The Wolves of Islam

That same day, Dagestani OMON forces unsuccessfully assaulted Karamahki. A few days earlier, Khattab’s father-in-law had been caught trying to escape wrapped in a rug in the back of a truck. In the days that followed, federal forces bombarded the village, which finally surrendered on 13 September. Karamahki, including Khattab’s in-laws’ home, was completely destroyed.

Earlier, a dispute had broken out between Basayev and Nadirshakh Khachilayev over the failure of Khachilayev’s detachment to support Basayev. Despite earlier agreement, Khachilayev refused to order his men into battle. Basayev threatened his associate with assembling a Shariah court that would sentence Khachilayev to death if he did not immediately begin combat operations in Novolaksk. Khachilayev, who had been hiding in Chechnya from Russian authorities and had joined Barayev’s Supreme Council of Islamic Jamaats, was expelled from the republic. He went into hiding in Karamahki.

Khattab’s Islamic Army of Dagestan finally retreated back into Chechnya on 12 September. Khattab claimed that two hundred more Russians were killed, while the losses on his side were sixty. Yeltsin publicly vented his anger at the Russian military’s inability to immediately repulse Khattab.

In the meantime, the first Moscow apartment building at house #19 Guryanova Ulitsa was blown up two seconds before midnight on 8 September, killing ninety-four people and wounding more than two hundred.

The following Monday, 13 September, another basement bomb went off. The carnage shown on television from the explosion at house #6 Korpus 3, Kashirskoye Shosse—where 124 men, women, and children were killed in their sleep at 5 a.m.—was wrenching. I remember the events vividly—we could not sleep for many nights after that, wondering if our building would be next.

On Tuesday, 14 September, police found and defused a third bomb at another apartment building on Borisovskiye Prudy Ulitsa.

The following Sunday, 16 September, at 5:58 a.m., a truck bomb blew the facade off an apartment building full of sleeping people in the Russian city of Volgodonsk. Phone calls were made to families living at house #35 Octyabrskoye Shosse, just before the blast, the caller asking, “How can you sleep with death just around the corner?” Eighteen people were killed and sixty-nine hospitalized. Altogether, 342 were wounded.

On 9 September, Basayev told the Czech newspaper Lidove Noviny that the bombing in Moscow had been “the work of Dagestanis—not our work.” On the one hand, Basayev denounced terrorism. On the other, he said that Russia’s military actions justified it: “For the whole week, Army and the Interior Ministry units have been pounding three small villages [in