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THE BLACK WIDOW BOMBERS

And we will take with us the lives of hundreds of sinners. If we die, others will come/follow us—our brothers and sisters who are willing to sacrifice their lives (in God’s way) to liberate their nation…We are more keen on dying than you are on living. —Chechen videotape delivered to Al Jazeera, October 21, 2002¹

I guarantee you and guarantee all the Russians who send and support all those special services, which are sent here and commit…atrocities—your bandit groups are on our territory of the Caucasus—this is not the last operation. These operations will continue. They will continue on your territory, insh'Allah. —Dokku Umarov, in his YouTube video statement after the March 29, 2009, Moscow subway bombings²

THE CHECHEN WARS

Chechnya had always been a desolate backwater in the northern Caucasus, the mountain range that forms the geographical divide between Europe and Asia. The mountains average 10,000 feet above sea level and stretch 650 miles from the Caspian to the Black Sea. This rugged terrain is made all the more formidable by the steepness of the mountains' craggy slopes. A number of peoples and tribes have populated the region, including the Avars, Tatars, Kabardians, Laks, Khazars, Ossetians, Alans, and the Vainakh. Their relative isolation has insulated them from outside authority and influence.

The Chechen people, historically called the Vainakh, have always resisted outsiders, be they from Persia, Saint Petersburg, Constantinople, or, more recently, Moscow. Invasions and attempted invasions by the Romans, Mongols, Ottoman Turks, and Russians were all repulsed. At the same time, the region was subjected to generation after generation of neglect and, on occasion, attempted ethnic cleansing campaigns. Violence has been an integral part of its history.

The Chechens converted from the pagan Vainakh religion to Islam and developed unique Sufi Naqshbandi traditions insulated from both Mother Russia's Orthodox Christian influence and the urban centers of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). Their ancient customary laws (adat), differed from tribe to tribe. Many Chechen traditions violated the basic tenets of Islamic faith. They stored wine jars in their villages (aouls) despite Islam's prohibition against alcohol, and rarely paid their tithes (zakat) or went on the pilgrimage to Mecca (the hajj). It was only in very recent times that the strictest interpretations of Islamic Wahhabi thought and Salafi traditions took hold, as Saudi Arabia poured men and resources into the area.

The region was first subjected to Russian domination by Grozny Ivan (Ivan the Terrible) in 1559. Chechen resistance can be traced to 1732, when Russian colonial forces were defeated in the village of Chechen-aoul by the Noxche tribe. In 1783, Catherine the Great, then seventy, sent her twenty-five-year-old lover, Prince Platon Zubov, to conquer the region as part of a campaign to convert all the Muslims in the Caucasus to the Christian faith. Prince Zubov described the Chechens as having a particular “enthusiasm for brigandage and predatory behavior, a lust for robbery and murder, perfidy, a martial sprit, determination, savageness, fearlessness, and unbridled insolence.”³ Catherine looked on them as a barbaric people whom she could subjugate by controlling Georgia to the south. The region was annexed to the empire in 1859. However, the first great Chechen Islamic leaders, Sheikh Mansour and, later, Imam Shamil, emerged during the Caucasian wars of 1817–64 and united the disparate tribes. Shamil's conflict with the Russians, remembered as the Jihad of Imam Shamil, set the tone for future waves of Chechen resistance.⁴ Shamil's Muslim warriors (murids) preferred death to defeat; no muridwas ever taken alive.⁵ When Chechen women in cliff-top villages perceived that defeat and capture were imminent, they reputedly threw their children over the precipice and jumped after them.⁶

According to Harvard professor Richard Pipes:

The Chechens…were always, from the Russian point of view, a troublesome element. Unassimilable and warlike, they created so much difficulty for the Russian forces trying to subdue the North Caucasus that, after conquering the area, the government felt compelled to employ Cossack forces to expel them from the valleys and lowlands into the bare mountain regions. There, faced by Cossack settlements on one side, and wild peaks on the other, they lived in abject poverty tending sheep and waiting for the day when they could wreak revenge on the newcomers and regain their lost lands.⁷

During the Russian Revolution, Chechens fought on both the Bolshevik and Menshevik sides and, once Lenin and his gang prevailed, select Chechens were co-opted into the Communist Party. The Chechen autonomous province (oblast) was established in 1922 and Chechnya and neighboring Ingushetia were made autonomous Soviet republics in 1936. However, during World War II, German troops occupied Chechnya in 1943 and 1944, and Chechen leaders allegedly collaborated with the Nazis.⁸

Stalin used the charge of collaboration as justification for dissolving the Chechen-Ingush autonomous republic in 1944 and in what can only be described as ethnic cleansing, three-quarters of the Chechen population (more than a half-million people) were rounded up and physically removed from their homeland—deported in boxcars to Kazakhstan. Nearly half the deported Chechens (between one and two hundred thousand) perished en route; others were killed by Stalin's firing squads. Many of the survivors ended up as slave labor in the mines of Karaganda in Kazakhstan.⁹ Survivors were finally allowed to return after Stalin's death in 1957.

It was against this historical backdrop that intense feelings of nationalism and xenophobia developed among the Chechens, reinforced by traditional tribal and family structures. The Chechen clan (teip) endured and perpetuated Chechen culture even under the direst circumstances. The teip system also bolstered the authority of tribal chiefs, headmen, and, within the family, fathers and husbands. A system of blood feuds (kanli) ensured that even the slightest transgression was never forgotten. No wrong could go unpunished and a vendetta culture developed. “The oral tradition abounds in tales of feuds sparked by the theft of a chicken, culminating in the death of an entire teip.”10 The young were trained rigorously in the art of warfare as honor and strength became highly prized. It was said, “No Chechen girl would consent to marry a man unless he had killed at least one Russian, could jump over a stream twenty-three feet wide, and over a rope held at shoulder-height between two men.”¹¹

With the dissolution of the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev and the balkanization of the Russian empire, Chechnya followed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in its quest for autonomy. Under the leadership of Dzhokhar Dudayev, the all-national congress of the Chechen people stormed a session of the Chechen-Ingush parliament with the aim of asserting independence. The Chechen nationalists pulled down the statue of Lenin in the main square in the capital city of Grozny, drove the KGB out, and threw the first secretary of the Communist Party, Vitaly Kutsenko, out of a third-story window. Dudayev declared Chechnya's independence in 1991. Unable to control the situation and end the violence in the region, Gorbachev's successor, Boris Yeltsin, declared a state of emergency on November 8, 1991.

