I used to be only a little one when a bunch of Chechens attacked the prepare taking my mom and me to Sochi. It was evening or late night, and a heavy cobblestone crashed into our compartment window. The stone flew previous me and fell someplace within the passage. All I bear in mind was how my mom shielded me together with her personal physique. We slowly slid all the way down to the ground collectively and crawled into the following compartment, attempting to not lower ourselves on the shards of damaged glass. I nonetheless recall an unlimited spherical gap within the window.
It was scary, however I don’t bear in mind what was extra horrifying, that the ladies round me had been shaking and praying out loud in a match of panic or that somebody stated the Chechens had been threatening the conductor with a knife. I bear in mind muffled screams from the connecting passageway with the following prepare automotive; a fellow passenger had gone to assist and gotten stabbed within the face. All of it ended rapidly, and the prepare continued onward. Greater than twenty years have handed since that day, however I nonetheless don’t know why it occurred. Why did they assault the prepare? Did they get what they needed?
Just a few years later, I began working as a journalist, and ethnic conflicts turned certainly one of my foremost matters. I lived in Russia, the place the extent of xenophobia, the concern of any manifestation of otherness, was very excessive, particularly in my native Volgograd, which is a number of hundred kilometers from Chechnya and the place many Chechen households fled from the warfare. My articles about Russian nationalists’ assaults on folks from the Caucuses aroused unhealthy curiosity among the many conservative public. Sadly, little has modified since then.
The breakout of the warfare in Syria within the early 2010s was an unimaginable shock to the world. This battle was not completely native: in 2012, a whole lot of residents from everywhere in the post-Soviet house rushed there. Amongst them had been many Chechens, Dagestanis, Georgians, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks, and Tatars, whose main motivation was to flee from the authoritarian states wherein they lived. The warfare within the Center East promised them cash, new experiences, and freedom. A lot of them turned the spine and army wing of the bloodiest terrorist group of our time, the Islamic State. With out their participation, Syria and Iraq wouldn’t have misplaced 1000’s of residents within the warfare. Greater than six million refugees wouldn’t have needed to search for a brand new dwelling and endure from misunderstandings in a international land.
Picture: Levi Clancy / Supply: Wikimedia Commons
Sooner or later in the summertime of 2016, I met one of many foremost characters featured on this ebook, a former Islamic State militant. I went to our first assembly in a state of horror: God, I’m going to satisfy with a terrorist! However he gave the impression to be as frightened as I used to be. We started to speak frequently by numerous on-line messengers, and in three years, he informed me sufficient for me to realize a full image of the connection between fighters and teams throughout the Islamic State and reconstruct the course of occasions in Syria and Iraq on the scale of human development. This was what I’d lacked from the chilly information protection of the Center East entrance. If not for him, we might not have identified the trail the youngsters introduced up in Soviet households launched into after they determined to combat on international territory.
Over the course of 5 years, I managed to get to know different ISIS fighters, together with Chechens who fought in Syria after which in Ukraine, in addition to the remnants of the ISIS underground in Georgia, and the wives of militants who ended up in prisons and refugee camps… All this helped me to grasp how small the world of terrorism is. Once I started to gather all these tales right into a ebook, they had been extremely interconnected.
A number of years have handed for the reason that defeat of the so-called Islamic State, however 1000’s of people that participated within the warfare on the facet of essentially the most brutal terrorist group proceed to reside beside us. They’re inexorably current in our frequent house. And on the similar time, the sting shouldn’t be removed from us. Participation within the warfare on the facet of the terrorists left an indelible mark on their lives; they had been expelled from society. After all the things that occurred, they may by no means once more be capable to reside as earlier than. All they’ve now could be to carry on to a future the place they’ll think about themselves free of the burden of their previous. Nonetheless, this future is unlikely ever to come back.
I’m grateful to all those that opened as much as me and shared tales that nobody had heard earlier than. These testimonies have confirmed essential in unraveling the complexities of our delicate world and, in flip, shaping our collective path ahead.
…
Boss of hell
It’s nighttime within the Pankisi Gorge. The ‘official representative’ of the Islamic State in Georgia settles right into a wicker chair reverse me. We discover ourselves in a guesthouse within the village of Jokolo.
My interlocutor is a barely dishevelled, middle-aged Kistin with a carefree manner. His identify is Jakolo, identical to the village, however spelled with a distinction of 1 letter. He’s a relative of Leyla, who runs this guesthouse. Within the Pankisi Gorge, it’s stated that each second particular person is expounded to 1 one other.
