Posted on 10/23/2004 10:26:17 AM PDT by Destro
October 23, 2004
Russia Steps Up Antiterror Drive as Chechen War Spreads
By C. J. CHIVERS
AMURZIYEVO, Russia - Magomed Khashiyev has died again, this time for real.
He was surprised and cornered, caught during a rare reunion with his wife and four children in a small single-story house here on Oct. 10. After years of eluding the authorities, he spent his last moments fleeing shoeless through a garden, as Russian commandos riddled him with automatic rifle fire, witnesses and his relatives say.
Russian authorities described Mr. Khashiyev as an Islamic terrorist loyal to Shamil Basayev, the Chechen who claimed responsibility for the worst acts of terror to strike modern Russia, including the siege at a public school in Beslan in September in which at least 344 people were killed.
Mr. Khashiyev trained in a terrorist camp in Chechnya, the Russians said, led a wing of Mr. Basayev's separatist group and helped organize attacks, including the seizure of the school. The unsparing pursuit of Mr. Khashiyev suggests Russia's invigorated efforts to hunt separatists after terrorist attacks shook the country this year.
The Russian security services, which erroneously announced at least once before that they had killed him, all but openly celebrated his death. "We feel satisfaction," said Maj. Gen. Ilya Shabalkin, spokesman for counterterrorism forces in the North Caucasus.
For all the Russian authorities' evident delight, the circumstances surrounding Mr. Khashiyev's death and the fate that has befallen his family provide insight into why Russia's war in the Caucasus has proved difficult to contain, much less win. It is a profile of the region's porous security and extensive familial connections, and of inhumanity and violence gone awry as the combatants tug each other ever deeper into war.
Mr. Khashiyev, 27, was not Chechen. He was born in what is now Ingushetia, the republic to Chechnya's west that has long supplied the war with Muslim fighters and has developed a potent anti-Moscow insurgency of its own. He waged underground war for years with the tacit support of his family, surviving in a tiny area where tens of thousands of Russian soldiers and intelligence officers are assigned.
For the family the hunt for him was a source of fear and fury. Mr. Khashiyev's relatives said that his mother's house was repeatedly raided over the last several years and that law enforcement officers often stole the family's possessions.
During an interrogation by the security services, one of Mr. Khashiyev's cousins was beaten to near infirmity, the family said, and another was abducted in a raid in September and has not been heard from since.
Moreover, the family said, the cousin who had been beaten was fatally shot in the assault that killed Mr. Khashiyev, and three women and seven children were struck by shrapnel. Another indignity came later, their families said, when armored vehicles knocked down the house in which Mr. Khashiyev had been trapped.
The destruction of life and property, conducted in a society bound by tribal codes of revenge, has been freighted with danger, his family said. "Probably the goal of the authorities is to scare people," said Magomed Tsurova, an Ingush police officer and brother-in-law of Said Khashiyev, the cousin who died with Magomed. "The result is quite the opposite."
The authorities' description of Magomed Khashiyev is of a man whose depravity knew few bounds.
They say he recruited suicide bombers, helped plan a raid in June in which rebels masqueraded as police officers and killed people who stopped for them, and worked to prepare the terrorists who seized the school in Beslan. He willingly risked his relatives' lives, traveling with his young children to shield him on heavily policed roads.
Little predicted such a course for his life. He was raised in Sleptsovsk, a village near the present Chechen border, a religious child who aspired to become a police officer, his family said.
He married in 1997. His wife, Khava Khashiyeva, said he seemed a normal man until the second Chechen war began in 1999. Then he changed. "He began to disappear," she said.
For five years, she said, Mr. Khashiyev kept a rebel's erratic schedule: home for hours or days, gone for weeks or months. No one knew when, or if, he would return.
Sometimes he sent men to his family with money or food, she said. But he never discussed politics or work with women, leaving her to wonder how he lived and what influenced his choices. Was he a nationalist? An Islamist? Both? "I asked him how he explained his absences," Ms. Khashiyeva said. "He said, 'It's just my business.' "
General Shabalkin said that through those years, Mr. Khashiyev was an active fighter, and attended a Chechen terrorist training camp run by Ibn al-Khattab, an Arab who was killed in 2002. Such associations would cost his family dearly.
Russian officers raided his mother's house at least 10 times, his family said, asking for his whereabouts while stealing money, jewelry, cellphones, electronic equipment and photo albums, according to letters the family wrote to the local prosecutor's office to demand investigations. "These were not searches," said another cousin, Asya Khashiyeva. "They were robberies."
The authorities wrote back that investigations were unnecessary, further enraging the Khashiyev clan.
As violence encircled him, Mr. Khashiyev seemed undeterred. He sometimes appeared at his mother's house, although this year he had not been home since March, several relatives said.
General Shabalkin offered a simple reason. At a meeting last year of an Islamic council led by Mr. Basayev, the general said, Mr. Khashiyev was promoted to run a faction of Ingush rebels and became busy with added responsibilities. The new rank also made him a priority suspect for the military and police.
On March 17, his relatives said, Russians swept into the home of Said Khashiyev, another of Magomed's cousins, and beat him for three hours, sometimes putting a phonebook against his head and striking it to deliver a wide, stunning blow. "All the time they asked, 'Where is Magomed?'" said one of Said's two wives, Fatima Khamatkhanova. Her husband limped for months afterward, she said.