Dudayev's support surged among Chechens while Yeltsin was criticized by all sides: Russian reformers accused him of going too far, conservatives of not going far enough. The average Russian was angered by stories of Chechen abuse of local Russians and saw Chechnya as a dangerous center of mafia activities. As ethnic Russians fled the region, the economy and industry suffered. In February 1994, Russia signed a treaty with Tatarstan affirming Russian sovereignty in exchange for domestic autonomy. Tatarstan had been the only republic other than Chechnya that had refused to sign the March 1992 federal treaty. Dudayev refused to enter into negotiations until Russia recognized Chechnya as an independent state.

Dudayev's erratic and authoritarian behavior, the severe economic slump, and increasing crime, corruption, and clan rivalry led to political infighting, attempted coups, countercoups, and mounting opposition to his leadership. He finally dissolved the Chechen parliament and introduced direct presidential rule. On November 29, 1992, Yeltsin issued an ultimatum to all the warring factions in Chechnya ordering them to immediately disarm and surrender. When the government in Grozny refused, the Russian president ordered his army to restore constitutional order by force.

In December 1994, Russia began aerial bombardment of Chechnya, including the capital city of Grozny. Russian forces assumed that every Chechen was the enemy and no one was spared. Thousands of civilians died as a result of carpet bombings and rocket artillery barrages. As civilian losses mounted, the Chechen population—even those opposed to Dudayev—became increasingly hostile to the Russian forces. Highly mobile units of Chechen fighters caused severe losses to Russia's demoralized troops. By summer 1996, the Chechen rebels had managed to split the Russian forces into a dozen isolated pockets. Over a period of one week, the rebels were able to fend off the Russian forces and send them fleeing.

The First Chechen War culminated in the Battle of Grozny, also known as Operation Jihad, in August 1996, a bloody siege in which more than 27,000 Chechen civilians died in the first five weeks (some estimates suggest the number exceeded 35,000, including 5,000 children). The bloodbath shocked Russians and the outside world, resulting in severe criticism of the war and waning domestic support among Russians. The total number of civilian deaths in the war is estimated to have been between 30,000 and 100,000, with as many as 200,000 more injured and more than 500,000 people displaced by the fighting. Yeltsin finally called for a ceasefire in 1996 and signed a peace treaty, the Khasav-Yurt Accord, the following year.

The peace agreement was short-lived. In August 1999, Yeltsin nominated Vladimir Putin, a relatively unknown former security service agent, to head the government. Shortly thereafter a series of bomb attacks destroyed several apartment blocks in Moscow and other Russian cities, claiming hundreds of victims. Although the perpetrators were never properly identified and there were many indications that the FSB was responsible, Putin used the bombings as an excuse to once again undertake a full-scale military mobilization against Chechnya. Appealing to Russian chauvinism, Putin's Unity Party swept into office on a wave of nationalist rhetoric and hyperbole.

In the period between the peace treaty and the resumption of hostilities, Chechnya had become the new focal point of the global jihad. As the Taliban consolidated their control of Kabul, many mujahideen fighters migrated to Chechnya, bringing with them the same techniques that had succeeded against the Russians in Afghanistan. Arms and money flowed to Chechnya as Arab mercenaries were integrated into the separatist units. Secular nationalists embraced Islam as a means of exploiting the new allies and resources. Warlords like Salman Raduyev and Arbi Barayev emerged in a region increasingly characterized by its lawlessness. Those Chechen groups not taking money from the jihadis engaged in campaigns of kidnapping and hostage-taking; more than 1,300 people were kidnapped and held for ransom. In August and September 1999, Chechen leader Shamil Basayev (in association with an Arab jihadi, Ibn Al Khattab) led two armies of two thousand Chechen, Dagestani, Arab, and international mujahideen and Wahhabi militants from Chechnya into the neighboring Republic of Dagestan and so precipitated the Second Chechen War.

Putin responded with massive aerial bombardments intended to wipe out the militants and flatten Grozny. The air campaign was followed by a new ground war. In the notorious zachistka (mopping-up) operations, Russian units would cordon off a village and prevent anyone from entering or leaving. In Chechnya, it was normal for people to disappear. The disappearances would take place either during the mopping-up operations or at the police checkpoints, which were set up on the roads leading in and out of every city. Over the course of several days, the Russians would violently interrogate Chechen civilians. Often the men and boys were killed and dumped in open pits that were subsequently blown up to obliterate all trace of the bodies.¹² The women who found themselves in police custody were vulnerable to sexual predation.¹³ Tens of thousands were arrested, tortured, or disappeared. According to the 2001 annual report by Amnesty International:

There were frequent reports that Russian forces indiscriminately bombed and shelled civilian areas. Chechen civilians, including medical personnel, continued to be the target of military attacks by Russian forces. Hundreds of Chechen civilians and prisoners of war were extra judicially executed. Journalists and independent monitors continued to be refused access to Chechnya. According to reports, Chechen fighters frequently threatened, and in some cases killed, members of the Russian-appointed civilian administration and executed Russian captured soldiers.¹⁴

The Chechens began to use suicide terrorism against government targets in 2000. Russian troops had been instructed to focus their attention on men between the ages of seventeen and forty, so Basayev opted to use female bombers. Two women, one aged twenty-two and the other sixteen, perpetrated the first attack, against Russian checkpoints. The twenty-two-year-old was Khava Barayeva, sister of the warlord Arbi Barayev, and soon to be a model for Chechen women and girls throughout the region. Basayev used women in several more operations, to great effect. At the outset his attacks were directed against Russian military and police but, as the conflict raged on, Basayev began to target civilians. In 1995 he took over a hospital in the Russian city of Budyonnovsk; in 2000 he attacked the Russian military base at Vedeno; and finally, he and his lieutenant, Arbi Barayev, began to hatch their most shocking plan to date: to target civilians in Moscow. The two men narrowed down possible targets: the Bolshoi Ballet, the Stage Theater, the Central House of Youth, and another theater, the Dubrovka House of Culture. They agreed that the Dubrovka was likely to have the most Russians (and fewest foreigners) in the audience, and so chose it as their target. Barayev did not get to put the plan into action, however; he was killed by Russian special forces in June 2001.

Notorious for his viciousness, Arbi Barayev was an inspiration to his twenty-five-year-old nephew, the rebel leader Movsar. Arbi boasted that he had personally killed more than 170 people while leading the Chechen Islamic Special Units and the Special Purpose Islamic Regiment (SPIR). He was infamous for shooting six members of the International Red Cross (ICRC) in 1996, and for beheading four foreign telecommunications workers—three British citizens and one New Zealander—in 1998. (Osama bin Laden allegedly paid Arbi thirty million dollars for the feat, outbidding by ten million the Russian police's offer for their safe return.)¹⁵ To honor Arbi's memory, Movsar adopted his name and joined with Shamil Basayev to commemorate the first anniversary of his uncle's assassination in fitting fashion.

