| A Vremya Novostei correspondent tried to figure out what was actually happening in Nalchik over the past few days.
Day two
By Friday evening, the road from Mineralnye Vody to Nalchik was covered in places by such thick fog that ambulances moving towards us from the direction of the Kabardino-Balkarian capital were barely visible. The fog and these cars created a sense of anxiety even among private taxi drivers, who, having seen enough hot TV news, raised prices on the Minvody-Nalchik route by as much as four times. Prices returned to the “peaceful” level by Saturday evening. But drivers living in areas adjacent to the CBD remain wary. They are afraid that after the current events, the republic will have to forget about tourists and skiers for several years. For a region that largely relies on tourism, this threatens, if not disaster, then a deepening crisis.
The strengthening of the regime was felt immediately upon leaving the Stavropol Territory - there were five times more police officers at the post than usual. The next post, already Kabardian, located at the Kyzburun intersection before the turn to Baksan, bristled with several firing points lined with sandbags. At the Shalushka checkpoint, right at the entrance to Nalchik, excited police officers warned my Stavropol driver: “They’re shooting in the city, be careful. Don’t drive too far, to the bus station and back.” By this time they had been shooting for two days. “Shalushka” looked quite militaristic. Immediately behind the police post there were military personnel - two infantry fighting vehicles and several soldiers. Not fully trusting the police, they again checked every entering car.
On Friday night, a whole group of journalists who had flown from Moscow on the last evening flight to Mineralnye Vody froze at this post for about five hours. From midnight until almost morning they were categorically refused to be allowed into the city. The drivers from Mineralnye Vody, who took the press representatives to the post and were convinced that something serious was really going on in Nalchik, turned around and drove home, leaving the passengers right on the side of the road. Someone thought of calling a taxi from the city. The cars arrived and stopped on the inside of the post, but the journalists were not allowed to cross the city limits on foot. Only around five in the morning did the checkpoint authorities change their anger to mercy.
Some of the journalists who broke into the city even managed to catch up with the main events of Friday. At this point, the militants continued to control two points - the so-called third police department in the Iskozh district and the Gifts store in the very center of the city. They had hostages at both points. The operation in the 3rd Department of Internal Affairs ended around seven in the morning - the bandits agreed to provide them with a so-called corridor, along which they set off together with the hostages in a packed Gazelle. The Gazelle, however, almost immediately lost control - some eyewitnesses believe that the militants were specially given a car with a faulty steering rod, while others claim that the driver and the militant sitting next to him were killed by a sniper. The Gazelle that crashed into a pole was fired upon and taken by storm. According to one version, all the hostages in it, the number of which remained unclear, survived. According to another, there were no hostages in the minibus at all.
The second act of the Friday morning drama took place around nine in the morning in the city center, when special forces stormed the Gifts store, located opposite the building of the republican FSB, disfigured by explosions. The battle with the two terrorists, who by that time were holding two hostages in the store, lasted about an hour. As a result, both militants died, and the women were hospitalized with poisoning from the gas used by the attackers. It is believed that one of the militants killed in Podarki was former Ingush policeman and prominent Wahhabi Ilyas Gorchkhanov. He, like Kabardian Anzor Astemirov, was considered the organizer of last year’s December attack on the State Drug Control Agency in Nalchik. Gorchkhanov, apparently, turned out to be the only relatively large catch of the security forces as a result of the current events in Nalchik.
"They are all young, about twenty years old"
On Friday evening, despite information about ongoing shootings, life had already returned to Nalchik. Some streets in the center were still blocked, but the rest were already full of cars, public transport was running, and people were crowding at the bus stops. True, not a single cafe was open and almost all the shops were also closed. It was only on Saturday morning that their owners finally felt that the threat had passed. By Saturday, the last cordons had already been lifted. Only at the dilapidated FSB did armored personnel carriers continue to be on duty, reinforced posts were visible at government buildings, and in the evening, on the quiet and empty streets of the resort sector, one could hear the rude shout of an armed patrol.