Pankisi is a picturesque rift within the northeastern a part of Georgia, shaped by the breakage of mountains on both facet of the Alazani River. Mountains are available numerous kinds: rolling, flat, jagged, undulating, rocky, bald, with gullies… However right here, the mountains twist into spirals and sharpen upwards. They protrude like satan’s horns from beneath the bottom.
These horns border Dagestan and Chechnya.
A number of villages are scattered all through the gorge, with roughly 10,000 Kists residing right here. Precise figures are unknown. Kists are ethnic Chechens who resettled in Georgia 4 hundred years in the past.
If there are locations destined to be cursed, then Pankisi is such a spot. Cursed locations all the time come up at fractures, on the crossings between worlds, cultures, languages, legal guidelines. In such locations, the place one’s personal and the international intersect, boundaries blur: everybody turns into a stranger to one another. And everybody turns into a little bit of themselves.
There is just one café in the whole gorge. It’s situated on the entrance to the biggest of the 4 villages, Duisi, and also you’re unlikely to comprehend it’s a café until you’re knowledgeable upfront. It’s located inside a small steel carriage – normally dwelling to building employees. Within the Duisi café, they serve nothing however khinkali. Three smiling ladies work within the kitchen, every together with her head lined by a shawl. They provide friends selfmade non-alcoholic beer – a rosehip concoction tasting like kvass or candy soda. The café opened a couple of years in the past with funds from American taxpayers – the USAID basis, which funds democracy growth tasks in unstable nations.
American taxpayers additionally funded the most well-liked guesthouse within the village of Jokolo. It was constructed by Leyla Achishvili to host friends from Poland, Ukraine, Japan, and from wherever else destiny takes them. USAID supported her enterprise shortly after she returned from Syria, from the territory of the Islamic State.
Virtually each dwelling in Pankisi bears the scars of the Second Chechen Battle, the Abkhazian Battle, and the Syrian Battle. Virtually each dwelling has ties to the Islamic State. Pankisi is amongst these locations the place heaven meets hell.
Jakolo calls himself the official consultant of the Islamic State. He has by no means been to Syria or Iraq, and journey to Turkey is prohibited for him by the Georgian authorities. Nonetheless, he considers himself a certified consultant of essentially the most ruthless terrorist group on the earth. Earlier than him, the imam of the Salafi mosque within the village of Jokolo and his shut pal Ayub Borchashvili held this place. In 2015, Ayub was arrested for recruiting underage Georgian Chechens into the ranks of the Islamic State and was sentenced to 14 years in jail.
Moreover, Jakolo was a detailed pal of Tarkhan Batirashvili, the protection minister of the Islamic State, in any other case often called Abu Omar al-Shishani. Jakolo adored him.
‘Here, guess who this is?’ Jakolo thrusts a smartphone with a photograph underneath my nostril. Within the image, two younger males in khaki coats are sitting arm in arm on a bench, laughing. To the left of the particular person vaguely resembling Jakolo is a freckled man with a shaven head and a easily shaved face.
‘That’s Omar,’ Jakolo says hoarsely.
Tarkhan Batirashvili was born in 1986 within the small village of Birkiani. Deep within the Pankisi Gorge, in a household of an Orthodox Georgian and a Kist Muslim. Such unions had been solely attainable within the Soviet Union, the place faith was thought of a really private and due to this fact secret matter. In spite of everything, the Soviet particular person was devoid of church buildings – folks had been raised as atheists who needed to imagine solely in communism, house exploration and Soviet engineering. At the moment, neither faith nor ethnicity was a matter of delight or public dialogue however served as self-identification in a posh area.
Tarkhan was born at a borderline time in a borderline place. The Second Chechen Battle unfolded earlier than the eyes of the red-haired teenager. He discovered in regards to the battle for independence by refugees from the North Caucasus within the breaks between work. He herded cattle within the mountains – many kids within the gorge labored as shepherds again then. After ending faculty, when it was time to determine what to do subsequent, Batirashvili didn’t deliberate a lot: he joined the military in 2006.
The Ministry of Defence of Georgia was already being financed by the US authorities at the moment, and the army had been present process coaching with the American particular forces. In August 2008, the Russian military invaded the territory of Georgian Ossetia and Abkhazia with a particular operation, which Russian President Dmitry Medvedev referred to as ‘coercion to peace’, and Tarkhan turned a soldier in his first actual warfare. And he suffered his first main setback: he contracted tuberculosis. He was discharged from the military, and he was compelled to return to the unemployed gorge.