DUBROVKA: THE HOUSE OF CULTURE

The lights in Moscow's House of Culture flickered on and off to signal the end of intermission and the beginning of the second act. Ladies decked out in jewels and furs and men in designer suits hurried back to their seats as the orchestra readied the audience for Georgy Vasilyev's sold-out performance of the hit musical The Two Captains. The Nord Ost players took their places on the darkened stage. More than 850 people¹⁶ eagerly awaited the play's conclusion. The musical was about love and intrigue during World War II. The elaborate set design and complicated staging had amazed critics: firecrackers and rockets boomed and a real aircraft landed onstage during every performance. It was a stereotypically Russian plot with singing bombers, dancing pilots, and folk music. There were few non-Russians and only a handful of foreigners in the audience.

Five minutes into the second act, an armed man appeared on the stage. This was the reborn Arbi Barayev, a.k.a. Movsar Suleimenov, and the AK-47 in his hands was no stage prop. He announced that he was taking the audience and the actors hostage. At first, many members of the audience assumed the armed man was part of the show. Their smiles faded as Barayev fired several shots into the air. A half-dozen terrorists had been seated in the orchestra; now they pulled black hoods and masks over their heads, drew machine guns from under the seats, and stood to join the other armed Chechen men and women—more than forty in total—who filtered into the crowd. The men wore fatigues and clutched automatic rifles in their hands. F-1 hand grenades dangled from their belts. The women switched out of their sweaters and jeans and covered themselves from head to toe in black Islamic veils and robes. All you could see were their kohl-lined eyes, the Makarov pistols in their hands, and the improvised explosive devices strapped to their bodies.

Onstage, Barayev said: “Take out your cell phones, call your friends and family, call the media and tell them that you have been taken hostage.”¹⁷ Then he told the captives to place their hands on top of their heads. Some people remained calm while others panicked. Several women began to cry and some even fainted. It was 9:05 P.M. Moscow time on October 23, 2002, and what would turn into a three-day siege had just begun.

The hostage-taking was originally scheduled for October 29. It was meant to be the culmination of a series of attacks, including car-bomb strikes on a McDonald's and the Russian Duma (parliament).¹⁸ However, the explosives packed into the car (a Lada Tavria) parked outside the McDonald's on October 25 failed to cause sufficient damage to satisfy the rebels,¹⁹ and the attack on the Duma fizzled out when the bomb failed to explode at all. Two more attacks, including one against the Moscow subway (which finally occurred in February 2004), were deferred. The arrest on October 22 of Aslan Murdalov, one of Barayev's co-conspirators, forced the team to speed up their schedule by a week. Barayev was not sure they were ready, but some of their number had begun filtering into Moscow on October 2, and the women had arrived by October 19. On the night of October 23 he left three vehicles—a Chevrolet SUV, a Ford SUV, and a VW Gazelle microbus²⁰—with their engines running outside the theater, in case the initial takeover was unsuccessful and the team had to make a hasty retreat. No one noticed the driverless vehicles idling outside the theater until it was too late.²¹

Onstage, Barayev informed the audience that the rebel group was a suicide squad (smertniki) from the 29th Division of the Chechen rebel forces. While the women guarded the hostages, the men assembled bombs from parts hidden around the theater and from the bags they had with them. The entire theater was rigged with two tons of RDX hexogen explosives along with two 152-millimeter fragmentation shells, one in each of two massive metal cylinders. They placed one cylinder in the center of the auditorium in row fifteen, where everyone could see it, and the second in the balcony.²² If either of these two devices had gone off, the theater's ceiling would have collapsed on the hostages. Twenty smaller bombs were placed throughout the building, in the balconies, under the seats where the audience sat, and in the hall. The female terrorists wore suicide vests packed with three to five kilograms of homemade explosive encased with metal nuts, bolts, and ball bearings. The shrapnel would cause as much devastation as the explosions themselves.

The terrorists called select radio and television stations using the hostages' cell phones. Several members of the international media—including the Italian newspaper La Repubblica—as well as reporters from Russian television channels NTV, TVS, and Ren-TV were invited into the theater to talk to the rebels and see for themselves that the hostages were being cared for. The stations broadcast the calls from the siege in real time over the next three days. The hostages pleaded with the authorities not to storm the building as truckloads of police and soldiers accompanied by armored personnel carriers encircled the theater. The terrorists said they were prepared to kill ten hostages for any terrorist casualty or in the event that security forces launched an attack.

In a filmed interview with NTV's Sergey Dedukh, Movsar Barayev said that the rebels had nothing to lose. They had traveled two thousand kilometers to get to Moscow and there was no way back. “We have come to die. Our motto is ‘freedom and paradise.' We already have freedom in Moscow. Now we want paradise.” Movsar explained that the group had not come to Moscow to kill the hostages or to fight Russian troops. They had had enough fighting in Chechnya. They wanted President Vladimir Putin to publicly declare the end of the war in Chechnya. They wanted Russian forces to immediately withdraw from Chechen territory. They also demanded that an antiwar demonstration be held in Red Square and that artillery and aerial bombardments in Chechnya be terminated. They especially wanted a halt to the notorious zachistka operations.

The military had seven days to pull out and if they refused, the rebels would start killing the hostages one by one. “We will kill them all!” a hostage-taker named Abusaid told Tatyana Deltsova, the BBC's Moscow correspondent, in a phone interview. “We came here to die. We are suicide fighters.”²³ The terrorists expected Russian special forces to attack on the third day of the siege. One of the Chechen leaders, Abu Said, told Azeri TV: “Yes, the Russians will definitely attack. We are waiting for it.”²⁴

At 3:30 A.M. on October 24, six hours into the siege, a woman walked into the auditorium. Olga Romanova had sneaked past the police cordons and tried to incite the crowd to overtake the terrorists. She screamed at the hostages, telling them there were only forty hostage-takers and hundreds of them. The terrorists pointed their guns at her. A voice from one of the balconies yelled out, “Shoot her!” Romanova dared them to do it: “Yes, go ahead and shoot me!” They took her from the hall into an adjacent room and fired four bullets into her with a 5.45-mm assault rifle. The bullets penetrated the right half of her rib cage, abdomen, lungs, and left hip bone as she crumpled to the ground, and she was soon dead. It was rumored among the hostages that she had been drunk or on drugs. Others claimed that she might have been an FSB agent. Romanova was the first casualty of the siege.

