by Mia Bloom
At 5:00 A.M. members of the Russian Spetsnaz (special-purpose troops) stormed the theater. Shortly before, they had accessed the ventilation system of the building through the gay club Central Station located next door. Inside the theater, the hostages heard a hissing sound like the noise a gas stove makes when you first turn it on. Immediately people felt their senses dulling and started to feel woozy and nauseated. The symptoms were those of classic opium poisoning: dilated pupils, vomiting, loss of consciousness, and eventual asphyxiation from a lack of oxygen. Many of the hostages took the smell to be smoke from a fire, but it soon became apparent that gas was being pumped into the building. Some of the terrorists yelled, “Gas! Gas!” and commanded the women to turn off the air-conditioning. Some of the hostage-takers had gas masks, which they put on. Most of the rest soon lost consciousness.
One of the hostages, Anna Andrianova, who worked for the daily Moskovskaya Pravda, called the Echo of Moscow radio show at the outset of the FSB’s assault. She told listeners: “The government forces are pumping gas into the hall. Please, give us a chance. If you can do anything!” She did not know what the gas was but from the terrorists’ reactions she believed that they did not want the hostages to die. The same could not be said of the Russian authorities, who did not seem to want anyone to survive the ordeal. Andrianova screamed: “We see it, we feel it, we are breathing it through our clothes … Our government has decided that no one should leave from here alive.”26
After nearly one and a half hours of sporadic gun battles while they waited for the gas to take effect, the Russian special forces blew open the doors to the main hall and poured into the auditorium. They threw in noise and light grenades to disorient the terrorists. When the shooting began, the rebels told their hostages to lean forward in their seats and cover their heads. Movsar was holed up in a windowless room, so the gas did not affect him.27 The FSB’s Alpha Group—a specialized counter-terrorism squad—gunned down the terrorists who were still conscious and systematically executed those who had passed out. Soldiers walked around the auditorium and shot each of the women terrorists in the head. Their orders had been to take no chances. The subdued Chechens were summarily executed at point-blank range. Even if the soldiers saw batteries in the women’s hands and empty detonators, indicating that the women’s bombs had been disarmed, they ignored this sight and killed the Chechens anyway.
The only hostages who recovered from the gas were the ones who received naloxone, a treatment for opium overdose, within the first few hours of the attack. The gas must have been extremely potent to knock out so many people, especially the Chechen captors, who were young and in good physical shape. Observers identified the gas as fentanyl, but it would have taken tons of regular fentanyl to do the job. Some derivatives of the drug, such as 3-methylfentanyl, might have been used instead. The Russian health minister, Yuri Shevchenko, later said that the FSB had used an opiate derivative of fentanyl that was most likely carfentanyl, produced by taking the basic fentanyl molecule and adding carbon to it, making the drug eighty to a hundred times stronger. Carfentanyl is not intended for use on humans; it is normally used by vets to tranquilize bison or elephants. Lev Fyodorov, a Russian toxicologist, told the Russian newspaper Gazeta that the gas was probably produced in a secret laboratory in the Lubyanka, the FSB’s headquarters. The Russians have consistently refused to disclose precisely which gas they actually used.28
A correspondent from the London newspaper The Guardian saw the bodies being pulled out of the theater, “their faces waxy, white and drawn, eyes open and blank.”29 Soon, the street in front of the theater was filled with the bodies of the dead and those unconscious from the gas but still alive. Just seventeen doctors confronted almost a thousand casualties. Within minutes they were completely overwhelmed. Few ambulances were standing by and city buses were brought in. It took the commandos more than an hour to evacuate the theater, during which time many of the hostages died. The soldiers, inexperienced in first aid, dragged people outside and piled them up like sacks. Many of the victims choked to death on their own vomit or swallowed their own tongues.