One of many former high-ranking officers of the regulation enforcement system of Georgia, L. (I haven’t not disclosed his identify at his request), stated that Batirashvili was one of many brokers recruited by the particular companies. He labored for the Ministry of Inner Affairs and the Antiterrorist Centre created underneath it. The safety forces observed him, stated L., because of his older brother Tamaz. He fought in Chechnya throughout the second marketing campaign and was an authority determine for the Kists. In keeping with L., amongst his mates had been influential area commanders, ‘real wolves’.
The duty of the youthful one, Tarkhan, included the obligation to report all the things that occurred within the Chechen neighborhood in Pankisi. The younger Kistin so needed to work within the safety forces that he did all the things he was requested to do. Along with working for the particular companies, Tarkhan moonlighted as a fixer for militants who weren’t aware of the native scenario within the gorge. He helped them discover individuals who needed to purchase or promote weapons and medicines. He was a form of messenger.
As soon as, L. recounts, Tarkhan’s brother, Tamaz, supplied intelligence with knowledge on a bunch of troopers who entered Georgia with a big batch of weapons. The army didn’t prefer it. Quickly Tarkhan, together with a number of militants, was arrested for possession of ammunition. L. stated that the ammunition was planted on Tarkhan. The longer term commander of the Islamic State ended up in jail for 2 years. ‘He wanted to serve Georgia, but they just kicked him out!’ laments Jakolo.
Nighttime in Pankisi. The face of the official consultant of the Islamic State is illuminated by the ember on the tip of a powerful Marlboro cigarette. He turns into nervous remembering his pal.
In jail, Tarkhan befriended Georgians and Chechens who fought alongside militants within the North Caucasus, and it was there that he transformed to Islam. It was behind bars that he determined to affix the worldwide jihadist motion. In 2012, he was launched early as a part of an amnesty and went to Turkey. From there, he crossed the border and located himself in Syria, the place a civil warfare was already raging. Tarkhan adopted the pseudonym Omar al-Shishani, which means Omar the Chechen, and joined the Caucasian group Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, the ‘Army of Emigrants and Helpers,’ later pledging allegiance to the Islamic State. Omar al-Shishani turned probably the most influential commanders amongst terrorists within the Center East. He was even dubbed the Minister of Battle.
‘And here he is in Syria,’ says Jakolo, handing over his telephone. The image reveals Tarkhan Batirashvili standing subsequent to a snow-covered fir tree, someplace in northern Syria, a panorama much like these present in Latakia, close to the Turkish border. On this picture, the Kist man has grown a protracted pink beard and wears a turban on his head.
It’s nighttime in Pankisi, however Leyla isn’t sleeping. Often, she peeks out of her room to verify if the terrace has been freed. The identify Omar al-Shishani holds a particular significance in her dwelling.
All the pieces began earlier
When Leyla’s eldest son, Hamzat, turned seventeen, she despatched him alongside along with his youthful brother, Khalid, to check with their father in Austria, so that they wouldn’t languish among the many radical youth in Pankisi. Ten years later, she says, Hamzat returned dwelling with a great training, fluent in 5 languages. However in 2013, he abruptly left for warfare in Syria. There, he turned the translator and shut pal of Tarkhan Batirashvili.
In Syria, Hamzat married certainly one of Chechnya’s most sought-after brides, Seda Dudurkaeva, the daughter of Asu Asu Dudurkayev, who was then the pinnacle of the migration service in Ramzan Kadyrov’s authorities. When she fled to Syria to be with Hamzat, Kadyrov disgracefully dismissed the official and ordered Seda to be discovered and returned dwelling. Leyla travelled to Syria to grasp what her son was doing with weapons abroad. When she lastly reached him, she noticed a very totally different younger man – he was able to die for the Islamic State and believed it might assist obtain justice for Muslims. Hamzat travelled in Omar al-Shishani’s armoured jeep, camouflaged and laden with weapons. The militants vastly revered him, particularly for managing to win over the sweetness Seda regardless of Kadyrov.
Seda was Leyla’s second concern – she was referred to as by the administration of Chechnya and requested to influence Dudurkaeva to return dwelling. However neither her son nor his spouse needed to take action.