Back in the main auditorium, the terrorists used the hostages' passports and other forms of identification to separate the foreign hostages from the Russians. They also separated the men from the women. The hostages were split between the main stalls and the balcony. Virtually no contact between the groups was allowed. The terrorists also checked IDs to determine how many police officers or federal agents might be among the crowd. Accounts differ as to what happened next. According to one story, police officers and agents were shot; according to another, after the siege it was found that no agents had been killed. All Muslims, Azeris, and Georgians in the audience were told that they were free to leave, as were those holding foreign passports. Seventy-five people from fourteen different countries were told to go, but then the Russian police negotiators refused to let the crowd be divided along ethnic lines. The Russian authorities did permit the terrorists to release 150 women and children and some of the foreigners, especially those who required medical treatment after the first few hours of the siege. One pregnant Russian suffering from dehydration and anxiety was taken to a local hospital.

The siege became a tense standoff and the hours turned into days as the Russians pretended to negotiate with the hostage-takers. Shortly after midnight on day three, a group of Russian doctors, including Dr. Leonid Roshal, head of the Moscow Institute of Emergency Children's Surgery, entered the theater with several NTV reporters to treat the sick and wounded. Most hostages just needed cough medicine or eyedrops. Roshal reported that the rebels were not beating or threatening any of the captives. Most of the hostages were calm; only two or three needed tranquilizers. The Red Cross also brought in hot food, warm clothes, and medicine.

According to Movsar's father, as part of the negotiations, Vladimir Putin promised to come to the theater. The Kremlin also promised to send General Viktor Kazantsev, a former commander of the Chechen war who wasn't even in Moscow, to negotiate terms.²⁵ Hoping that a peaceful agreement could be negotiated, Barayev ordered the men to disable the bombs in the auditorium and to take the batteries out of the handheld detonators, so that there would be no accidental explosions. In fact, there were no negotiations in the works. The terrorists had been duped. In the final hours before the security forces took over, the rebels were informed that the Russians would concede to their demands, a lie that appears to have persuaded the Chechens to relax their defences. Russian special forces then leaked information to the media that they planned to storm the theater at three in the morning. Barayev and his men waited for two hours for the assault but nothing happened. They let their guard down again, assuming the tip to have been a hoax.

At 5:00 A.M. members of the Russian Spetsnaz (special-purpose troops) stormed the theater. Shortly before, they had accessed the ventilation system of the building through the gay club Central Station located next door. Inside the theater, the hostages heard a hissing sound like the noise a gas stove makes when you first turn it on. Immediately people felt their senses dulling and started to feel woozy and nauseated. The symptoms were those of classic opium poisoning: dilated pupils, vomiting, loss of consciousness, and eventual asphyxiation from a lack of oxygen. Many of the hostages took the smell to be smoke from a fire, but it soon became apparent that gas was being pumped into the building. Some of the terrorists yelled, “Gas! Gas!” and commanded the women to turn off the air-conditioning. Some of the hostage-takers had gas masks, which they put on. Most of the rest soon lost consciousness.

One of the hostages, Anna Andrianova, who worked for the daily Moskovskaya Pravda, called the Echo of Moscow radio show at the outset of the FSB's assault. She told listeners: “The government forces are pumping gas into the hall. Please, give us a chance. If you can do anything!” She did not know what the gas was but from the terrorists' reactions she believed that they did not want the hostages to die. The same could not be said of the Russian authorities, who did not seem to want anyone to survive the ordeal. Andrianova screamed: “We see it, we feel it, we are breathing it through our clothes…Our government has decided that no one should leave from here alive.”²⁶

After nearly one and a half hours of sporadic gun battles while they waited for the gas to take effect, the Russian special forces blew open the doors to the main hall and poured into the auditorium. They threw in noise and light grenades to disorient the terrorists. When the shooting began, the rebels told their hostages to lean forward in their seats and cover their heads. Movsar was holed up in a windowless room, so the gas did not affect him.²⁷ The FSB's Alpha Group—a specialized counter-terrorism squad—gunned down the terrorists who were still conscious and systematically executed those who had passed out. Soldiers walked around the auditorium and shot each of the women terrorists in the head. Their orders had been to take no chances. The subdued Chechens were summarily executed at point-blank range. Even if the soldiers saw batteries in the women's hands and empty detonators, indicating that the women's bombs had been disarmed, they ignored this sight and killed the Chechens anyway.

The only hostages who recovered from the gas were the ones who received naloxone, a treatment for opium overdose, within the first few hours of the attack. The gas must have been extremely potent to knock out so many people, especially the Chechen captors, who were young and in good physical shape. Observers identified the gas as fentanyl, but it would have taken tons of regular fentanyl to do the job. Some derivatives of the drug, such as 3-methylfentanyl, might have been used instead. The Russian health minister, Yuri Shevchenko, later said that the FSB had used an opiate derivative of fentanyl that was most likely carfentanyl, produced by taking the basic fentanyl molecule and adding carbon to it, making the drug eighty to a hundred times stronger. Carfentanyl is not intended for use on humans; it is normally used by vets to tranquilize bison or elephants. Lev Fyodorov, a Russian toxicologist, told the Russian newspaper Gazeta that the gas was probably produced in a secret laboratory in the Lubyanka, the FSB's headquarters. The Russians have consistently refused to disclose precisely which gas they actually used.²⁸

A correspondent from the London newspaper The Guardian saw the bodies being pulled out of the theater, “their faces waxy, white and drawn, eyes open and blank.”²⁹ Soon, the street in front of the theater was filled with the bodies of the dead and those unconscious from the gas but still alive. Just seventeen doctors confronted almost a thousand casualties. Within minutes they were completely overwhelmed. Few ambulances were standing by and city buses were brought in. It took the commandos more than an hour to evacuate the theater, during which time many of the hostages died. The soldiers, inexperienced in first aid, dragged people outside and piled them up like sacks. Many of the victims choked to death on their own vomit or swallowed their own tongues.

The hostages' coats were in the theater's cloakroom and they had no outside clothing to protect them from the elements; it was a snowy night and many of them suffered from exposure when they were left unattended in the street. There were reports that members of the security services and police rummaged through their pockets, helping themselves to the victims' money and jewels.³⁰ Rescue workers on the scene had not brought enough naloxone for everyone. The stricken hostages got no relief when they were transferred to the local hospitals, where staff were expecting to treat victims of explosions and gunshot wounds, not victims of an unknown chemical agent.

