Chechnya, London Telegraph, Nigel Turner, February 5, 2000 – Grozny is a capitol under siege. Artillery is lined up along the northern ridgeline and a ring of tanks and armored vehicles surround all avenues leading away from the city.

Barking dogs and rifle shots break the night. Food is scarce and medical supplies are unknown. An oily, black smoke hovers above the city as rebel stronghold after stronghold have fallen to the advancing Russian troops. Yet, more than three thousand rebels have broken through the blockade and they are moving to join more than seven thousand in the southern mountains.

Grozny, Chechnya

February 5, 2000

11:00 P.M. (GMT +3:00)

A dark, gray pall hovered above Grozny, the Chechen capitol. Chechnya is a dusty Muslim republic hemmed in by Georgia, Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Russia. It is situated north of the Afghan border and east of Turkey. Grozny was a mixture of smoke, dust, and death. The city had been reduced to a pulverized skeleton because she had dared to defy the Russian Federation. Her paved streets were little more than gravel tracks punctuated by deep craters and bordered by leafless, blackened trees.

Grozny was bleeding.

Winter snow nestled up against rubble that had been mercilessly pounded by 240mm mortars, 152mm self-propelled guns, and 120mm howitzers. The inky, one-eyed vultures perched along the northern ridgeline above the city. Behind the artillery pieces lay a forest of felled, spent casings. The pile was enormous, as the Russians had bombarded the city these last four months.

Grozny was dieing.

The dust hung indistinguishable from the blue-gray smoke. The once proud state house had stretched majestically into the sky before the Russians returned. Today, it was little more than jagged concrete chunks and twisted metal. Homes and shop fronts were reduced to charred wood burnt beyond recognition, and endless rubble piles bracketed the boulevards. Drinking water and open sewers ran together, finding or creating rivers through the devastation.

The Russians had returned.

When the artillery north of the city rested, the sky filled with flying death and rained iron bombs. Concrete apartment buildings once festooned with bright curtains, and flower boxes became hollow-eyed specters teetering against the skyline. Man-made thunder boomed every minute of every hour of every day. The ground shuddered under the torment and large boulders were reduced to smaller ones. Nothing green survived; only the gray and burnt black ruins.

The Russians knew only one way to fight.

Widows and orphans huddled, wintered in ice-cold cellars without sufficient food or water. A moldy bread crust was a great meal, and boiled potatoes a hearty feast. Everyday in the labyrinth’s remains, a mother gave birth, a child cried, and another son was buried. Only the rats ate well.

The Chechens bled.

The Russian Generals remembered 1996 and the failed attempt to snuff out freedom’s flame. This time they would not mindlessly send smooth-faced boys into the killing field at Minutka Square in the center of Grozny. When the Russians entered the city under the January skies, they came with tanks, armored personnel carriers, and a hundred thousand troops.

The Russians bled too.

Anyone found without proper identification papers (and there were many) were shoveled into ditches gouged out of the earth by the ridgeline artillery. Old men, pregnant women, and young boys were clustered together much the way the Nazis herded the Jews at Babi Yar. Even the rats surrendered the city to the Chechen rebels, and inevitably, the Chechens fled south towards the hills.

And Grozny died.

Beyond the dead city, Shamil Basayev—the rebel’s top field commander—led his men into the hills. He hobbled along on one leg and a crutch for his recently amputated foot. They were a rag tag, gritty line of men and boys. They had liberated most of their weapons from dead Russian soldiers, and all of their ammunition came from the Russian army. The average Russian soldier was only too happy to barter his rifle, ammunition pouch, or grenade string for a bowl of soup. In a curious way, food became a weapon.

Shamil permitted an English journalist from a paper he had never read to tag along. Nigel Turner was a flaccid fellow with red jowls and poor skin. He wore a bulletproof vest and kept a lightweight Nikon camera slung over his shoulder. Strapped to his backpack was a notebook-size laptop computer complete with a solar charger for the battery pack and a satellite modem. He tended to wheeze in the sharp night air as the higher elevation starved his lungs.

Nigel set up whenever there was a quiet moment to transmit his latest scribbling to his London paper. A copyeditor fixed his grammar, checked his spelling, and pulled the story into a presentable format. It was the least they could do for someone dodging artillery barrages and ducking under the distinctive .50 caliber buzz-saw whine. There was the dark side of his assignment—sometimes journalists never returned from the field.

Parvez Hyder carried an AK-74 he had taken off a seventeen-year-old Russian conscript. He left a knife in the boy’s neck and managed to keep most of the blood away from his trousers. Grozny’s dark night was pierced lights from burning barrels that kept Russian sentries warm, and by fire pits of families who no longer had cellars to call home. His eyes never ceased scanning the path they had trekked up—searching for the telltale glint of a sniper rifle.