When Leyla returned to the Pankisi Gorge from her exhausting journey, she was contacted by Hamzat’s mates. They reported that he had died in one of many battles for the Islamic State. When her youthful son, Khalid, discovered of this, he informed his mom that he needed to ‘become a martyr’ identical to his brother. A number of months later, Leyla’s youthful son additionally died in Syria.
Seda remained a widow for a short while. After Hamzat’s demise, Omar al-Shishani took her as his spouse. In keeping with Muslim customized prevalent in radical circles, the widow of a martyr ought to come underneath the safety of the elder. Over time, the Chechen girl bore two kids to Tarkhan Batirashvili.
In July 2016, the ‘Minister of War’ was killed. American plane struck the constructing the place he was hiding along with his unit.
Seda contacted Leyla and requested for assist to flee from Syria. Nonetheless, she was prevented by Tarkhan’s older brother, Tamaz. On July 4, 2018, Dudurkaeva was arrested in Turkey with pretend paperwork and her two younger sons in her arms – she had managed to flee from Raqqa in Syria to Idlib, and from there, throughout the border, to the Turks. Two weeks after her arrest, it turned identified that Batirashvili’s brother was useless.
‘It’s a disgrace he’s gone,’ Jakolo says. ‘Omar was a very good friend.’
Jakolo lights one other cigarette. He admits to me that he has lengthy needed to depart Georgia, however the Georgian authorities gained’t enable it. They don’t need an ‘official representative’ of the Islamic State to seem in Europe with a Georgian passport. However they don’t imprison him, both – he willingly shares details about all the things occurring within the underground scene. It advantages the intelligence companies to maintain such an individual shut and free.
‘It’s awful right here,’ says Jakolo, extinguishing his cigarette within the overflowing ashtray. Leyla kindly takes the ashtray and empties it right into a bucket. Then Jakolo bids us farewell and rapidly disappears into the evening panorama.
Chechnya with out Chechens
An aged man in a lightweight straw hat unlocks the door to the one room of the Pankisi Gorge’s Ethnography Museum. This man is Khaso Hangoshvili, a revered elder and member of the Kist neighborhood residing within the gorge.
Beneath the straw hat, Hangoshvili’s reddish-grey hair is seen. Khaso painstakingly crafted the Pankisi Ethnography Museum himself, aiming to coach the few vacationers who ventured to this space – drawn by horseback driving alongside picturesque mountain trails – in regards to the wealthy cultural heritage of the area.
On the entrance to the museum hangs a plaque with images of Chechens with Kalashnikov rifles someplace within the mountains, smiling broadly, posing fortunately for the digital camera. Subsequent to them is a portrait of Imam Shamil. Shamil, a Dagestani, was a legend of the liberation warfare of the North Caucasus towards the Russian Empire within the nineteenth century. He united Dagestanis and Chechens into one Imamate format of rule, akin to an emirate. Imam Shamil spent his final years in Kyiv. There’s a plaque in his honour close to Independence Sq.. Up to date peoples of the North Caucasus revere Imam Shamil as a hero of Muslim anti-colonial battle.
‘War is the national specialty of the Vainakhs,’ says Hangoshvili. Over sixty, he strikes with assistance from crutches, and drives a jeep. The straw hat creates a picture of Clint Eastwood’s character from the spaghetti western The Good, the Unhealthy and the Ugly. Even Hangoshvili’s eyes are the identical clear shade of blue, and his hair is as straw-like as within the films.
The duties of the elder embody resolving disputes between native residents and speaking with Georgian authorities in case of battle within the gorge. The museum is simply his interest. There should not many reveals within the single museum room. His favorite, says Khaso, are the bronze clocks, formed just like the constructing of the federal government of Ichkeria in Grozny. The twelve-story constructing, which housed the Republican Committee of the Communist Celebration earlier than the Chechen revolution, was bombed throughout the First Chechen Battle. There, on the eighth ground, was the general public reception of President Dzhokhar Dudaev of Ichkeria. Hangoshvili proudly recollects visiting there within the mid-nineties, when Dudaev was nonetheless alive.
On the wall on the entrance to the museum, Hangoshvili hung a poster with the slogan: ‘Their god is freedom. Their law is war.’
‘You see,’ continues the elder, ‘the Vainakhs haven’t had forty years with out warfare to rebuild the financial system, create tradition, and begin peace. They don’t know peace, that’s the issue.’ The Chechens have a protracted historical past of resistance towards the Russian Empire.