The following day, the surviving hostages found themselves under virtual house arrest. The FSB posted armed guards at the hospitals and doctors were ordered not to release anyone in case some of the militants were hiding among them. Families panicked as the government refused to release any information about which hospitals were treating the casualties or to disclose the names of those who had died. The official number of the dead rose by the hour while the government maintained the fiction that the assault had been launched when the rebels started executing captives. The final body count was 41 terrorists killed³¹ and 129 hostages dead as a result of the gas and the inadequate response by the medical teams. Among the dead were several children and 18 members of the cast. Moscow's health committee chairman, Doctor Andrei Seltsovsky, contradicted official reports and admitted that all but three of the hostages who had been killed in the raid had died of the effects of the unknown gas rather than from gunshot wounds. None of the three people killed by the terrorists were hostages. They were individuals who had entered the siege after it started and were assumed to be FSB agents. It is worth noting that the terrorists took extra care to make sure that the hostages did not die at their hands.

THE BLACK WIDOWS OF DUBROVKA

Al Jazeera satellite television aired a prerecorded video that had been dropped off at their Moscow office a day before the Dubrovka hostage-taking. It showed the Chechen rebels and female Black Widows clad in black abayas with their faces covered in hijabs. The women claimed that they were waiting for a just and humanitarian solution in Chechnya, but that obviously no one cared about the death of Chechen innocents. Old men and children were killed daily and their children's blood flooded the land because of the Russian occupation.³² One of the women spoke defiantly to the camera: “We might as well die here as in Chechnya however we will die taking hundreds of nonbelievers with us.”³³ The terrorists in the video all swore by Allah that they desired death more than the Russians wanted life. Each one of them was willing to sacrifice himself or herself for the sake of God and the independence of Chechnya.³⁴

In most Chechen towns, the Russians had completely destroyed all infrastructure, including the systems for water, electricity, and gas, making it impossible for people to live a normal existence and causing a massive refugee flow out of Chechnya into neighboring republics. Now the Chechens would bring the fight to the heart of Russia, a few miles from the Kremlin itself. A female shahida (martyr) summed up the reasons for their willingness to sacrifice themselves:

People are unaware of the innocents who are dying in Chechnya: the sheikhs, the women, the children and the weak ones. And therefore, we have chosen this approach. This approach is for the freedom of the Chechen people and At least three pairs of sisters werethere is no difference where we die, and therefore we have decided to die here, in Moscow. And we will take with us the lives of hundreds of sinners. If we die, others will come and follow us—our brothers and sisters who are willing to sacrifice their lives, in Allah's way, to liberate the nation.³⁵

Despite such statements, some of the men at Dubrovka may have hoped to get out of the theater alive. Only the women wore suicide vests, not the men. Movsar Barayev had several forged passports in his possession along with a large amount of foreign currency.³⁶ Like Basayev when he attacked the Budyonnovsk Hospital seven years earlier, Barayev might have expected to survive to fight another day. Several of the male terrorists had return bus tickets to Khasavyurt. According to his father, Bukhari, Movsar had not made the usual Islamic preparations for his death prior to the attack. He had unpaid debts and there were other indications that some of the men at Dubrovka did not assume that this was their final operation. However, several of the women had settled their affairs. Rajman Kurbanova returned her wedding presents and said good-bye to her friends in the weeks before the operation.

There appeared to be a double standard for the men and the women at the theater. While the men secured the perimeter, the women circulated throughout the crowd. They were tasked to make sure that the audience did not panic and to see to their needs and make them a bit more comfortable. They distributed water, blankets, and chewing gum. The women ate dried dates and shared them with the hostages. They found chocolates and candies in one of the theater's backrooms, which they distributed. There were a few children attending the performance that night and the female terrorists visited the mothers and asked if their children needed anything. One hostage reported that the women acted more like nuns ministering to the sick than terrorists. They allowed people to go to the toilet without queuing in line. Despite these efforts, after the first few hours, the whole orchestra pit became one giant outhouse.

As the female terrorists mingled with the audience, several hostages got to know their captors a little better. It is from those hostages that we have the most information about the female terrorists' state of mind and motivation. Many of the female hostages showed signs of Stockholm syndrome: they identified with the hostage-takers and empathized with their plight. Tamara Starkova, a forty-two-year-old pediatrician who lost her husband and daughter at Dubrovka, recalled watching the Chechen men running around shouting and screaming at the hostages, but the women were different. The women said “please” and “thank you.” They were surprisingly polite under the circumstances. The women did not discuss politics. Tamara listened to the women's stories of Russian atrocities and understood what had led them to Dubrovka. One woman explained that her whole family had been killed by the Russians. She had buried all her children and was now forced to live in the forest. She had nowhere to go and nothing to live for. Another of the shahidat confided to Tamara that she had lost her husband and child, and Tamara thought to herself that any mother would be capable of terrible acts under similar provocation.³⁷

The hostages were struck by one of the terrorists, named Asya, most likely Aset Gishnurkayeva from Achkoy-Martan, who reassured them that the terrorists' motives were actually peaceful. Asya hoped that there would be a negotiation with the government and that the crisis would end well. She was involved in this mission so that her children could grow up in peace. Asya was particularly helpful during tense moments when the men onstage started shooting their weapons into the air.³⁸ She tried not to frighten the hostages and begged them not to worry. She explained that it was their war, not the hostages'. Asya's friend, Madina Dugayeva, also helped her calm the hostages. Madina had studied to be an actress at Chechen State University and was exceptionally pretty. Another terrorist, Sekilat Aliyeva, was a teaching assistant in the university's history department. Hostage Irina Filipova, found herself sympathizing with the female terrorists and concluded that the women must all have different motives: for some true believers it might have been a divine mission; some of the others might have been drugged; she wondered whether the younger girls had been forced.³⁹

While some of the hostage-takers made repeated references to Islam and Allah during the fifty-seven-hour ordeal and the men placed a banner with the words “Allahu Akbar' (God is great) over the stage, many of the women were not well versed in Islam. Several mispronounced their prayers in Arabic and could not answer the most basic questions about the tenets of the faith. When asked questions about Islamic doctrine or practice, the women had no idea how to respond. Most of the terrorists just talked about the persecution that they suffered at the hands of the Russian forces in Chechnya. Their ignorance suggested that they had only recently been taught about Islam. Several wore their Islamic garb incorrectly. In one case, a female terrorist had tied her headscarf improperly and had to get help from one of the hostages to fix it.

