“As North Caucasians, our hearts go out to the refugees arriving from the war,” remarked Shamil, our botanist driver and guide, who was originally from what was once a mixed Khevsur-Chechen mountain village. “But they are Chechens, and are all involved in weapons and drug smuggling and stealing cattle and even people.”
It almost defied logic how anyone, no matter how motivated by greed or ideology, could possibly move quantities of contraband or human beings up or down the twisting gravel paths that passed for roads in the region. The one-hundred-mile route from Tbilisi to Shatili, up and over the Datvis Djvarigeli (Bear Crest) Pass had taken us more than five hours in a four-wheel-drive vehicle during the day, and was far too dangerous to traverse at night. The smallest driver error on the dirt-and-shale road could result in pitching your vehicle off a vertical cliff into an abyss. Georgian security checkpoints on the southern face of the range should have easily intercepted any and all undesirable traffic, not to speak of the small garrison under Colonel Irakli’s command on the frontier itself. And it was precisely that traffic, moving from Georgia into Chechnya, that I was depending on to bring me back into Chechnya at war.
We waited and waited. Then, at dusk, I heard the sound of distant motors, and then saw two sets of headlights, making their way down the hairpin turns above Shatili, coming from the south. Soon, two white landcruisers pulled up to the security bar. It was Tom Dibb and another Brit from the Halo Trust, traveling with an escort of four or five Chechen toughs—my ticket out, meaning my transport back to war.
But it did not look good. The weighted pole barrier gate called a schlagbaum remained in place, and the Georgian guards stood their ground, refusing to let the Chechen convoy pass. As night fell the Chechens escort became increasingly vocal and pushy, evoking eternal friendship with the Georgian guards and making unspecified threats by turns. It was, I have to say, one of those rare moments when one really saw a portrait of the Chechens, as found in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, when the noted Soviet dissident describes the Chechen as the only people in the work camps who could not be broken by the system because they showed no fear. Now, there they were. Six men with a couple of pistols, stuck in a cul-de-sac, staring down a garrison of unfriendly soldiers, and making the garrison start to blink. Sadly for me, the soldiers did not blink soon enough.
“I think it is because the Georgian commander knows you are media,” said Tom. “Act like you are leaving, and then double back. We will cross at first light.”
After a truly miserable night spent in a filthy, wood-smoke-filled cabin, I was back at the post early the next morning. But the vehicles were already gone.
“They went back to Tbilisi,” said the Lee Marvin look-alike, Colonel Irakli.
But, on the far side of the schlagbaum there were fresh car tracks leading down over very rough ground to the rock-strewn, boiling white stream bed. Did they emerge on the other side, and then disappear into Chechnya? It was almost impossible to tell.
Well, not quite. In the wake of the September 11 attacks and war with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the New York Times ran the following front-page article on December 9, 2001, by reporter Michael Wines, entitled “War on Terror Casts Chechen Conflict in a New Light.”
Urus-Martan, Russia—The only road from Georgia into Chechnya worms northward from the Russian border, across the Caucasus Mountains and through Russia’s wild Argun River gorge. On a drizzly October day two years ago, Abdul Itslayev was standing beside it, hitchhiking.
It was the start of the Russian Army’s assault on rebels in Chechnya, and Mr. Itslayev had come to Itumkale, a village wedged between seven thousand five-hundred-foot peaks, to move relatives out of guerrilla territory that was certain to be a battle zone.
He succeeded, but in unexpected fashion. For instead of the usual sputtering Lada automobile, there appeared on that hopelessly remote dirt path two brawny Mitsubishi four-wheel-drive vehicles driven not by Chechens but by foreigners.
“In my car there were two Brits and an Arab,”Mr. Itslayev said in a recent interview. “I asked them why they came here. They said they were coming to help the Chechens.”
In fact, the three were coming to join a group of militant Muslims that had established a paramilitary beachhead inside Chechnya. As in Afghanistan, some were outsiders and members of the strict Wahhabi branch of Islam. Their trademarks, as in Afghanistan, were money, fancy sport utility vehicles and a taste for the best weaponry.
…Stories like [Itslayev’s], Russian officials argue, bolster what the Kremlin has been saying all along: That its two-year-old war in Chechnya is a battle against international terrorism, not a brutal suppression of domestic separatists. It is also the sort of story that Americans and other Westerners shrugged off until the attacks of Sept. 11 forced a reassessment of the spread of terrorism… [etc., etc.].
I do not know about the “Arab,” but I can state with almost total certainty that the two Brits referred to were Tom Dibb and his companion from the Halo Trust, a small fact lost in the fight to make the connecting link between Osama bin Laden and Chechnya.
The reporter for the Gray Lady may have missed the boat in December 2001, but I had certainly missed the bus that October day, two years before.
It was October 11, my forty-fifth birthday. I had planned to spend it in Samashki. That was not going to happen; and, due to the impossibility of getting there that same day, I could now question why I had attempted to do so in the first place.
Why Samashki?
To find my friend Hussein? Was he even there? Did it make any difference?
What effect would my presence have on him this time around, or on others?
Who was I to go to Chechnya at all?