Boston Globe

13 November 1999

[for personal use only]

Russian bombardment sows terror in town

Jets, rockets in Chechnya targeting rural villages

By David Filipov

SLEPTSOVSKAYA, Russia - It was 10 in the morning when the Russian jets came, as the people of Samashki were climbing out of their cramped basement shelters after another terror-filled night, thinking that the bombing had finally stopped. They were wrong.

Stunned Chechen families ran for the cover of their houses as two jets strafed a central road, Cooperative Street, firing rockets. Two women and three children in the Abdulkadirovs' home died immediately. An explosion blew off the leg of 12-year-old Zelimkhan Yakuev as he ran for cover. Dozens more were killed or wounded as they tried to escape.

''There was no warning. The Russians told us they were not going to attack Samashki. They lied,'' said Khava Avturkhanova Thursday in a hospital in the town of Sleptsovskaya, on the border of Chechnya 6 miles west of Samashki. She was tending to her daughter, Madina, 22, one of dozens of people injured in the Oct. 27 attack. Nearby, a Russian battery fired salvo after salvo in the direction of Samashki as warplanes dropped bombs in the distance.

Russian leaders claim they are conducting an operation to wipe out terrorist bases in Chechnya, and bring the separatist Caucasus region back under Moscow's control. Journalists and other independent observers are not being allowed into Chechnya to see for themselves.

Samashki, a town of 12,000 about 20 miles west of Chechnya's capital, Grozny, provides an example of what the Russian forces are doing. In numerous interviews, refugees and wounded who have fled the town described a systematic bombing and artillery campaign apparently aimed at killing as many people as possible, no matter who they are. Some Russian observers agreed.

''Present tactics in Chechnya imply war crimes are committed on a daily basis,'' commented Pavel Felgenhauer, a Russian military analyst in Moscow. ''The Russian Army in Chechnya is rapidly becoming an army of war criminals - like the Yugoslav Army of President Slobodan Milosevic.''

People from Samashki know something about atrocities and brutal tactics. Nearly 500 people were killed in two attacks by federal troops during Russia's 1994-1996 war in Chechnya. Nearly every house was badly damaged or destroyed.

But those interviewed said this time the damage is much worse. Among the weapons the Russians are using, refugees said, are ''Grad'' and ''Uragan'' antipersonnel rockets, which spread showers of shrapnel over a wide area, and ground-to-ground tactical rockets. The way the Chechens see it, this is ethnic cleansing from the sky.

''If the last war was a war against against Chechen fighters, then this is a war against the whole population,'' said Usam Baisayev, whose family operated a bathhouse on Cooperative Street, one of the few buildings still standing from the last war. Now it is gone, too. Baisayev's uncle, Isa, saw it blow up in a rocket attack last week.

The Baisayev family's 30 members are now living on the generosity of a friend in Ingushetia, crowded into a three-room hut and subsisting on thin soup and flat bread. They are among the 200,000 people who have fled the violence.

Anxious to avoid the bloody infantry battles that inflicted heavy losses on their troops during the last war, Russian forces have employed new tactics this time. They avoid entering Chechen towns, instead bombarding them with planes, artillery, and tactical rockets.

The Russians may also seek to depopulate towns like Samashki to deprive Chechen separatist militants of the support the towns provided in the last war. People from Samashki, though, said they were determined to stay out of the war this time. After the first Russian airstrikes in late September, the mayor, Leche Masayev, and town elders made the decision not to let Chechen fighters into town.

After that, townspeople said, the Russians said they would not fire on Samashki. Some who had fled for the neighboring Russian region of Ingushetia, like Khava and Madina Avturkhanova, came back in early October. It was a mistake.

The bombardment began in earnest on Oct. 22, when Russian troops sealed the border and a commander, General Alexander Belousov, announced that there were only ''bandits'' and ''terrorists'' in Samashki. That night, tank rounds and cloudburst shells landed first north of the center, then to the south, then on Cooperative Street. One person was killed.

''The Russians were just taking aim,'' said Usam Baisayev. ''After the last war, we have all become experts in Russian military tactics.''

Baisayev, a former journalist for a Chechen newspaper, was in Samashki in April 1995 when Russian paramilitary police went on a rampage, throwing grenades into cellars filled with women and children and firing flame throwers at civilians in the street. They said 96 civilians were killed.

In March 1996, 500 civilians were killed during heavy fighting in the town between federal troops and Chechen separatists. Houses that had been rebuilt during the lull were destroyed, turning Samashki into a virtual ghost town.

When Russian troops withdrew in late 1996, people came back and rebuilt once again. What had once been a relatively prosperous agricultural town, by rural Russian standards, was now barely scraping by. People grew their own vegetables and tended cattle and sheep. The separatist government in Grozny, having won de facto independence after the Russian pullout, offered only a little help. For a while there was light and gas.

When the bombing started again this fall, Samashki residents thought they knew what to expect. But nothing could prepare them for what happened Oct. 24, when the Russians began bombing in earnest.

At one moment, the Baisayevs were sitting in their makeshift home next to their bathhouse, listening to a Radio Liberty correspondent report that the Russians had just launched two tactical rockets toward Chechnya. Two minutes later, the rockets struck Samashki, followed by a hail of shrapnel from a salvo of Grad rockets.

Usam's aunt, Lena Baisayeva, an ethnic Russian, was getting dressed to prepare for a night in the cold bomb shelter the family shares with 70 other townspeople.

''Suddenly, the windows blew out and knocked me back,'' she said. ''I sensed a burning smell and it was suddenly light on the street, then it was foggy and you couldn't see anything.''

The two houses next to the Baisayevs' were destroyed. A girl who had fled fighting in northern Chechnya was killed. Samashki residents say the only reason more people were not killed was the deep ditches many people dug in their gardens, called ''wolf pits,'' something they learned from the last war.

''If you hide in a cellar, a direct hit on your house can bring the ruins down on you and trap you there,'' said Alikhadzhi Saitov, a Samashki refugee living in a chilly tent in the Ingush town of Karabulak.

But then the Russians changed tactics again.

''Now the planes and helicopters fly around in a circle, like vultures, waiting for anything to move,'' said Isa Baisayev, Lena's husband. ''They fire the rockets, and you never hear them coming until they hit.''

More civilians died each day. Old man Ramzan. Anzar, the goalie on the local soccer team.

On Oct. 29, the Russians promised to open the border with Ingushetia and let civilians flee. Dozens of people from Samashki joined a convoy of refugees from Grozny and other parts of Chechnya. But when they reached the border, the Russian troops turned them back. As the convoy passed Samashki, planes and helicopters closed in and opened fire, killing at least 25 and wounding more than 70.

Still trapped in Chechnya, the wounded were forced to go to a hospital in nearby Urus Martan. But the Russians bombed there, too.

''Each time, we had to carry the patients down to the cellar,'' Khava Avturkhanova said. It was only three days later that the Russians let her take her daughter Madina, who suffered two broken arms and a broken right leg, to the safer and better-equipped hospital in Sleptsovskaya.

Madina was also wounded in the last war, when a shell fragment broke her left leg. Khava's brothers and father are still in Samashki. She has no idea where her husband and two other children are.

The Russians have set up checkpoints on the border where they inspect all men ages 15 to 50 for signs that they have been fighting. Some men are led away by the Russians. Ingush police say they are being taken to a ''filtration camp'' in the main Russian military base 30 miles north of here.

Lena Baisayeva went back to Samashki Thursday. Someone has to tend to the cattle and check on what family belongings are left.

However great the danger, the people of Samashki know that one day they will have to go back and live there again.