The shootings, however, continued on Saturday. In the middle of the day, for example, the taxi dispatch service notified drivers not to go to Kabardinskaya, in the area where the border guard detachment was located. The military and police continued a large clean-up operation. The exact number of militants who took part in the attack is still unknown to anyone, so even now it is impossible to say how many of them could still remain in the city, and how many went to the green camp.
The figures for Nalchik are generally very flexible. On Friday evening, Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev reported 72 militants killed and 31 detained. On Saturday morning, the President of the Republic Arsen Kanokov named the number of attackers - 150 people. The difference, apparently, should indicate that the order of the head of state not to release the militants from Nalchik was not fully fulfilled.
This, however, is confirmed by the stories of local residents. In the Balkar suburb of Khasanya, for example, they saw a group of militants who arrived from the city in a car with two hostages. They say that one hostage was shot right in Khasanya. They also wanted to kill the second one, but the shot turned out to be non-lethal, and the prisoner survived. The militants went into the forest. Nobody gives an answer to the question of whether the person executed was included in the lists of dead civilians.
According to official data, the number of civilian casualties does not exceed two dozen. Townspeople claim that in reality there are at least twice as many of them. In any case, many people still continue to look for their relatives, about whom it is known for sure that they are not militants.
The situation is approximately the same with the estimate of the number of participants in the attack. Official reports show figures from several tens to three hundred. An interlocutor of Vremya Novostei, close to the Muslim community of Nalchik, believes that there were about 200 attackers: they attacked 11 or 12 objects simultaneously in groups of five, seven, ten people. In his opinion, local residents made up approximately half of the entire detachment, the rest came from other republics, and possibly countries. Eyewitnesses of the attack say that the militants were quite clearly divided into younger and less experienced ones, who even did not always have enough camouflage, and other, more trained and well-equipped dogs of war.
The bodies of killed militants were lying on the streets and in buildings on Friday, in places where the most serious clashes took place. Three bodies lay near the building of the FSB Directorate of Kabardino-Balkaria, destroyed by an explosion, at the intersection of Nogmova and Lenin streets. A little further along Nogmova, at the 2nd Department of Internal Affairs, there were 14 bodies left. Several more corpses of militants remained right in the building of school No. 5. “They are all young, no more than 20 years old,” says eyewitness Luiza Orazaeva. - Muslims are supposed to bury before lunch the next day after death. And the police did not specifically pick up the bodies, probably so that others would be discouraged next time.” In some places, the bodies lay there for almost two days and even began to decompose. It was only on Friday evening that a refrigerator truck picked them up.
The body of the killed militant Afov lay for almost two days under the windows of a residential building at the intersection of Nogmov and Pushkin streets. Someone took a sheet from the house and covered him. This sheet, soaked in blood, can still be seen on the sidewalk. Next to her lie an old soldier's pea coat and a brand new army "unloader". Local homeless people are already trying on the peacoat, and the “unloading” attracts the keenest attention of young people: everyone considers it their duty to feel it with the tip of their shoe to see if by chance there is a machine gun horn or a grenade left. A cordon was set up around the murdered man, and the militant’s relatives spent the whole day trying to persuade them to let them in to the body: “Be people, my little brother is lying there.” But the soldiers and policemen were adamant.
The bodies of militants will most likely not be released to relatives - this is the current anti-terrorism law. Representatives of the Muslim community of the republic consider this law to be erroneous: “The first thing that needs to be done is to give people a humane burial for the dead. Perhaps this would at least partially mitigate the consequences of what happened. 70 killed means 1000-1500 relatives who are now, in theory, ready to take revenge. It is very important that this mutual revenge and hatred of policemen and believers does not begin. If it starts, the Dagestan version of Kabardino-Balkaria can no longer be avoided.”
For now, Muslims are anxiously following the dynamics of police statistics: over the past 24 hours, the number of killed militants has increased by almost two dozen, and the number of those detained has decreased by approximately the same amount. And it is unlikely that representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs will be able to convince anyone that this movement in numbers is the result of inaccuracy in counting bodies in conditions close to combat.