Parvez was different from the other men and boys stumbling into the night. He spoke flawless English. He grew up in a blue collar Chicago suburb and spent his teenage years watching the immortal Walter Payton lead the Bears to a Super Bowl victory and dominate the hated Packers and Vikings. He held an American passport, having become a naturalized citizen during Reagan’s first term. He followed the privileged American route and noted with great interest when the Soviet Union collapsed, the empire shattered, and Chechnya declared independence. Parvez decided to take a semester off and explore his heritage. He made an amazing discovery during his travels—he enjoyed killing Russians.

The rebels fanned out from Grozny in groups of twenty. They were wrapped in soiled fatigues, homemade blankets, and filthy bandages. Many of them coughed, and a few could barely hold their rifles up. Malnutrition and sickness dogged their steps. Campfires were shielded from the air, as everyone warily watched the sky for Russian helicopter gun ships, sporting forward-looking infrared sensors.

Russian pilots were circumspect about flying through the nighttime sky. The Chechen rebels had acquired the American-made Stinger anti-aircraft missile. The Stinger downed two hundred seventy Russian aircraft in Afghanistan, achieving an incredible seventy-nine–percent kill ratio. The Russian pilots were well aware of its lethality, as the Chechens had already downed twelve aircraft in the current conflict.

The other problem plaguing Russian pilots was training for night operations. The world was entirely different absent daylight, and more than one pilot ended up strafing friendly troops or misjudging altitude. While Russia still produced weaponry for export, everyone witnessed the prowess of the American military machine and no one wanted to be using second-class equipment. Most Russian pilots remained safe in their bivouac during the evening.

Sometime before the sun began painting the eastern sky pink, Shamil ushered his charges into caverns stocked with fresh water, Red Crescent foodstuffs, and ammunition.

Nigel Turner careened sideways, collapsing into a heap. He slid the pack off his back, wondering if the burning sensation along his shoulders would ever end. His features were bathed in cold perspiration. He groaned ever so softly as exhaustion and sleep demanded his attention. He was amazed to still be alive. Shamil Basayev was a hunted man, and rumors abounded regarding a bounty on his head. Nigel might have dozed off, had it not been for Parvez Hyder pulling a thermal blanket across the opening of the cave.

Parvez intrigued Nigel for several reasons. He was larger than the rest of the men his age, and Nigel suspected it came not from genetics but nutrition. Parvez had straight teeth, good dental work and hygiene—he was the only one besides Nigel who regularly brushed and flossed. The knife he carried strapped to his belt had an eagle perched atop the globe with an anchor running behind embossed on the hilt. The emblem was synonymous with one military service—the United States Marine Corps.

Nigel suspected Parvez understood and spoke English. While he had never heard him utter anything but the gibberish Shamil and his men babbled, Parvez seemed to understand Nigel’s mutterings as he puzzled through a sentence or cussed at his laptop. A lantern illuminated the squalid cave. Parvez was the only man field stripping his weapon and studiously running the copper cleaning brush through the bore. The rest abandoned their weapons carelessly to a pile, but Parvez brushed, blew and polished his weapon. He sparingly applied oil to the moving parts and finished up using a carbon-stained diaper to wipe down his weapon.

Shamil staggered above the flickering shadows dancing off the walls. His dark features a stark contrast to Nigel’s blistered skin and Parvez’s fairer complexion. The two merged like a misshapen animal running along the interior cave walls. They murmured in whispers too faint for anyone to understand.

“It is time to strike back,” whispered Shamil.

Parvez gave a furtive glance over his shoulder toward the others in the cave. “How?”

“The Iranian Ayatollah has a plan. He needs someone smart—special,” explained Shamil.

“But my place is here,” hissed Parvez. He gave Shamil a stricken look.

Shamil reached forth a fatherly hand to calm his shoulder. Shamil leaned closer and spoke directly into Parvez’s ear.

“How many of us do you think will be alive in a year? One in five, if we are lucky—closer to one in ten. We need to hit them where it counts. We need to make them fear us again.”

Parvez nodded.

“You are the chosen one. You are the one who can pull this off. You have been to the university. You understand technical details and you believe in killing Russians. I can’t send one of these shepherd boys to do what needs to be done,” whispered Shamil.

After another minute, a grim grin penciled its way along Parvez’s features.

Nigel watched the whole thing from his spot against a rock. He pretended to fuss with his laptop, bringing the flat screen and artificial light into the cave’s dank recesses. He suspected something was up, but he had a story to write. Grozny had fallen to the Russians! His hands flew over the keyboard, bringing up his last story—another variation of David meeting Goliath.

It was the fantasy his editors adored, and a fiction that people safely tucked in bed each night wanted to believe. The ponderous and lethargic Goliath rumbling down from the north with his heavy-handed club of bombs and planes, meeting a diminutive David armed with the simplest of weapons— a mere three thousand rebel fighters against a hundred thousand troops. Nigel was sure Hollywood and photojournalists would make movies decrying the savagery exhibited by the Russians. It was pap ladled up to the masses. It was also patently false.

