Chechen fighter’s account of Gelayev’s men crossing bordersRuslan Isayev, North Caucasus, October 12 – More than two weeks have passed since a group of more than 200 Chechen fighters headed by Ruslan Gelayev crossed one international and two administrative borders to Chechnya.
This way, one of the most fight-worthy Chechen groups returned home after two years in Georgia. In one of the Chechen villages, a fighter and Gelayev’s distant relative, 35-year-old Umar, told me about how the troop made its way to Chechnya.
“We set off from Georgia on August 2. We strayed for long in the woods in Georgia, noticing tracks of Russian soldiers who, as we learned, had been tracing us from military satellites. In two weeks we practically passed along the whole Georgia’s frontier. Our guides were Georgians and ethnic Chechens living in Georgia. After many hesitations and considerations, the leader decided to cross the Russian-Georgian border in the most difficult, and therefore least protected, sector.
Many places, especially the defile, were really hard to get through. Some men from the group could not take the physical load and made up their mind to go back. No one was stopping them. In the Chechen army, unlike in the Russian one, there are no contracts and nobody is forcing you. We all fight in the name of Allah and liberation of our country from the Russian occupants.
The physical load,” continues Umar, “was immense. When climbing up a mountain more than 3,000 meters above the sea, all of us were at the breaking point. At one moment, the group found itself very close to the frontier guards. Russian soldiers pretended not to have noticed us and passed us by.”
During the last two weeks of the trek when the fighters approached the Ossetian village Tarskoye, all were on the verge of total exhaustion. They ran out of food. It was decided to get several heads of cattle from a nearby farm. The group of five or six men charged with this task clashed with armed Ossetian policemen and two Russian soldiers. They let the policemen go, taking their guns, and – shooting the soldiers.
From thereon, the troop revealed itself. Several days before it reached the Ingush village of Galashki, Russian paratroopers were dropped in the neighboring woods. A special group of men was to fight them, while the main part of the troop passed to the territory of Chechnya without major troubles.
The fighters headed for the Achkhoy-Martan and Urus-Martan districts in Chechnya. The current situation in these districts remains, mainly for this reason, quite tense. Virtually the whole area below the mountains is packed with Russian servicemen, urgently relocated from all of the republic’s regions.
“Mop-up operations” designed to find and arrest the fighters were conducted almost in all villages located at the foothills of the black mountains. A similar search was carried for more than a week in Gelayev’s native village, Komsomolskoye. According to the villagers, many arrested people were severely beaten by the soldiers with the purpose of making them divulge Gelayev’s whereabouts.
His location is known, however, only to a few of the field commander’s closest fellow combatants. Even the ordinary troop members, who are now rallying after the transition from Georgia, have no idea on this whatsoever.
The rumors about Gelayev being wounded which was disseminated by Russian command has not been confirmed. According to the information from Gelayev’s circles, he is in good health and ready to activate military action against the federal forces in the near future. In the mean time, he is planning, as some say, to meet Maskhadov, Basayev and other Chechen leaders for further coordination of actions.
(P/T) |