More important, several of the women would have been disqualified as shahidat according to the strictest interpretation of Islam: one, Koku Khadjiyeva, was mentally ill and another, Medna Baraykova, was sick with tuberculosis and constantly coughing up blood. Russian survivors said some of the women in the group had talked of their eagerness to get home to Chechnya because they were pregnant. In May, four months after the attack, the official autopsies were completed and the Russian weekly Moskovsky Novisti revealed that three of the women—Amnat Isueva and two sisters, Raina and Ayman Kurbanova—were indeed pregnant. According to Islamic law, these women would not have been permitted to go on a martyrdom operation.

It's hard to know if these stories are true. It is likely that the Russian security apparatus disseminated disinformation to make the terrorists seem even more monstrous than the events suggested. According to her cousin Usman, Ayman Kurbanova (known as Rajman within her family) could not possibly have been pregnant. Usman reported that her first husband had left her after only a few months of marriage because she was infertile. Usman explained how Rajman's first husband had dishonored her; he literally shoved her out of the house and, in the process, broke her heart. The experience devastated her and left her forever changed. Like so many other Chechen women, in her despair she connected with the Islamists and, at forty, she married her second husband, a jihadi warrior.

Many of the Chechen women clearly suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and were emotionally fragile. “You're having a bad day, but we've had a bad ten years,” one Chechen Black Widow barked at the hostages. Another survivor, Nastya Kruglikova, recalled that one of the women had placed a grenade between her, her cousin, and her aunt. Kruglikova asked: “What is going to happen, are you going to blow us up?” The terrorist assured her that everything would be all right. However, after a few seconds of thought, she seemed to change her mind, and said: “Well, maybe you will be blown up but at least you won't know anything about it. You won't regret it. You don't know what's happening in Chechnya. You can't know what your soldiers have done there to our people. You can't have any idea how terrible our lives are.”⁴⁰ She said she had left behind a child, but inshallah (God willing), God would look after him. Most of the shahidat were so fragile, they cried as they related the stories of their childhood and the years of war. The hostages remembered how the female terrorists tried to hide their tears. Many of them looked no more than sixteen years old.

On several occasions the hostages asked whether they could go to the bathroom. Each time, the women terrorists asked the men for permission. It seemed as if the women were not really in charge. One of the hostages claimed that the men controlled all the detonators, including the ones for the bombs attached to the women. Other hostages recalled seeing the women carrying their own suicide-belt detonators but still asking permission for their every move. The women bombers of Dubrovka appeared not to be in control of the situation even though they, not the hostages, were the ones with guns. Unlike female terrorists in other parts of the globe, they seemed weak.

One terrorist, Zura Barayeva, appears to have been an exception. She is reported to have been at ease with what was going on in the theater and more in control than the others. During the siege she took off her bomb belt and slung it nonchalantly over her shoulder. This may be because Zura was Movsar's aunt and one of the widows of Arbi Barayev. She is alleged to have trained the other women for the mission and may have recruited some of them. One of the hostages recalled that Zura seemed normal. She would ask people if they had children. She would always say, “Everything will be fine. It will finish peacefully.” She seemed to take pleasure in the situation, particularly in how people were listening to what she had to say and wanted to know what she thought. She was most pleased about being in charge.⁴¹

THE SISTERS GANIYEVA

At least three pairs of sisters were among the terrorists at the Dubrovka House of Culture: the sisters Khadjiyeva, Kurbanova, and Ganiyeva. The last-mentioned pair, Larissa (Fatima) and Khadizhat (Milana) Ganiyeva,⁴² were part of a large family of six boys and four girls. Two of the boys were killed fighting in the First Chechen War. Another brother was killed during a Russian aerial bombardment in 1999 and the oldest girl had worked as a nurse in Grozny treating the war wounded. She disappeared one day in July 2000, never to be seen again.

Fatima had tried to find her first brother's remains back in 1996, braving checkpoints and harassment by Russian soldiers, but the Russians refused to give up his body for a proper burial. For Fatima, this was just one in a series of humiliations that the family was forced to endure at the hands of the Russian military. The family's next encounter with Russian troops was in October 1999, not long after the outbreak of the Second Chechen War. Russian soldiers entered their village, shot five of the Ganiyevs' cows, and left with two of the carcasses tied to their vehicle. In July 2000, Russian troops returned and robbed them of their most valuable possession, a brand-new videocassette recorder. They also took several lambs and chickens and, just before they left, threw a grenade down into the cellar where the family stored their winter provisions.⁴³

The last straw occurred during the summer of 2002. Russian soldiers stormed the Ganiyev house yet again and arrested the youngest son and two of the girls, including Fatima, during yet another zachistka operation. They tried to take fourteen-year-old Milana as well, but her mother managed to stop them. The girls' arrest coincided with a new special order, number 12/309, issued by the Russian Duma and known as Operation Fatima. This law instructed the police to detain any women wearing traditional Muslim headscarves (hijab) and to strip-search them at military checkpoints. Under Operation Fatima women were routinely detained and, while in detention, were tortured and raped and subjected to other kinds of sexual abuse to make them “confess” to crimes such as smuggling weapons.⁴⁴

The two girls were gone for three and a half days before their father secured their release by paying the Russian soldiers a bribe of $1,000. When they finally came home, however, they were changed. Both had been beaten, subjected to torture by electric shock, and possibly raped. After they returned home they said, “We are now in shame. We cannot live like this.”⁴⁵ For days Fatima sat without speaking a word. By her culture's standards she was an old maid, already twenty-six, and now ruined for marriage if her virginity was not intact. The war was killing her friends and potential suitors. Her little sister, Milana, had just turned fifteen and Fatima knew that she would be subjected to the same treatment in the next mopping-up operation. Neither she nor their mother would be able to protect her.