“I never thought that people would run from us to Chechnya”
Director of the Nalchik Institute of Islamic Studies Ruslan Nakhushev, whom authorities have long considered one of the leaders of the so-called Kabardino-Balkarian jamaat, says that he feared the worst after the introduction of additional military and internal troops into the republic: “But so far they are behaving very correctly.” Mr. Nakhushev fears that terror could begin in two or three days, when the funeral takes place. “I am very sorry for both the dead employees and those who were among the attackers,” he says. “We, both Kabardians and Balkars, are very small peoples, and under no circumstances should we allow a civil war to break out.” It so happened that in Kabardino-Balkaria the Ministry of Internal Affairs is the only conductor of the state’s religious policy. The time has come to understand that this is not entirely correct. Religious extremism must be countered with something other than a boot and a butt.”
Ruslan Nakhushev, whose name appears on the list of Wahhabis compiled by the police, is now grateful to the police: they took his 13-year-old daughter Inara out from under fire. The fifth school, where Inara studies, is located directly opposite the Republican Anti-Terrorism Center, which became one of the targets of the attackers on the morning of October 13. The militants who attacked Center T occupied the second floor of the school building as a firing position. Everyone who was in the building at that moment thought about one thing - that the Fifth School of Nalchik could repeat the fate of the First School of Beslan. In a matter of minutes, the children were taken through the assembly hall and courtyard to the territory of the neighboring stadium. Policemen from the 2nd Department of Internal Affairs literally covered the children with their bodies. “Inara’s diary and backpack are pierced by bullets in two places,” says Nakhushev.
A repetition of Beslan that day was feared in all schools and kindergartens, and panic was not avoided in all cases. At school No. 14, teachers suggested that the children leave school on their own. By the time the parents, who heard the shooting, came running there, the students were no longer there. “At first they said that they were driven to the House of Public Services,” says Tatyana, the mother of ninth-grader Rustam. “I ran to the House of Public Services, but there was no one there either. I no longer knew where to run when I saw my son in the courtyard of the house: thank God, he found himself.”
Having met her son, Tatyana hurried to work - she has a furniture store on the first floor of a large residential building on Kirova Street. She got to the store at about half past ten in the morning and, like many other residents of Nalchik, completely unexpectedly found herself in the line of fire. In the same house and even in the same room as the furniture store there is the Arsenal hunting store, which also turned out to be one of the targets of the militants. Hoping to replenish their supply of weapons, the militants drove a tractor to the store and pulled out the window bars of one of the display cases. Tatyana saw how, literally a few minutes later, one of its employees, Kabardian Anzor, drove up to the store. “He apparently thought that the store had been robbed, and mistook the people in camouflage and masks standing by the broken window for operatives,” says Tatyana. - He went up to them and asked: “What, guys, have you endured a lot?” And they come at him with guns. The nearest militant pointed a machine gun at him, and immediately a sniper, a policeman from the 2nd District Department of Internal Affairs, shot him in the head from the roof. Anzor immediately ran. He still can’t come to his senses.”
Anzor, who arrives at the store during our conversation, is indeed very laconic. He arrives accompanied by a whole group of operatives. He explains to them that the militants simply did not have time to break into the store’s weapons room and therefore took away almost nothing.
“We also have small losses,” says Tatyana. - Except for the fact that we can’t work with broken windows, and while we don’t work, we’re losing money. We already have to lie to suppliers all the time that everything is fine here. Otherwise, they will stop bringing anything here at all.” Tatiana and her shopping partner Lydia are Russian. Tatyana says that she would love to leave Nalchik, but there is nowhere to go. Lydia is very determined to leave.
But the Chechens are most determined to leave. According to official data, there are about 30 thousand of them in the republic, according to unofficial data - twice as many. In particular, many families of the current Grozny authorities live in Nalchik. In recent days, they have been rapidly leaving their homes and leaving for Chechnya. At the Nizhny Kurp checkpoint, through which it is most convenient to get to Chechnya, there are queues of 20-30 cars, mostly Chechen. The neighborhoods of Nalchik, favored by the diaspora, are emptying before our eyes. Among Kabardians, there are the usual pogrom rumors in such situations about Chechen children who disappeared from schools, kindergartens and sanatoriums in advance.