The hostages’ coats were in the theater’s cloakroom and they had no outside clothing to protect them from the elements; it was a snowy night and many of them suffered from exposure when they were left unattended in the street. There were reports that members of the security services and police rummaged through their pockets, helping themselves to the victims’ money and jewels.30 Rescue workers on the scene had not brought enough naloxone for everyone. The stricken hostages got no relief when they were transferred to the local hospitals, where staff were expecting to treat victims of explosions and gunshot wounds, not victims of an unknown chemical agent.
The following day, the surviving hostages found themselves under virtual house arrest. The FSB posted armed guards at the hospitals and doctors were ordered not to release anyone in case some of the militants were hiding among them. Families panicked as the government refused to release any information about which hospitals were treating the casualties or to disclose the names of those who had died. The official number of the dead rose by the hour while the government maintained the fiction that the assault had been launched when the rebels started executing captives. The final body count was 41 terrorists killed31 and 129 hostages dead as a result of the gas and the inadequate response by the medical teams. Among the dead were several children and 18 members of the cast. Moscow’s health committee chairman, Doctor Andrei Seltsovsky, contradicted official reports and admitted that all but three of the hostages who had been killed in the raid had died of the effects of the unknown gas rather than from gunshot wounds. None of the three people killed by the terrorists were hostages. They were individuals who had entered the siege after it started and were assumed to be FSB agents. It is worth noting that the terrorists took extra care to make sure that the hostages did not die at their hands.
THE BLACK WIDOWS OF DUBROVKA
Al Jazeera satellite television aired a prerecorded video that had been dropped off at their Moscow office a day before the Dubrovka hostage-taking. It showed the Chechen rebels and female Black Widows clad in black abayas with their faces covered in hijabs. The women claimed that they were waiting for a just and humanitarian solution in Chechnya, but that obviously no one cared about the death of Chechen innocents. Old men and children were killed daily and their children’s blood flooded the land because of the Russian occupation.32 One of the women spoke defiantly to the camera: “We might as well die here as in Chechnya however we will die taking hundreds of nonbelievers with us.”33 The terrorists in the video all swore by Allah that they desired death more than the Russians wanted life. Each one of them was willing to sacrifice himself or herself for the sake of God and the independence of Chechnya.34
In most Chechen towns, the Russians had completely destroyed all infrastructure, including the systems for water, electricity, and gas, making it impossible for people to live a normal existence and causing a massive refugee flow out of Chechnya into neighboring republics. Now the Chechens would bring the fight to the heart of Russia, a few miles from the Kremlin itself. A female shahida (martyr) summed up the reasons for their willingness to sacrifice themselves:
People are unaware of the innocents who are dying in Chechnya: the sheikhs, the women, the children and the weak ones. And therefore, we have chosen this approach. This approach is for the freedom of the Chechen people and there is no difference where we die, and therefore we have decided to die here, in Moscow. And we will take with us the lives of hundreds of sinners. If we die, others will come and follow us—our brothers and sisters who are willing to sacrifice their lives, in Allah’s way, to liberate the nation.35
Despite such statements, some of the men at Dubrovka may have hoped to get out of the theater alive. Only the women wore suicide vests, not the men. Movsar Barayev had several forged passports in his possession along with a large amount of foreign currency.36 Like Basayev when he attacked the Budyonnovsk Hospital se
ven years earlier, Barayev might have expected to survive to fight another day. Several of the male terrorists had return bus tickets to Khasavyurt. According to his father, Bukhari, Movsar had not made the usual Islamic preparations for his death prior to the attack. He had unpaid debts and there were other indications that some of the men at Dubrovka did not assume that this was their final operation. However, several of the women had settled their affairs. Rajman Kurbanova returned her wedding presents and said good-bye to her friends in the weeks before the operation.
There appeared to be a double standard for the men and the women at the theater. While the men secured the perimeter, the women circulated throughout the crowd. They were tasked to make sure that the audience did not panic and to see to their needs and make them a bit more comfortable. They distributed water, blankets, and chewing gum. The women ate dried dates and shared them with the hostages. They found chocolates and candies in one of the theater’s backrooms, which they distributed. There were a few children attending the performance that night and the female terrorists visited the mothers and asked if their children needed anything. One hostage reported that the women acted more like nuns ministering to the sick than terrorists. They allowed people to go to the toilet without queuing in line. Despite these efforts, after the first few hours, the whole orchestra pit became one giant outhouse.