That September a strange woman came to visit the girls. It is unclear whether it was Zura Barayeva (one of Arbi's widows), or another woman recruiter of suicide bombers, Kurbika Zinabdiyeva; both allegedly recruited shahidat for the Dubrovka operation. Whichever of the women it actually was, she had been invited there by the girls' surviving older brother, Rustam (Aslan), a well-known jihadi fighter in Shamil Basayev's inner circle, who had promised two of his sisters as suicide bombers for the Chechen cause. Rustam was allegedly paid $1,500 per sister. He had recruited half a dozen women for Basayev's suicide bombing unit, the Riyadus-Salikheen (RAS, the reconnaissance and sabotage unit of the Chechen martyrs). Rustam's infamous protégées exploded at Dubrovka, at the Wings rock concert at Tushino Airfield, and at the Mozdok Airbase in North Ossetia. At Tushino, Zulihan Elihadzieva exploded along with another girl, killing more than a dozen people; she was alleged to have been pregnant by her half brother Zaga (Danilahan Elihadziev). Rustam himself had trained the Mozdok bombers, Lidya Khaldikhoroyeva and Zarema Muzhakhoyeva, before he was arrested and sentenced to life in Vladikavkaz prison in March 2005. He admitted that his role was to drive the girls to North Ossetia, pretending that they were his wives and then to drop them off at a bus stop. He did this with each of the girls, first with Zarema Muzhakhoyeva and then with Lidya Khaldikhoroyeva. Rustam Ganiyev said that he only learned from the television that civilians, including many women, had died in the bus attack; the toll was nineteen dead and twenty-four wounded.⁴⁶

Fatima and Khadizhat were sent to a rebel camp. They and the other girls spent their days training and reading the Qur'an while being regaled with stories of Khava Barayeva's heroic exploits. Diligent students, Fatima and Khadizhat wrote down everything they learned in their exercise books, which were later found after an operation against the rebel base. In their notes they wrote that the shahida goes to heaven after her death, where she is transformed into one of the houris, the beautiful virgins who serve Allah's warriors in paradise. According to the girls' notes, the perfume of heavenly flowers and eternal paradise were the shahida's reward.

The process of indoctrination was intense and intimidating. Once young women entered the rebels' camp, there was no way out. If you fail to carry out your mission, they were repeatedly told, we will kill your parents, we will kill your children. It was very taxing psychologically.⁴⁷ Another recruit reported that she was given in marriage to a jihadi who told her that as she was his gift, he could give her to his friends and colleagues. After she was passed around, and had fainted, she woke up in a strange safe house with several other women being trained for a jihadi mission. One girl refused and the instructors reported that she had been eviscerated and chopped up into several pieces, which were tossed into the trash. If any of the other girls refused to carry out their mission, a similar fate awaited them.

Fatima and Khadizhat had been gone for more than a month and a half when their parents found out that their daughters had been among the terrorists at the theater. Across Chechnya, horrified families recognized the faces of their dead daughters and sisters when the news stations aired the footage from the Dubrovka attack.

Rustam's culpability came to light in the months after the Moscow theater siege, when the remaining Ganiyev daughter allegedly sought asylum from the Russian police. In August, Raisa (Reshat) Ganiyeva begged the FSB to provide her a safe haven because Rustam had promised her for one of the four new suicide operations Shamil Basayev was planning. According to the Russian government, she turned herself in of her own volition, but during a meeting with Sophie Shihab of Le Monde, Raisa managed to whisper in the journalist's ear, “They arrested me…”⁴⁸ The FSB relocated Raisa to a safe house in Khankala, east of Grozny, where she remained under police protection for a year and then disappeared altogether.

COERCION AND REVENGE

From the beginning of the second war in Chechnya, women became increasingly involved in the fight. Even the smallest fighting units had female health-aid workers, whom the men respectfully called “sisters.”⁴⁹ Slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya met dozens of women in Chechnya ready to embark upon suicide missions for the cause. She chronicled Russian human rights abuses in Chechnya in several of her articles and books, including A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya and A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. Politkovskaya painted a picture of a brutal war in which thousands of innocent citizens were tortured, abducted, or killed at the hands of Chechen or federal authorities. Politkovskaya herself was tortured in Chechnya for three days and her children threatened.⁵⁰ Flown in from the west coast to help negotiate the end of the Dubrovka crisis, she stated that the nineteen women at the siege were “real heroines” to most Chechens, even though they were likely forced into their actions by men. Polish journalist Andrzej Zaucha believed that the women were at Dubrovka of their own free will but that many had very personal motives for being there. Politkovskaya concurred that a major motive for the women was to avenge the deaths of their family members. Abu Walid, a Saudi who was reportedly one of the rebel commanders, told Al Jazeera that the women, particularly the wives of the mujahideen who were martyred, were menaced by Russian soldiers who threatened their honor in their own homes. The women would not accept being humiliated and living under the occupation. They wanted to serve the cause of God and avenge their husbands and sons.⁵¹

This desire for revenge and the likelihood of coercion were not mutually exclusive. Many Chechen women were outraged by the war and did lose husbands, sons, and brothers. But Russian behavior toward Chechen women during their mopping-up operations was an additional motivating factor. In Chechen society, men are the head of the household; nearly all issues are decided by them. A Chechen woman lives under the guardianship of her relatives until she marries, when she becomes her husband's responsibility. The woman represents the family's honor, and when an injustice is done to her, it can often be washed off only by spilling blood.⁵² Traditionally, the wronged family takes revenge only against the individual(s) involved in the original crime or insult. However, with the many years of war and the increased trauma among Chechen civilians, a generalized revenge directed toward all Russians became increasingly acceptable.⁵³ In this extreme situation, all Russians were blamed for the actions of their soldiers.

According to Chechen sources, many of the women were victims of rape, which meant that they could never marry or have children. The prospect was so bleak that many concluded that they might as well die.⁵⁴ In one documented case, Russian federal forces detained Aset (not her real name) at a checkpoint in June 2003 and accused her of being a suicide bomber. According to relatives, during her interrogation she was chained to a bed and gang-raped every night. When she was released six days later, she was barely able to walk or stand.⁵⁵ According to one Chechen woman who abandoned her suicide mission at the last minute, if you sacrificed your life in the name of Allah and killed some infidels, you would go straight to heaven regardless of your previous sins.⁵⁶

Anna Politkovskaya argued that the women in Chechnya were “zombified” by their sorrow and grief. Writing in Moscow's Zhizn magazine, Svetlana Makunina endorsed the commonly held Russian view that the women terrorists had all been turned into zombies. They did not actually want to be involved in suicide attacks. They were drugged, raped, and forced. Another journalist, Maria Zhirkova, explained how difficult it was for anyone to understand the position of Chechen women in society. Rape was such a big issue. If a woman was raped and it was photographed or filmed, she could be blackmailed into doing anything because the rape was a disgrace to her entire family.⁵⁷

Wartime rape is a relatively common device used against the women of the other side. However, unlike cases in Darfur, Sierra Leone, and Bosnia, the experience of rape in Chechnya occurred in two very different ways: one, young women were raped by Russian soldiers during detention and as part of the campaign to ethnically cleanse certain areas, and two, women were kidnapped and raped by Chechen fighters. These same-side rapes were occasionally videotaped to make it impossible for the victims to return to their families. Under this kind of pressure, martyrdom seemed like a blessing.⁵⁸