Within the 18th century, the Vainakhs, together with the Tatars, resisted the armies of Catherine II underneath the command of Prince Potemkin. Throughout a chronic warfare, the Caucasus was forcibly annexed to the Russian Empire. Within the nineteenth century, resistance was led by Imam Shamil. Within the twentieth century, the Bolsheviks arrived within the North Caucasus and, just like the imperial forces earlier than them, tried to colonize the mountainous area.
Vainakh society has by no means been accustomed to submitting to colonizers. The lives of Chechens, Ingush, Avars and different peoples of the Caucasus have all the time been structured round clan hierarchy, household loyalty and adherence to the customs of Muslim society. Caucasians have been accustomed to working their very own land and being masters in their very own houses. Nonetheless, the Soviets got here with the concept of collectivization and industrialization, equalizing everybody underneath the authority of Moscow. In 1931, throughout a interval marked by Joseph Stalin’s directives to exterminate prosperous peasants throughout areas seized by the Bolsheviks, and the orchestrated famine in Ukraine often called the Holodomor, over 35,000 Chechens had been arrested and executed. Amongst them had been non secular leaders, kulaks, and nationalists. 1000’s died from starvation and illness.
Throughout World Battle II, Chechens died on the entrance strains however didn’t wish to stay underneath Soviet rule. On 23 February 1944, on a day now celebrated in Russia as Defender of the Fatherland Day, 450,000 Chechens and Ingush had been loaded into freight trains and deported from Russia to the outskirts of the brand new Soviet empire, to the steppes of Turkistan. The operation was referred to as ‘Operation Lentil’: they had been despatched to Kazakhstan as collaborators, though Chechens had by no means been underneath German occupation. The Vainakhs had been expelled from their homeland as a result of they refused to undergo Soviet rule. 1 / 4 of them perished throughout the first 4 years of compelled exile. They had been solely capable of return dwelling after Stalin’s demise, from 1957 onwards.
Dzhokhar Dudaev was eight days-old when his household, together with different Caucasians, was deported to Kazakhstan. His mother and father died throughout the deportation. He returned to his homeland as a young person and discovered in regards to the causes for the deportation from his older brothers. Dudaev grew up as a Soviet man, however the reminiscence of how the Soviet authorities handled his folks lived inside him like a parallel life.
By the Nineteen Eighties, he had risen to the rank of main common within the Soviet Air Pressure and commanded bomber divisions first in Poltava, Ukraine, then in Tartu, Estonia. It was in Tartu the place he took step one in the direction of the abyss within the early Nineteen Nineties, when anti-Soviet sentiments swept throughout the Soviet Union. He helped Estonia break away from occupation. Because the garrison commander of Tartu, Dudaev refused to comply with Soviet orders to dam Estonian tv and parliament. Quickly after, he returned to his native Chechnya and proclaimed the independence of Ichkeria from Russia and the USSR. Nonetheless, for President Boris Yeltsin, giving up Chechnya meant permitting Russia to collapse, as independence would even be demanded by Dagestan, Ingushetia, Bashkortostan and different nationwide republics.
The warfare had begun.
Within the First Chechen Battle, 1000’s of members of the Chechen resistance and civilians had been killed. Within the first two years, 15,000 Russian troopers died.
‘They say we are friends with Russia, although we are very fierce enemies,’ stated Dzhokhar Dudaev. In 1996, he was killed, and a brand new stage started within the historical past of Chechnya. The warfare ended briefly. After the conditional and short-lived victory of the separatists, Chechnya plunged into post-war darkness. Violence, poverty, and concern flourished within the republic.
After Dudaev’s demise in 1996, Shamil Basayev referred to as for the withdrawal of all Muslim republics of the North Caucasus from Russia and their unification right into a single state residing in line with Sharia regulation. Later, he was dubbed the brand new bin Laden for his radicalism. He spoke of utilizing weapons of mass destruction towards Russia and attaining the creation of a caliphate from the Caspian to the Black Seas.