As the female terrorists mingled with the audience, several hostages got to know their captors a little better. It is from those hostages that we have the most information about the female terrorists’ state of mind and motivation. Many of the female hostages showed signs of Stockholm syndrome: they identified with the hostage-takers and empathized with their plight. Tamara Starkova, a forty-two-year-old pediatrician who lost her husband and daughter at Dubrovka, recalled watching the Chechen men running around shouting and screaming at the hostages, but the women were different. The women said “please” and “thank you.” They were surprisingly polite under the circumstances. The women did not discuss politics. Tamara listened to the women’s stories of Russian atrocities and understood what had led them to Dubrovka. One woman explained that her whole family had been killed by the Russians. She had buried all her children and was now forced to live in the forest. She had nowhere to go and nothing to live for. Another of the shahidat confided to Tamara that she had lost her husband and child, and Tamara thought to herself that any mother would be capable of terrible acts under similar provocation.37
The hostages were struck by one of the terrorists, named Asya, most likely Aset Gishnurkayeva from Achkoy-Martan, who reassured them that the terrorists’ motives were actually peaceful. Asya hoped that there would be a negotiation with the government and that the crisis would end well. She was involved in this mission so that her children could grow up in peace. Asya was particularly helpful during tense moments when the men onstage started shooting their weapons into the air.38 She tried not to frighten the hostages and begged them not to worry. She explained that it was their war, not the hostages’. Asya’s friend, Madina Dugayeva, also helped her calm the hostages. Madina had studied to be an actress at Chechen State University and was exceptionally pretty. Another terrorist, Sekilat Aliyeva, was a teaching assistant in the university’s history department. Hostage Irina Filipova, found herself sympathizing with the female terrorists and concluded that the women must all have different motives: for some true believers it might have been a divine mission; some of the others might have been drugged; she wondered whether the younger girls had been forced.39
While some of the hostage-takers made repeated references to Islam and Allah during the fifty-seven-hour ordeal and the men placed a banner with the words “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) over the stage, many of the women were not well versed in Islam. Several mispronounced their prayers in Arabic and could not answer the most basic questions about the tenets of the faith. When asked questions about Islamic doctrine or practice, the women had no idea how to respond. Most of the terrorists just talked about the persecution that they suffered at the hands of the Russian forces in Chechnya. Their ignorance suggested that they had only recently been taught about Islam. Several wore their Islamic garb incorrectly. In one case, a female terrorist had tied her headscarf improperly and had to get help from one of the hostages to fix it.
More important, several of the women would have been disqualified as shahidat according to the strictest interpretation of Islam: one, Koku Khadjiyeva, was mentally ill and another, Medna Baraykova, was sick with tuberculosis and constantly coughing up blood. Russian survivors said some of the women in the group had talked of their eagerness to get home to Chechnya because they were pregnant. In May, four months after the attack, the official autopsies were completed and the Russian weekly Moskovsky Novisti revealed that three of the women—Amnat Isueva and two sisters, Raina and Ayman Kurbanova—were indeed pregnant. According to Islamic law, these women would not have been permitted to go on a martyrdom operation.
It’s hard to know if these stories are true. It is likely that the Russian security apparatus disseminated disinformation to make the terrorists seem even more monstrous than the events suggested. According to her cousin Usman, Ayman Kurbanova (known as Rajman within her family) could not possibly have been pregnant. Usman reported that her first husband had left her after only a few months of marriage because she was infertile. Usman explained how Rajman’s first husband had dishonored her; he literally shoved her out of the house and, in the process, broke her heart. The experience devastated her and left her forever changed. Like so many other Chechen women, in her despair she connected with the Islamists and, at forty, 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 listeni
ng 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
