Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [256]
In 1992 Dudayev sent Basayev to aid Muslim Azerbaijani national forces fighting Russian-backed Christian Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, and then to help Abkhazians fighting for freedom from Georgia. The rumours were ominous. One of the reasons why two hundred thousand ethnic Georgians fled Abkhazia in terror was that, after decapitating a hundred prisoners, Basayev had organised soccer matches for his men playing with the heads of these captives. He returned to Chechnya with a band of brutal ‘wolves’, although the human variety were a great deal more sinister than the four-legged ones. In 1994 Basayev and twenty of his best men flew to Pakistan where the ISI sent them for advanced training at a mujaheddin camp in Afghanistan. He returned home to Chechnya after being taken ill handling chemical weapons, they and nuclear explosives being a constant in the apocalyptic imprecations he rained down upon Russia.
When a Moscow-backed opposition emerged against President Dudayev’s dictatorial rule, Basayev played a leading role in suppressing them, defeating a squadron of Russian tanks operating as freelance mercenaries on the rebel side. Not so covert Russian support for the rebels became an all-out onslaught once the Chechen leader refused an ultimatum from Yeltsin for all sides to disarm and desist. The Russian attack was a shambles, as officers and men refused to participate in actions of dubious legality, while nervous conscripts drafted in from neighbouring regions trembled as they approached formidable Chechen fighters. Encountering resistance in Grozny, most of whose citizens were ethnic Russians, the Russians spent five weeks bombarding the city with heavy artillery and waves of bombers. As the Chechen rebels had fallen back to wage a guerrilla campaign from the mountains, most of the twenty-seven thousand dead in the ruined city were innocent civilians, who unlike the Chechens had no village teips or clans to seek sanctuary with.
The Chechen wars were fought with terrible brutality on both sides, even before the Chechens resorted to spectacular terrorist violence. The Chechens used mines and ambushes to disrupt Russian movement, while the Russians, many of whose commanders were routinely drunk, pulverised towns and villages with artillery fire that took no account of a civilian presence. Torture of prisoners was similarly normal on both sides. After the Russians killed eleven members of Basayev’s family by dropping two six-ton bombs on his uncle’s house, fatalities which included the rebel commander’s wife and child, no captured Russian pilot would survive. Basayev made two fateful decisions.
First, he decided to take the war to Russia, or, as he had it, to make the Russians see what blood looks like, the second of many acts of terrorism he committed. These acts played into Russian propaganda that built on the widespread reputation Chechens had among ordinary Russians for Mafia-style activities. In the summer of 1995 he hid 145 of his men in trucks, while others, disguised as Russian policemen, claimed that the vehicles contained the bodies of Russian troops killed in Chechnya. Bribes ensured that the convoy swept through Russian checkpoints until they were stopped in the southerly town of Budennovsk. Escorted to the town police station, Basayev’s men leaped from the trucks and killed all the policemen, before initiating a full-scale gun battle with police reinforcements in the town centre. Basayev initially secured the town hospital, situated in a former monastery, so as to treat his wounded,