But they did represent a distinct outlander group. Their nominal leader—or at least the man who symbolized the foreign and diaspora component in Chechnya—was a handsome Jordanian of Chechen descent (some said he was actually a Bedouin from Saudi Arabia, others that he was a lesser prince from one of the Gulf Emirates) with almost feminine locks cascading down his back. He was known as Commander Khattab, a name whose mention struck fear in the breast of virtually every Russian soldier to serve in Chechnya.
There was no question of his zealotry. Schooled in the ways of holy guerrilla warfare during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and reportedly a close associate of Osama bin Laden, Khattab and his men took credit—indeed, celebrated—their gratuitous, no-quarter killings while at war. A popular video making the rounds showed the commander at work in the mountains, trapping an entire Russian armored column by the old trick of knocking out the first and last vehicles to block escape or retreat, and then slamming rocket-propelled grenades into those stuck in the middle. Then he and his men moved in with small arms and knives. The final frames show a blissful Khattab shouting “God is the Greatest!” while lifting what appeared to be human entrails on his bayonet. Another film that saw wide circulation as an anti-Chechen propaganda piece (and that may or may not have been shot by Khattab’s personal cameraman) was a snuff clip. It portrayed several Russian kontraktni being executed by the tried-and-true manner of slitting their throats like ritually slaughtered animals. This was not the sort of material that endeared the Chechen cause to human rights activists, or to many Chechens, for that matter.
Adding to inter-Chechen tension was Khattab’s effort to proselytize his rigorous brand of Islam. The majority of Soviet Chechens were members of one of two traditional Sufi brotherhoods—the Qaddari and Naxshabendi tariqat, or semisecret religious orders. Much has been made of the difference between the two, the former embracing the “active” and the latter the “passive” forms of zikr, or ritual remembrance of God. The wild, barn-dance stomping I had seen in Samashki was associated with the first—a quieter, meditative reflection about the nature of the universe, and clues to be gleaned by pious communion with the spirit of intervening Muslim saints was more typical of the second.
Both were regarded by the authorities in Moscow, for the duration of the Soviet Union, as fundamentally dangerous expressions of religious-based, anti-Soviet feeling—“antisocialist tendencies” that needed to be extirpated, preferably with a good dose of Marxist-Leninist Listerine, such as a stint in a gulag hard-labor colony. Khattab’s attitude toward the traditional Sufi brotherhoods that had sustained the Chechen spirit during the seventy years of commissar domination was remarkably similar to—well, to that of the commissars. He regarded the practice of zikr in all its forms, and other Sufi practices, such as the visitation of saints’ graves, as nothing short of polytheistic, un-Islamic ignorance that had to be banished from the land. I include the following exegesis from the (Internet) pen of Khattab to give the reader a taste of the man’s theological thinking:
It is regrettable that simple, uneducated Muslims [of the Caucasus] have failed to understand the true meaning of worship. In their ignorance, it is not Allah they worship, and they fall into the sin of polytheism, which places a man outside religion. This occurs when they pray to dead prophets, to the friends of Allah… and when they march in procession around the graves and the tombs of [these worthies], just as they would around the Kaaba…. But if such simple and ignorant people are guilty of polytheism because they are ignorant, and because they could not understand what true worship is, some justification can be found for them. [But]… how can we justify the learned scholars who do understand that these simple people have become bogged down in polytheism, which places a man outside religion, yet at the same time pass down decisions that this polytheism… is the best way to express love for the prophets, the friends of Allah?… Do these learned men have no fear, as they lead the simple people to unbelief?![22]
The passage might be translated thusly: Traditional Sufi Islam is heresy; traditional leaders are guiltier than their followers for leading the masses into the cardinal sin of shirk, or polytheism.
A major rift had just opened in Chechen society between the pure and unclean—and between the majority of local Chechens who only wanted to rebuild their shattered lives, and the Wahhabi outlanders who had arrived to cleanse Chechnya first of the godless Russians, and next of apostates, before then maybe exporting their pristine version of Islam and attendant holy war to neighboring territories, such as Dagestan.
While it is not entirely fair to blame Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev exclusively for this development, there is little question that he was the man who left the door ajar, and with dire consequences. Perhaps one might better ask the uncomfortable question of just who else, aside from the Islamic fundamentalist fringe, was interested in aiding the Chechens. Certainly not the West. And as the Turkish saying has it, “a drowning man will clutch a snake swimming on the water.”
Yandarbiyev’s other contribution as acting president was actually quite different and arguably a complete contradiction of his apparent embrace of the Wahhabis. Specifically, it was he who opened a window on the world for Chechnya in the form of a real foreign ministry. Curiously, it was not located in shattered Grozny, but in a luxury suburb of Bebek, along the shores of the Bosphorus in Istanbul. In addition to the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rouslan Chimaev, the Minister of Health, Dr. Umar Hambiev, also made Istanbul the seat of his activities, while other ranking officials in the Chechen government came and went with frequency, making the townhouse almost a government in exile.
“To say ‘government abroad’ is more correct,” said my old friend Eduard Khatchoukaev, the former Deputy Director for Foreign Economic Relations of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, whom I had met in prewar Grozny. “But ‘government ex-territorio’ is better.”
Good old “Edik.” Always depend on him for a colorful quote. His new title described him as being Chief of Department of Foreign Credit and Investment in the Chechen Republic. The last time I had seen him he had been nothing more than a man on the run, hiding out in a Baku basement during a new Ramadan, fasting and predicting that not only would Djohar Dudayev emerge as a “serious personality” in any post-Yeltsin government in Russia, but that the real winner of the Russo-Chechen war would be Germany. He did not bother to explain.
“Mark my words,” Edik had said before sort of drifting back into a coma induced by his fast.
The next quote he gave me in Istanbul that autumn of 1996 was a little more chilling, and verged on being a threat. It concerned the question of who had killed Djohar Dudayev six months before, and what the Chechens aimed to do about it.
“We will make the murderers pay,” said Edik, handing me a printed photograph published in a Moscow newspaper. It showed the Chechen president standing next to his jeep with his hand on a telephone receiver and literally staring up at the cross-hair target reader of the missile nose cone that was about to blow him to bits. Edik informed me that it was actually an American projectile, as evidenced by some technical information written in English pertaining to the guidance system. For me, the photograph was such an obvious hoax that it was almost laughable. But Edik seemed to believe it, as did others. It was not Russia, but the United States that had assassinated the Chechen president as part of some larger, imperialist plot designed to… what?
22
Umar ibn Al Khattab, “How We Understand Monotheism,” trans. Joan Beecher Eichrodt. The excerpt quoted here is available on-line at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/chechnya-sl/message/147 (accessed July 9, 2003).