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