On the finish of 1999, on the evening earlier than New Yr’s Eve, Yeltsin introduced his successor, former FSB director Vladimir Putin. The very first thing Putin did as president of Russia was to go to Chechnya to help Russian troopers. He referred to as the second Chechen army marketing campaign ‘liberation’ in order that Chechens wouldn’t really feel defeated. Russian troopers had been allegedly there to not drive Chechens to give up their weapons and quit the concept of the republic’s independence however to liberate them from terrorist rule. Even such a model was heard within the official press: Chechen terrorists began a warfare with Russia to hold out genocide towards Chechens with the arms of Russian troopers. At the moment, such concepts appeared wild to many, however the time period ‘liberation’ for justifying colonial insurance policies caught on and continued for use to later justify the occupation of territories in Georgia and Ukraine and army intervention in Syria.
Within the images of the early 2000s, Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, seemed like Stalingrad in post-war photographs. Navy autos moved by streets the place there have been no homes – that they had changed into burnt skeletons of buildings. Loss of life reigned the place folks had as soon as lived.
Lots of of 1000’s of troopers from throughout Russia arrived each day to combat for the ‘liberation’ of Chechnya. On the entrance to Chechnya, an indication on the fence flaunted: ‘Freedom or death. Chechnya is a subject of Allah.’
Many Russians didn’t perceive what they had been preventing for. Military propaganda portrayed Chechens as non-human. Animals. Wolves that wanted to be tamed, taught a lesson. Filtration camps appeared and shortly turned the scariest locations in Chechnya. Chechen males aged 14 to 60 had been taken to the camps and crushed, generally to demise. Women and girls had been raped there. Journalists and human rights activists devoted many publications to those camps. Those that managed to outlive informed how troopers knocked out detainees’ tooth and laughed that ‘the wolf is now toothless’. Some had been subjected to a ‘living corridor’: troopers lined up on each side of the chamber armed with rifles and iron rods, and the detainee needed to run by the ‘corridor’ to the top. Those that fell midway had been crushed to demise. Chechen militants additionally tortured Russian troopers – they tortured, killed, and mutilated useless our bodies. Evil went unpunished; it was rewarded.
Violence in Chechnya was all over the place. Later, many Russians who had skilled Chechnya left to ‘liberate’ Ukraine from the fictional fascists portrayed by Russian propaganda. For instance, Igor ‘Bes’ Bezler and Igor ‘Strelkov’ Girkin fought towards the Chechen resistance after which participated within the seizure of the Donbas area. A lot of them had been concerned in creating prisons for Ukrainian army personnel and civilians who publicly disagreed with the occupation. Those that managed to flee informed of brutal torture carried out by Russian officers.
And but…
Immediately, above the railway tunnel within the centre of Grozny, there gleams a large memorial plaque with a press release by Akhmat Kadyrov: ‘Let justice prevail.’
Kadyrov turned the pinnacle of the Chechen Republic in the summertime of 2000, six months after Vladimir Putin took workplace as President of Russia. Beforehand, Kadyrov had been the mufti of Ichkeria since 1995 and had sided with Chechen resistance. Moscow provided him a deal: peace in change for loyalty. At the moment, virtually each Chechen had misplaced no less than one relative within the warfare, each different particular person had been bombed, or had witnessed somebody’s demise. Persevering with the warfare was insufferable. Many agreed to provide peace an opportunity, though they remembered Dudayev’s phrases: ‘Better to die than to be unfree.’ Some militants emerged from the underground and joined Kadyrov’s new military, whereas these Chechens who determined to proceed the combat for independence went deeper into the forests and commenced to develop radical concepts of resistance, together with planning kidnappings, sabotage, and terrorist assaults.
‘A Chechen cannot be fearful, cannot be a coward,’ says Khaso Hangoshvili. He appears to be like on the forged iron clock within the form of the Ichkeria authorities constructing. There aren’t any arms on the clock. The buildings on the map of contemporary Grozny are lengthy gone – they had been destroyed throughout the Second Chechen Battle.
‘If someone in the family is noticed to be growing up cowardly, they make them…’ the elder falls silent to regain composure, ‘they make it so that he fears nothing. When I was little, there were ancient cult buildings in our mountains. The elders deliberately told us that there were devils, demons in the mountains, who could destroy… And they gave us a task: ‘Go,’ they are saying, ‘at night, put your hat there.’ I went, I put it on. Then they inform one other: ‘And you go and bring that hat back.’ They spoke in order that we might be scared, however we went.’
‘But why?’ I ask the elder.
‘Because for the Vainakhs, it’s higher to die than to be afraid,’ says Khaso and demonstratively adjusted his straw hat.
Translated from the Russian by Kate Tsurkan Ukrainian writer: Samit-knyha, Kyiv, 2021