Nigel never included in his dispatches the sources of Chechen money and arms. There were the car theft rings operating inside of Germany and selling their gleaned Mercedes, Porsches and Audis to the new Russian Czars, the drug runners moving product from Turkish poppy fields to Italy, France, Spain, and England, and the notorious white slave trade shipping women and young boys to sick Asian societies. No one waged a war against the Russians, fed troops, or secured bullets, medicine, and clothing without money.

The Iranians, for the most part, considered the Chechens a decadent, slovenly lot. They failed to adhere to the Shi’ites strict code designed to usher in the dark ages replete with all its benefits of disease, illiteracy, and poverty. In contrast, the Gulf States of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar sent hundreds of millions of dollars. Turkey, Pakistan, and Afghanistan plied the war with surplus rifles, RPG-7s (rocket propelled grenades), and Stinger missiles. It would not do to raise the nasty specter of Islamic fundamentalism, and it tended to spoil the idyllic tale of a desperate band of freedom fighters standing up to the monolithic Russian Bear. Nigel kept the references to petrodollars out of his prose, and worked the crazy dedication angle of suicide bombers. With Grozny’s fall, he suspected suicide squads would increase.

Nigel finished his notes and flipped the laptop shut. Exhaustion quickly slammed his eyelids shut. When he awoke,

Parvez was gone.

The rebels retreated south through Katyr Yurt—an insignificant village of four hundred. Yesterday, on February 4, 2000, the Russians punished Katyr Yurt for no better reason than it lay along the rebel’s line of march. At three in the afternoon, the Russians came with their fighter-bombers, helicopters, missiles, and vacuum bombs—fuel air explosives—a weapon expressly prohibited by the Geneva Convention for use against civilian targets.

And Katyr Yurt died too.

Three hundred sixty-three people died in Katyr Yurt—not one of them a rebel fighter. The streets were smashed bloody and trees shredded. The vacuum bomb ignited its mixture of fuel and greedily gobbled all the air away from the people below. It literally sucked their lungs inside out. It seems no one told the Russian commanders that Katyr Yurt was behind the Russian lines and inside the safe zone.

But then, Russians know no better.

Western experts estimate a billion dollars might be needed to rebuild Grozny. Vladimir Putin, the new leader of the Russian democracy, quietly declared Grozny would never be rebuilt. It is an example to all others who would dare declare their independence and forcibly demand a seat at the table of nations.

Stalin’s spirit lives on.

Chechnya earned Stalin’s lasting animosity by supporting Hitler in the Great Patriotic War. The Soviet Empire did not trouble itself with the petty squabbles inside its borders, and the KGB ensured a reign of terror to keep the myriad of language and ethnic groups in line. History rumbled on and the dark empire broke apart into conquered peoples demanding their independence. Boris Yeltsin presided over the Soviet Union’s disintegration and chose to ignore Chechnya.

A new wind blew for a while.

The Chechens, hardly a unified group, reverted to what they did best. The thirty or so clans squabbled amongst themselves, robbed banks, hijacked cars, and kidnapped journalists. Not content with targets of opportunity inside Chechnya’s borders, the Chechen mafia extended its reach into southern Russia, kidnapping whomever they could find. By 1996, Chechnya had become a problem requiring a solution—a Russian solution.

Old ways die hard.

Boris and his advisors convinced themselves the army built by Breshnev still existed. Except Chechnya was not Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, it was closer to Afghanistan in the 1980s. The largely unpaid, malnourished, and poorly trained Russian conscript waded into Muslim Chechnya and came to face-to-face with some of the meanest people on earth. While the Russians bombed and strafed Grozny, it still remained habitable at the beginning of 1997.

The killing had only just started.

The Chechens quit killing each other and concentrated on their godless, socialist overlords. Even though peace broke out in 1997 and an oil pipeline deal was struck, the Chechen clans gleefully continued to kidnap journalists and kill any Russian soldiers they found. The Russians returned, marching from the east, north and west. They battered down Gudermes, Chechnya’s second largest city, and crossed the Sunzha River until they came to a rest on the ridgeline north of Grozny in late October 1999.

Grozny would die.

The rebel clans retreated past Argun and Shali towards the Caucasus Mountains’ sheltering slopes. The Russian Army held in its bloody gauntlet a hard fought, extraordinarily expensive piece of blasted real estate. In 1995, the rebels kept fifty thousand army and Interior Ministry troops tied down. In 2000, the number was approaching one hundred fifty thousand. With the fall of Grozny, the war changed from a campaign for territory to a campaign of terror.

They were Russians.

They were Chechens.

The killing had just started.

Douglas De Bono / DouglasDeBono.Com Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota E-Mail readermail@DouglasDeBono.Com