Women sent off for marriage to a neighboring village occasionally found themselves kidnapped and raped. Often the interlocutors (matchmakers) were compensated for making the arrangements. Instead of going to their weddings, the women were funneled into the Chechen jihadi network. Aset (Asya) Gishnurkayeva left her village of Naur to get married. When she got off the bus in Achkhoy-Martan, she was kidnapped and molested by Chechen men. It turned out that her mother had sold her to the jihadis. Aset ended up at the Dubrovka. When confronted by police afterward, her mother insisted that Aset was still alive somewhere in the Middle East, her whereabouts unknown. She refused to acknowledge that her daughter was killed at the Dubrovka even when shown photos from the attack.⁵⁹

Russian authorities have also alleged that the girls were under the influence of drugs. It suits the Russian government to say that drugs, brainwashing, and blackmail are involved. To blame societal dynamics in Chechnya is easier than facing up to the role played by Russian soldiers in radicalizing Chechen women. The authorities do not want people to conclude that the situation in Chechnya is so desperate and the living circumstances so awful that women are driven to suicide and murder. So the Russian media regaled readers with stories of drugged and coerced zombies and implied that responsibility for their condition rested entirely on the Chechens themselves and on radical groups like Al Qaeda.

The claims perpetuated in Russian propaganda are refuted by stories of Russian soldiers laughing as they charge Chechen fathers 300 rubles (about $20) not to rape their daughters. According to the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, 85 percent of the women raped in Chechnya were raped by soldiers or police officers and 15 percent of the attackers were Chechens.⁶⁰ In Chechnya, rape constitutes “normal conduct” and many of the cases never go to court due to the cultural norms or fear of retribution from the Russian authorities. The human rights violations fall under Russian policies of bespredel (without limits or boundaries)—committing atrocities and acting with impunity. The concept originated in Moscow's world of organized crime and was exported to Chechnya; thus soldiers could do anything to Chechens with impunity.⁶¹

While the situation for women in Chechnya was dire, the truth about how women become involved in suicide operations remains murky. Certainly, Russian actions have played a significant role in traumatizing women and incentivizing them to seek revenge. However, a black-and-white interpretation is complicated by reports that several of the women who participated in the Dubrovka siege were “sold” to the resistance to become suicide bombers—as we have seen in the case of Fatima and Khadizhat Ganiyeva. Several of the women were the sisters (not the widows) of well-known jihadis who had been paid as much as $1,500 per sister to deliver shahidat. The families of four of the women (Aset, Raina, Ayman, and Koku) reported that their daughters had been kidnapped and trained to kill against their will.

It is difficult to know for sure. Whatever the truth—whether these women chose their fate willingly or were pushed into participation—the attack against the theater was very much a family affair. The terrorists in the room comprised sisters, aunts, uncles, husbands, cousins, and wives. Thirty-two of the terrorists carried their real passports (which were later used to identify them) and several of the attackers were related to one another.

There is no doubt that recruiters routinely target young women who have lost someone during the war, like a close male relative. As a result of the stress from the war, women are highly impressionable and readily convinced to carry out a suicide mission. The organization instills an intense hatred of Russians for causing the death of her loved ones. The outside world is cast in terms of good and evil and an intense religious indoctrination follows.

Not all of the girls are religious. Most of them have grown up in secular environments, wearing miniskirts, listening to rock and roll, and watching American movies. But the recruiters deliberately misinterpret the Qur'an to persuade their recruits to become martyrs. Most of the girls have grown up in large families and are told that as shahidat they are the only hope for the families' future and their actions will save the whole clan. The girls' new comrades promise to make sure that their families will be taken care of financially, and promise the girls' families thousands of dollars for their daughters' sacrifice. The girls are placed in a closed environment in which they know no one. The psychological process involves bolstering the girls' self-image while simultaneously cutting it down. So while the women train to be fighters, they are also made to do the men's laundry and cook for them. Some of the girls think that life in the rebel camp will be full of adventure. No longer mere village girls frightened by life, they will be transformed into fighters and future heroines respected by their comrades and celebrated by their communities.

Although not all of the Chechen female bombers fit this profile, the majority were younger than thirty. While not all had lost relatives in the fighting against Russian troops or in the brutal purges of Chechen civilians by Russian security services, many had suffered during the mopping-up operations. Not all of them were raped, tortured, or humiliated by the Russian military, but all could tell tales of degradation under the occupation.⁶² Starting with the Second Chechen War, a new culture arose in which the norms of Chechen society and expectations of what women could contribute changed irrevocably. Many girls are convinced that a martyrdom operation is their best option. Recruiters now know that they cannot force the girls to do anything. A coerced bomber is considered “vocationally unsuitable and would blow the operation at any moment.” In the end the girls go to their deaths voluntarily.

TERROR AND COUNTER-TERROR

After the siege at the House of Culture, then Deputy Internal Affairs Minister Vladimir Vasilyev pledged publicly to cleanse not only Moscow, but all of Russia of Chechen “filth.” The hostage-takers' families bore the brunt of Russia's response. The relatives of the women terrorists were persecuted, kidnapped, and killed. The Russian authorities also destroyed the houses of all of the terrorists they could identify from the Dubrovka. In retaliation for the attack against the Ganiyevs' house, the homes of four Russian families in Assinovskaya were burned down three days later. Asya's home, too, was blown up by the Chechen administration and the Russian security services in retaliation for her participation in the siege. That December, the FSB killed Movsar Barayev's brother Adlan.

In April 2009, London's Sunday Times ran a story in which Russian special forces admitted to torturing Chechen women, then shooting them in the head. They disposed of their bodies in a nearby field, placing an artillery shell between their legs and on their chests. The soldiers added 200-gram TNT bricks and blew them to smithereens in a technique called “pulverization.” Another woman, an alleged sniper, was tied to the ground as soldiers rolled a tank over her body.

That same month the Russian government declared the war in Chechnya over. However, the violence by Russian forces against Chechen women only funnels them into suicide bombing operations. Violence from within the Chechen community exacerbates this dynamic. There might be a short hiatus, but the underlying fault-lines of the conflict still exist and a new generation os Chechens is being raised in a culture of martyrdom and hate. This makes the Russian infrastructure especially vulnerable to future attacks, ans the March 2010 Moscow subway bombings demonstrated. The Russians can officially declare the war is over, but until such time as the address the problem of Chechen autonomy and cease and desist from targeting Chechen women, there will always be young girls willing to kill.