On Sept. 3, hours before the siege in Beslan ended in carnage, masked Russians raided an auto shop operated by another of his cousins, Alaudin Khashiyev. Alaudin was abducted, witnesses said. Family members said they had complained to the Ingush government and law enforcement agencies. General Shabalkin and a spokesman for the Ingush administration said they knew nothing of it.
Mr. Khashiyev demonstrated his imperturbability and the gaps in Russian security once more on Oct. 8, when he arrived at his mother's house with Dzhabrail Kostoyev, a driver. His hair fell to his shoulders, his wife said. He wore a beard. He said they were going to find their own apartment.
Ms. Khashiyeva gathered their four children in the car, and the family passed across Ingushetia and arrived here that night, at a home rented by Said Khashiyev, his wives and three children.
Said Khashiyev's connections to Magomed are in dispute. General Shabalkin said he was an accomplice. Said's second wife said that he was guiltless and that there was tension between the men, exacerbated because Magomed had arrived with a pistol. "My husband was against giving him shelter," she said.
But tribal connections are strong in Ingushetia, and when Magomed said he needed a day to find an apartment, Said relented and let him in, she said. On Oct. 10 Magomed was still there. Said Khashiyev confronted his cousin again. "He asked Magomed to leave, to leave our family alone," Fatima Khashiyeva said.
It was too late. Russia's Federal Security Services, or F.S.B., had been tipped that Mr. Khashiyev was in the house, General Shabalkin said.
The raid began at about 6:20 p.m., when roughly 50 Russians surrounded the house, survivors and neighbors said.
The authorities say the men refused to surrender and a shootout ensued. Fatima said that her husband, Said, had been unarmed and that the men had tried only to flee.
This much is clear: shooting began, and Magomed and Said Khashiyev jumped out a window to the garden. A second surge of gunfire erupted.
Said was found dead beneath the window, his neighbors said. Magomed made it about 30 yards farther before he fell. Bullets had struck his right side and leg, his family said; one entered his brain behind the right ear.
Inside, the women frantically worked to protect the children, they say, covering them with rugs and lying atop them. Mr. Kostoyev ran to their room and told them he would jump out a window to escape.
They pleaded with him not to, as he might draw fire toward the children. He leapt anyway, they said. Gunfire resumed. A rocket later struck the building, injuring the women and children with flying glass, plaster and shrapnel, and bringing down the roof.
The families dug their way out. Two breast-feeding infants were among them (WOW! Such a dramatic and sympathetic way to describe infants designed to elicit sympathy - The NYTimes up to their old tricks). One, Fatima's 3-month-old son, suffered a shrapnel injury on his right cheek. The other, a 10-month-old girl, suffered a skull injury and went into a coma.
Mr. Kostoyev was arrested. The authorities said that he was being investigated for collaborating with terrorists and that he is giving evidence against them.
Critics of Moscow's policies in the Caucasus have warned that a paucity of justice or democracy is sustaining conflicts and risks fueling their expansion. As the Chechen war spreads, those who knew Mr. Khashiyev's career and its consequences for his family say Ingushetia now feels as if it might explode.
"People cannot take it," said Jaffar Khashiyev, a brother of Alaudin, the abducted man. "Even a stone, if water drips on it long enough, will crack."
yesterday I was googling for hours trying to turn up those Yahoo video-stills of the horrors of Beslan.
I'm sure people here have downloaded many of these to files, but that's not the point. These pictures, unless I've searched with great incompetence, are simply no longer available on regular web sites. The ones left on Yahoo are just of weeping babushkas, not the awful reality of those children fleeing the bullets of Islamists.
Something odd going on here.
Western allies of the Chechens trying to sanitize such images?
Yahoo has removed the most graphic of the images. Those heartbreaking ones that told the hardest story.
(tinfoil on) I am suspicious--particularly now that the "mourning time" is over and vengeance is nigh.
There are other interests at work that seem to infuence the press reports when a certain agenda is afoot.
So the terrorist thug regularly put his family and relatives at risk to protect himself, and helped kill children in Breslan. Only a writer for the NYT could try to make you feel sympathetic to that terrorist scum and try to make the Russian commando squad seem evil. I say good riddance to him and all his associates.
In Chechnya it is the interest of those that seek to destabilize Russia (at least in the Caucuses) and make that area available for Western interests its energy corridors. Many include powerful men - including Americans (of both left and right) but not limited to them backed by money from Saudi interests - but not limited to them.
May such plans be exposed, whether they hurt members of this country or not. A unstable Russia is not in our best interest. I assume I am preaching to the choir though.
That is what drew me to FreeRepublic in the first place - to debunk and show that anti-truth pro evil spin of the MSM.
try the following link
www.russian-ministries.org
There are updates from those ministering in the area and from the survivors. Also photo galleries from Beslan are available.
Please continue to pray for the community.
Try http://beslan.knows.it/ I saw another freeper posted it, after doing a search on this site. It's excellent.
I would like to point out, again, that I was not able to find these images through google or yahoo. They are on lycos, though...strange.
Love your tagline!
Ping
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