There were plenty of places for the residents of Makhachkala now to buy, sell, and haggle, but there was no place for them to conduct the business of being urban dwellers. No cafés or restaurants—only a very few larger stores provided the public space essential to the fabric of any city. Public transport, such as there had been, had fallen into disrepair, replaced by privately owned small vans that followed routes of their own choosing. At the same time, the city was ballooning: its population had gone from 300,000 to 800,000 in less than ten years, but only 100,000 of those who had lived there a decade earlier remained. Everyone was a newcomer, and almost no one had ever lived in a city before. Villages began to sprout at the outskirts of Makhachkala, unregulated construction that used much the same material as the kiosks; rural Dagestanis were trying to make a place for themselves in the capital. Virtually nothing and nobody remained of the city Zubeidat had loved and hated when she was growing up there.
While Makhachkala was swelling, Dagestan itself was starting to fracture in an unprecedented way. A generational religious chasm had opened up. Throughout the seventy years of Soviet rule, most formal study and practice of Islam had lived underground. The dangers inherent in practicing and teaching the religion varied with time—being an observant Muslim could land one in prison in the 1940s or bring reprimand from the local authorities in the 1970s—but the isolated state of Soviet Muslims remained a constant. Sheikhs—elders and teachers in the Sufi tradition—passed their knowledge from generation to generation, and with each iteration something changed. By the end of the twentieth century, Dagestani Muslims practiced local traditions, such as worshipping at the grave of a sheikh, that would strike a Muslim from a place like Saudi Arabia as nothing short of sacrilegious. And the Dagestani Muslims’ knowledge and understanding of the Koran would seem woefully superficial.
It was to Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, the United Arab Emirates that young men from Dagestan began to travel in the 1990s, once the borders opened. There they discovered an Islam based on the rigorous study and discussion of the Koran, as practiced by the Salafis. Many of them stayed and studied for several years. Then they returned and confronted their village elders. Some of the young Salafi neophytes were driven from their villages; others left of their own accord; virtually none lived in peace with local elders, or with their families. Makhachkala’s uneasy boom was at least in part the result of an influx of these newly urban, newly religious disenfranchised young men. Those who continued to practice Sufi Islam, and the secular authorities who increasingly relied on the Sufi hierarchy, called these young men Wahhabis—a dangerous misnomer.
WAHHABISM is a modern fundamentalist movement in Islam, and in the late 1990s its presence was beginning to be felt in the Caucasus. The war in Chechnya, which began with Moscow’s crackdown on a secular ethnic self-determination movement, had changed Chechen society profoundly. Hundreds of thousands of Chechens had been killed or had left during the armed conflict from 1994 to 1996. When a peace treaty was finally signed in August 1996, giving Chechnya essentially the autonomy it had been seeking but without the official status of an independent state, its population had been depleted, its earth had been scorched, and its economy had been destroyed. Its leader, Dzhokhar Dudaev, had been killed by a targeted Russian missile in April of that year. He was replaced with Aslan Maskhadov, who had been his right hand. Maskhadov was very much in the Dudaev mold, also a former officer in the Soviet army, also entirely secular and assimilated, but he lacked Dudaev’s ruthless charisma, and by the time he signed the peace treaty with Moscow he lacked full authority over Chechen rebel fighters.
In the desperate years that followed, radicalism of every sort flourished. A small number of proselytizers from Saudi Arabia and other countries found a large number of young men willing to listen to them, and to begin proudly calling themselves Wahhabis. They believed another war was in the offing; Russia remained the enemy, but the soldiers’ new fervor was religious rather than ethnic. For several years they fought a guerrilla war that looked more like a number of gangs preying on vulnerable people under the guise of a holy war: they kidnapped journalists, foreign humanitarian workers, and even Chechens; some of the hostages were killed and others released for ransom. Then another war really did begin.
In the summer of 1999, armed Chechen fighters began crossing over into neighboring Dagestan. In August and September 1999, Russia was terrorized by a series of apartment-building explosions that killed more than three hundred people. Russia’s newly appointed prime minister and Yeltsin’s anointed successor, the former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin, blamed these bombings on Chechens, linked the acts of terror to the new Chechen armed presence in Dagestan, and unleashed the Russian military on Chechens in both Chechnya and Dagestan. The new war, which would drag on for years, catapulted the previously unknown Putin to national popularity, ensuring he would indeed become Russia’s next president. In the years after the start of the second war, a wealth of evidence emerged pointing to Russian secret-police involvement in both the apartment-building bombings and the Dagestan incursions, but with Putin quickly turning Russia into an authoritarian state, this evidence never became the object of official investigation. Journalists, politicians, and activists who tried to conduct their own investigations were assassinated.
Dagestan, meanwhile, found itself in the middle of a war. In response, local authorities did something that essentially ensured the war would go on for years to come and the supply of soldiers would be limitless: they outlawed Wahhabism, by which they also understood Salafism. The urban young men whose conflict had been with their own fathers and their village elders were now, dangerously and romantically, outlaws. Their everyday religious practices were forced underground: even the imams of Makhachkala’s two large Salafite mosques took to pretending they were Sufis.
The local police and the federal troops now stationed in Dagestan soon settled on a singular, and singularly ineffective, tactic for fighting the enemy they had conjured—a witch hunt. Local authorities compiled lists of suspected Wahhabis. A young man could land on the list for wearing a beard, for attending the wrong mosque, or for no reason at all. Men whose names were on the list were detained, interrogated—in a couple of years some would report being asked, “Where were you on September 11, 2001?”—and, in the best-case scenario, released only to face further harassment. In the worst case, they disappeared.
In response, some of the young men took up grenades, mines, and bombs. These were most often used to blow up police vehicles. Makhachkala and much of the rest of Dagestan became a battleground, with explosions and gunfights erupting daily. This was the Dagestan to which Anzor and Zubeidat brought their four children, including Tamerlan, who at fourteen was on the verge of becoming that most endangered and most dangerous of humans: a young Dagestani man. Anzor and Zubeidat had to move again, to save their children—again.
They would go to America after all.
PART TWO
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BECOMING THE BOMBERS
Map: The Failed Escape
