Chechen Jihad by Yossef Bodansky

Author:Yossef Bodansky [Yossef Bodansky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061740565
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

STRIKES IN MOSCOW AND IN WESTERN EUROPE

IN LATE 2002 AND EARLY 2003, THE SUPREME ISLAMIST-JIHADIST leaders attempted to launch a spate of spectacular terrorist strikes throughout Europe—from Moscow in the east to Paris and London in the west—from their strategic safe haven in a cluster of terrorist camps in southeastern Chechnya and just across the border in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge. While the Moscow strikes succeeded, those planned for Western Europe were narrowly averted at the last minute.

These terrorist strikes had been conceived during a commanders’ conference in mid-February 2002. Chaired by two Egyptian senior Islamist-Jihadist commanders, Muhammad Shawqi al-Islambuli and Mustafa Hamzah, the meeting included the senior Chechen commanders Abu-al-Walid, Movsar Suleimenov (a.k.a. Movsar Barayev), and the Akhmadov brothers, as well as several commanders from Great Britain, Sweden, and Germany. The participants resolved to replace the lost strategic base in Afghanistan with a new support infrastructure in Chechnya and Georgia, to use that safe haven to expand the Islamist-Jihadist networks in Western Europe and launch new operations from Moscow to London.

In the wake of the conference, Basayev established a new elite “martyrdom battalion,” formally named the Riyad-us-Salikhin [Fields of Righteousness] Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Shakhids [Martyrs]—that was dedicated to the conduct of new terrorist strikes in Moscow and other Russian cities. Both the Akhmadov brothers and Movsar Barayev would play central roles in the battalion’s operations. In a stark deviation from comparable entities in the Middle East and Asia, nearly half the would-be martyrs in Basayev’s battalion were young women. The other half was composed of veteran fighters, most of them graduates of Khattab’s training camps.

At around this time, the Chechens also launched a new effort to secure supply and transportation lines between the northern Caucasus and the Moscow area, dispatching a number of long-term sleeper agents to Moscow. Two of Basayev’s key operatives—Aslambek Khaskhanov (a.k.a. Zaurbek) and Ruslan Elmurzaev (a.k.a. Abubaker or Yassir)—had already approached Akhyad and Alikhan Mezhiev, a pair of Chechen brothers living in Moscow, asking for their help in establishing a clandestine support system in Moscow. The brothers were to rent three apartments to be used as safe houses and to acquire vehicles for their travel and cargo transport; they were given money, including $2,500 in cash, and told to start immediately. In April a longtime Basayev operative named Khampash Sobraliev acquired a small house in the village of Chernoe, in the Moscow Oblast, paying for the $20,000 house in cash. A Chechen family moved in, quickly building a high fence around the property, and soon a regular stream of visitors began appearing at the house, many of them driving expensive foreign cars and SUVs. Most of the visitors were suspected of having connections to the Chechen Mafiya.

Yet the sleepers made little actual headway in Moscow until mid-2002, mainly because the Chechen Islamist-Jihadist leaders were on the defensive—preoccupied at first by the Russians’ assassination of Khattab and then by the power struggle that culminated in the Basayev-Maskhadov summit in June.

By now the specter of a U.

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