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By Root 1000 0

for several reasons. The wars mobilised Muslim opinion across the world, simplifying complex internecine conflicts into a war between Christianity and Islam—a view somewhat undermined by the enormous relief efforts made by Christians in the West who would have recoiled from the nationalist Orthodox Christianity of the Serbs, whose only firm allies were their Russian co-religionists. The foreign jihadists acquired further combat experience and extended the organisational sinews of terrorism into Europe, under the noses of security services that had yet to learn that Human Concern International was not quite what the words implied. Yet there was something else too. The war was resolved by another Pax Americana and the presence of large numbers of NATO troops, including many from Muslim countries like Turkey. The jihadists’ attempt to plant Islamist palms in the snows of the Bosnian hills had failed. The local Muslim population resembled a body that rejects an organ transplant. Faced with what the jihadists represented, the Bosnian Muslims opted for their local tradition of confining their religion to the private sphere, laughing off radical calls to ban Father Christmas. That this was all the local Islamist radicals called for was a victory of a notable kind. The trouble was that this evolving reality did not moderate the scenes of jihad that circulated on the internet or via DVDs, for these had joined the timeless fairytale too.50

A third conflict enraged the jihadi-salafist imagination by supplying lurid images of Muslim suffering and, one strongly suspects, scenes of retaliatory savagery that often reflected a psychopathic bloodlust. When would-be Anglo-Pakistani jihadists sit down of a night in some dilapidated northern English suburb to watch their spiritual comrades in action, the most gruesome scenes invariably stem from the Chechen wars, whose agonies and complexities have been reduced to a jihadist splatter movie on a DVD costing about US$20.

The implosion of the Soviet Union in December 1991 brought not only the collapse of the Soviet outer empire, but demands for greater autonomy within the newly minted Russian federation, 30 per cent of whose citizens were not ethnic Russians. Only two federal subjects refused to sign the 1992 Federation Treaty, and by 1994 Tatarstan had negotiated a special accord granting it enhanced autonomy. That left Chechnya, the predominantly Muslim part of the former Chechen-Ingush Soviet Republic, a million of whose people Stalin had deported in 1944 to Kazakhstan, from which the remnants returned home in 1957. They found that eight hundred mosques and four hundred religious colleges had been shut down, while the mazars or shrines, essential to the Sufi brotherhoods to which many Chechens belonged, had been closed or demolished. Although the Muslim world is entirely unaware of this, it has largely been conservative Western scholars like Robert Conquest and John Dunlop who have spent decades investigating the crimes of the Soviet Union against the Chechen people, studies partly informed by the spirit of the Cold War, but also honouring the struggle of a small nation against a chauvinistic totalitarianism. Others have increased our understanding of Islam’s role in Chechen society. The vast majority of Chechens practise a popular Sufi strain of Islam that incorporates local customs, drum and string music, and venerable paganisms; since the 1980s, some 10 per cent have adopted the more bracing beliefs of the Wahhabis.

On 6 September 1991, militant Chechen separatists led by former Soviet general Dzokhar Dudayev, a Chechen married to a Russian woman, stormed the Chechen-Ingush Supreme Soviet, killing the Communist leader of the capital Grozny and effectively dissolving the government. After having himself elected president by a suspiciously large margin, Dudayev unilaterally declared Chechen independence. When Russia’s president Boris Yeltsin declared a state of emergency and flew Interior Ministry troops to Grozny, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev declared his action illegal. The Chechens