The Wolves of Islam

Russia and the Faces of Chechen Terror

Paul J. Murphy, Ph.D.

BRASSEY'S, INC.
WASHINGTON, D.C.

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

Dagestan] This [terrorism like in Moscow] will go on because those whose loved ones, whose women and children are being killed, will also try to use force to stop their adversaries."

Khattab told Al-Watan Al-Arabi that the war "had shifted to all Russian cities and would be directed against all Russians." When specifically asked, he refused to condemn the Moscow bombings. Vyacheslav Izmailov, a respected news commentator on Chechnya, thought that he knew why Khattab reacted this way.

Khattab's Terror Campaign

Going on Russian NTV television, Izmailov said that very reliable sources in Chechnya had told him that Khattab, just after his initial defeat in Dagestan, recruited former Russian military personnel for a terror campaign across the Russian Federation. The men were divided into four teams to carry out bombings in:
* Dagestan
* Moscow
* St. Petersburg
* Rostov-on-Don

Each team was given money to buy what it needed and to rent premises to hide explosives intended for the bombings.

On 15 September, the Islamic Liberation Army of Dagestan claimed responsibility for the Moscow bombings. Was this the same Islamic Army of Dagestan that Khattab was in charge of? The Russian government's case says it is.

The Role of Achimez Gochiyayev

The Russian federal prosecutor's office alleges that Khattab paid Chechen national Achimez Gochiyayev, thirty-one, $500,000 to carry out the attacks at:
* Guryanova Street, #6 Kashirskoye Shosse
* Borisovskiye Prudy

...and then helped hide Gochiyayev and his accomplices in Chechnya.

Gochiyayev, the mastermind, was a terrorist sleeper. Born in 1970 and raised in the Karachaevo-Cherkessia Republic, in 1997, he closed down a construction business in Moscow and went to Chechnya to train in Khattab's camps. After graduation, he went back to his home in Karachaevo-Cherkessia, where he established and ran his own Wahhabi jamaat (Muslim Society #3) until Khattab activated him. Gochiyayev, using the alias Mukhita Laipanov, rented the basements of the three apartment buildings in Moscow for "commercial storage."

The Explosives Transport

Five of Gochiyayev's fourteen accomplices have been caught and charged with transporting the truckload of sugar sacks filled with explosives (hexogen) to Moscow. The route the explosives took to get to Moscow was from Urus-Martan to a food warehouse in Kislovodsk, where the hexogen was stored in a rented truck until late August. Ruslan Magiayev, Timur Batchayev, Yusuf Krymshamkhalov, and Adam Dekkushev then transferred the explosives to another vehicle and drove them to Moscow. There, Gochiyayev registered in a hotel using his brother-in-law's name (Taukan Frantsuzov) and then supervised placement of the explosives in the rented basements of the three apartment buildings.

The Wolves of Islam

Adam Dekkushev was caught by Georgian security services and handed over to Russia in 2002. He confessed that Abu Omar instructed him on how to organize and carry out terrorist acts, while plans of the apartment building bombings were developed by Khattab personally. In early December 2002, Batchayev was killed in a Georgian raid on the Pankisi Gorge while Yusuf Krymshamkhalov was apprehended and extradited to Moscow. Magiayev was apprehended by Russian police in Mineralnye Vody. Gochiyayev remains on the loose.

In court, Adam Dekkushev said that he, along with Yusuf Krymshamkhalov and Batchayev, prepared the explosives, transported them to Volgodonsk, and randomly picked the apartment building on Octyabrskoye Shosse to blow up. Abu Omar had promised to pay him for the job, but Dekkushev never got a single kopeck. Dekkushev's appeal to Abu Omar for material help for his family was also rejected. And according to Dekkushev's court testimony, it wasn't the FSB who ordered the bombing of the building as Berezovsky alleged, but the CIA.

The 4 September Buinaksk bombing has been solved too and tied directly to Khattab. Six men arrested in Azerbaijan were convicted of the bombing in March 2000. One of them admitted that he worked for Khattab but claimed that he did not know that the explosives he transported in his truck from Khattab's camp to Dagestan were intended to blow up the military apartment buildings. Khattab promised the bombers $300,000 to drive their truck bombs into the center of the compound, which would have destroyed four apartment buildings simultaneously. They parked on an adjacent street instead and blew up only one building. They complained at the trial that Khattab had not given them all the money he owed them.

The evidence that Khattab was responsible for the apartment building bombings in Moscow is clear. Of course there is also the now well-known story told by Berezovsky too. I remember that the story began to circulate in Moscow almost immediately after the bombings.

Berezovsky says that the FSB, working on behalf of the then newly appointed prime minister and KGB veteran Vladimir Putin (but without Putin's knowledge), blew up the apartment buildings to consolidate Russian society around Putin's candidacy for president prior to the presidential elections by creating the pretext for restarting the war in Chechnya. The idea was that this would ensure Putin's presidential election victory.

There is a second fantasy version that says that Basayev and his brother Shirvani are really long-standing GRU agents and that the bombings were not planned by radical Islamists at all, but by Russian military intelligence. According to this account, all the details of the attack were worked

Holy Wars in Dagestan and Bombs in Moscow 107

In the summer of 1999, in a villa in the south of France, with the participation of Basayev and the head of the presidential administration, Aleksandr Voloshin. Furthermore, it is alleged that the explosive materials used were not supplied from secret bases in Chechnya but from GRU stockpiles near Moscow.

Basayev's declarations of war and terrorism in Russia ignited the apocalyptic war in Chechnya in the fall of 1999. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin declared on 27 September, "We are now the victims of the aggression of international terrorism." A day later he proclaimed, "It is clear we cannot simply drive them out of one spot and draw a line. . . . The whole world knows that terrorists have to be destroyed at their bases." Two days later, Russia responded with one hundred thousand troops and brutal military force to eliminate "foreign terrorist bases" from the North Caucasus.