“I never thought that people would run from us to Chechnya, and not vice versa,” says one of my friends. “Can you imagine, on the 13th, a friend called me from Grozny, saying that she was watching TV and was very worried about Nalchik.”
"We are fighting for faith and freedom"
57-year-old Zhenya Gergokova does not yet know how and where she will live next after the drama she suffered: on Saturday she had a hypertensive crisis, and her relatives are seriously afraid for her fate. Zhenya was one of five hostages who were captured by militants on Thursday morning in the Gifts store. Apparently, in Podarki they retreated from the FSB building, where, despite the destruction, they were resolutely resisted.
“Gifts,” which mainly sells kitchen utensils and simple souvenirs, opened at nine o’clock in the morning, even before the start of the battle. A visitor even came there - a young woman from Cherkessk, who was picking out a surprise for one of her friends. At 9.15, distant shooting, which began on the outskirts of the city in the area of Baysultanov Street, where militants attacked the 1st Department of Internal Affairs, reached the center. Militants attacked the FSB building, throwing explosives at the doors. The doors and parts of the facade were thrown into the middle of Lenin Street by the explosion. The battle went on for quite a long time. At some point, the militants realized that they were losing ground to the defenders and fled. Two of them, grabbing a couple of gaping women right on the street, jumped into “Gifts” and locked the doors behind them. Zhenya Gergokova was among those who by that time were already in the store: she works there as a salesperson.
Hours of waiting stretched on. Zhenya says that there was no shootout as such. The militants from time to time negotiated with the police and military who besieged them. The hostages were very afraid that the store would be stormed: in the North Caucasus, operations of this kind are usually carried out using all available types of weapons, with the help of which any room can quickly be turned into a pile of smoking ruins. The relatives of the hostages, who crowded around the cordon and begged the officers not to give the order for the assault, were also afraid of this.
The militants, according to Zhenya, behaved quite tolerably, even leaving mobile phones for the hostages and allowing them to call relatives. Zhenya didn’t tell her relatives about the militants, but simply said that because of the shelling and the cordon, she couldn’t leave work. But the relatives found out everything anyway. When at about seven on Thursday evening, about nine hours after the events began, the militants agreed to exchange two women for water, Zhenya was one of the two lucky ones. When she came out, her strength immediately left her, and if it weren’t for her relatives, she would have been lying fainted on the asphalt. Now Zhenya is resting at home, happy that she got out of trouble: her unfortunate friends are still in intensive care.
Zhenya was most impressed by the fact that the militants, each of whom had a knife in one hand and a machine gun in the other, performed namaz at the appointed time. This was so struck by hostages that they began to ask the militants, how their faith and war were correlated. “We are fighting for faith and freedom,” the militants answered. Whether one of them was Ilyas Gorchkhanov, Zhenya does not know.
"It is not written in any Qur'an to kill people"
“I still remember how I went to this cinema,” says taxi driver Arsen. We stand in front of the box in front of the box at the intersection of Teberdinskaya and Kalmykova streets, in the Nalchik district a free aul. It was once a cinema "Cosmos". Then, about the mid-90s, this place became an impromptu mosque. It was this free-Aul mosque that became the spiritual center of the so-called Jamaat Kabardino-Balkaria. “Then the mosques grew like mushrooms,” Arsen continues to recall. The imam of the free -Aul mosque Mousse Mukozhev is now hiding, although officially no one has put him on the wanted list. Mukozhev is considered a Amir of Kabardino-Balkaria-in the present time, this semi-underground title means, apparently, much more than all the spiritual administration of Muslims. Spiritual management does not like competitors. The free -Aul mosque has been closed since last year. The symbolic minaret was demolished, the sports section and the office of the local administration were opened in the building.
