Moscow, and developed into the most-feared "Bojevik," or rebel leader, in Chechnya.
Bassajev can already claim responsibility for a bloody hostage crisis in which 1100 people were taken hostage at the district hospital in Budjonovsk in 1995. The attack claimed the lives of 166 hostages, their deaths intended as a form of protest, carried out on Russian territory, against the ruthless methods of Russian troops on Chechen soil.
When the peace treaty of Chassavjurt temporarily brought the violence to a halt in 1996, Bassajev, together with Jordanian national Chattab, devoted himself to the training of Islamist fighters. Although there was no fighting during the truce period, in which the Chechen republic, Itchkeria, was governed by its lawfully elected president, Aslan Mashadov, the Russian government failed to honor the commitments it had made in 1997. Chechnya, which had been devastated during the war, was left without funding from Moscow and began to flounder under the dominance of rival warlords.
This is when what had been an internal Russian conflict began to develop into a tactical battle with international involvement. Members of the global Islamist rebel movement began to appear in Chechnya. They brought along money, weapons and a religion foreign to the Chechens - Wahhabism, a rigid interpretation of Sunni Islam that is particularly widespread in Saudi Arabia.
Bin Laden's current second-in-command, Egyptian al-Zawahiri, was arrested on Chechen territory in 1997 and later released. His arrival, as well as that of other Sunni brothers in Chechnya, produces an effect similar to that of a new bacterial culture interacting with a weakened organism. The influence of Al Qaeda and Wahhabites in Chechnya was not the beginning of the conflict with the central authorities in Moscow, but rather its consequence.
A historically incubated, essentially post-colonial crisis region has now become a new theater in the fight against international terrorism, but under different conditions. Since the attacks on the United States in September 2001, Putin has used the banner of a global alliance against Islamist extremists to continue waging his hopeless, bloody war with the Chechens for Russian territorial integrity.
"Religious fundamentalism was irrelevant at the beginning of the conflict," says Professor Valery Tishkov, a member of the Academy of Sciences. His colleague, Professor Alexander Ignatenko, an expert on Islamic radicalism at Moscow's Lomonossov University, believes that this has now changed. According to Ignatenko, the global alliance of religious extremists and the associated globalization of the terrorist strategy are facts that Russia must face.
But can this be the reason behind the spiral of violent events, increasingly frequent and extreme, that has placed a stranglehold on Russia during the past two years? It has been less than two years since 41 hostage-takers and 129 hostages died when Russian special forces stormed Moscow's Northeast Musical Theater – a serious blow to President Vladimir Putin, who had campaigned for the country's highest office with the promise to provide security and stability.
Two months later, in December 2002, two car bombs – detonated by a father with his two children – kill 72 people in Grosny. In July 2003, two suicide bombers kill 16 people at a rock concert. In August 2003, an attack on a military hospital in North Ossetia claims 50 lives, and 46 passengers die when a train is blown up between Kislovodsk and Jessentuki.
The dead are buried, but the Kremlin doesn't change its tune: terrorism must be combated with unwavering severity. In December 2003, a suicide bomber kills six people a stone's throw from the Duma. In February 2004, 41 passengers are killed when a bomb explodes in the subway. And on May 9, 2004, the "Day of Victory" over Nazi Germany, a bomb rips apart Chechen president Ahmed Kadyrov in Grosny.
With each bloody act, the early predictions of human rights activist and Sakharov follower Sergey Kovaljov, that the war with Chechnya would bring great misfortune to Russia, seem to be coming true.
Russians are once again asking themselves: How sincere are the many condolence telegrams from overseas? When the "foreign minister" of the Chechen underground government enjoys political asylum in the United States, the "minister of culture" in England, the "minister of health" in France, and the "social minister," provided with a grant from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, in Germany? Is this what the international fight against terrorism looks like?
At the Kremlin, they are once again asking themselves whether to believe the denials of Aslan Mashadov, Chechnya's president-in-hiding, who claims he had nothing to do with the whole affair. After all, didn't he offer to mediate during the hostage crisis?
By as early as Friday afternoon – when shots were still being fired from the basement of the school and the dead hadn't even been counted yet –, the Russian domestic intelligence service, FSB, announced that the hostage crisis had been thought up by top terrorist Shamil Bassajev, commanded by his Ingushetian comrade Magomet Yevlojev, and financed by Chechen Al Qaeda offshoot "Abu Omar al-Saif."
Everyone involved pursues the trail he most wants to pursue, and hopes that people will soon forget what happened last week, in the name of freedom and self-determination, but also in the name of the state's monopolistic hold on power, and has been imprinted on the souls of hundreds of children.
Aslan Kudsajev, one of the pupils held hostage at School Number 1 in Beslan, experienced firsthand the tactics that will be employed in the Chechen conflict in the future. The terrorists forced him to throw the body of someone they had shot out of the window and into the schoolyard. It was the dead father of a pupil. He was killed because he was a policeman. The pupil, Kudsajev, did as he was told, and survived.
Many of the hostages in Beslan were less fortunate. They lost their lives and they had no idea what for. The following statement appears on the website of the Chechen rebels: "An exciting September in Russia has just begun."
UWE KLUSSMANN, WALTER MAYR
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