“When the mosque was opened, up to 1,500 believers gathered here on Fridays,” says Ruslan Nakhushev, who, until December last year, maintained contacts with Musa Mukozhev. - Now she was closed, the believers are simply nowhere to go. Two weeks before this attack on Nalchik, two thousand people were going to pray in honor of the beginning of the month of Ramadan on the banks of the river - they were dispersed by the police. Gathering more than ten people in the republic is generally dangerous - they will immediately come to find out what is the matter. It is bad that Jamaat was actually dispersed. After all, in the mosques, one could at least somehow follow the people gathered there. And now they will create small groups that no one can control at all. The threat of repeating the Dagestan version is very great, and it is very important to prevent this. ”
Ruslan Nakhushev believes that in Kabardino-Balkaria about nine thousand believers of Muslims, who do not attach importance to the authority of the official clergy. From the point of view of the clergy and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, they are all Wahhabis whose goals are a change in the state structure and the creation of an Islamic caliphate. They themselves claim that they simply hold another view of Islam and want to have the right to pray in their own way.
Nakhushev has many acquaintances among these believing youth, but he claims that none of these people took part in a raid on Nalchik. The motivation of plaque is not clear to him: he is convinced that it is still impossible to correct the situation with such methods, and they can only lead to the transformation of Kabardino-Balkaria into a second Chechnya. But it is necessary to correct the situation, according to the interlocutor of “News Time”, the authorities should still go on dialogue with the Muslim community and take care of the cessation of persecution on a religious basis: “Girls dressed in Islam are humiliated, young people are broken in interrogations, bones are broken in interrogations, And on their heads they cut crosses only because they go to the mosque and read the Qur'an. The spiritual control in all these cases is silent. People often just have no choice but to take up weapons. I told you that there are several dozen people who are ready to go to death? (see "News time" of September 29) They were found. "
“I do not want to know such a faith for which you can come and kill innocent people,” says Kabardian Aslan. - It is not written in any Qur'an that you can kill. But, on the other hand, the police are to blame. Yes, peaceful people were injured, but they attacked them not on civilians, but primarily for employees. And our employees are what are unlimited faces. A person worships the Almighty, they can throw him into the car for this, take him somewhere out of town and bury him there. They seem to bring people themselves specially. All through these killings and through the Ministry of Internal Affairs. If the Ministry of Internal Affairs stops them, nothing more will happen again. ”
Aslan, like almost all my interlocutors in Nalchik, is clearly dissatisfied with the praise, which the highest authorities distribute to the leadership of the Kabardino-Balkaria Ministry of Internal Affairs. “Yes, they also died, they are also sorry. But their work was to prevent an attack. I will not say that those who attacked were done correctly. You can’t kill people, all issues can be resolved. There are feds, there are higher international instances, a red cross in The Hague for example ... But the Kabardino-Balkarian power itself is to blame for what happened. If Arsenchik, the new president (President of the KBR Arsen Kanokov. - Ed. ), Will not drive these old people, nothing will change, and then it will be possible to wait for repetition. ”
The taxi driver Arsen carefully argues about religion: “What is there in the next world, no one knows, because no one returned from there. They say that those who died in Ramadan immediately go to heaven, therefore, probably, they went to death. ” From the acquaintances of Arsen, the younger brother of his friend-police officer, a 27-year-old guy who was engaged in construction and repair in Essentuki and Pyatigorsk, went to death. This guy was a believers - he did not drink, did not smoke, followed the posts and never showed that he could take up the weapon.
Now his brother -ipperior brother has serious problems at work. Arsen called him home, asked if he was allowed to pick up at least a corpse, a friend replied that this was a non -complement conversation. As they say, this is far from the only case in which the street fighting line on October 13 was held between close relatives and bosom friends.
Jihad did not do without looting. Arsen tells how, having escaped in the morning of the 13th of the shootout at the FSB, he returned home and found his neighbor killed. “This family recently sold KamAZ, the money was lying at home. Someone found out, and two right on that morning, when they shot everywhere, climbed into the house. The woman was tied up, but the man who washed the car in the yard heard a scream and rushed to the aid. He was also threw and tied him up. His mother went there to the noise, but he, connected, waved her hand, go away, they say. She understood and ran after the police. Those two took the money, thought of leaving, but then they returned and shot a man from a cut. The hostess remained alive. And the police arrived only in the evening. " Ivan Sukhov, Nalchik-Moscow
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