Female Suicide Bombers Unnerve Russians
By Steven Lee Myers

August 7, 2003 – (NYT) Zulikhan Yelikhadzhiyeva lived much of her short life surrounded by the horrors of the two wars in Chechnya, but she suffered comparatively little.

She lived in a cloistered brick house in this small Chechen village, which has largely escaped war's worst ravages. She studied at the village's medical vocational school and interned at its local clinic.

Little seems to explain why a month ago, accompanied by another woman, she approached the entrance to a music festival in Moscow and blew herself up. The blast killed only her, but the other woman detonated her own suicide bomb moments later, killing at least 16 people. Ms. Yelikhadzhiyeva was 20.
In the last four months, seven suicide attacks, all but one of them carried out by women, have spread fear across Russia, killing 165 people in all and setting in motion a new dynamic in the four-year-old war against Chechen secessionists.

Russian news media, echoing officials, have dubbed the perpetrators "black widows," women prepared to kill and to die to avenge the deaths of fathers, husbands, brothers and sons at the hands of Russian troops in the current war or the one in the 1990's.

But Ms. Yelikhadzhiyeva - identified, officials said, by a passport found at the scene - does not fit such a description. Here in Chechnya, truth is elusive and what, precisely, drives these women, and how they are recruited, seem murky. Ms. Yelikhadzhiyeva had no dead father, husband, brother or son to motivate her.

The suicide attacks by women have particularly unnerved the Russian authorities, in part because Chechen women had been able to move more freely than Chechen men, who are routinely harassed by Russia's police and security services.

The only recent attack not carried out by a woman was the truck bombing of a military hospital in Mozdok on Friday, which left 50 dead at last count.
In Ms. Yelikhadzhiyeva's case, neither the authorities nor those who knew her could say exactly what compelled her to blow herself up. In February she disappeared in circumstances that remain mysterious.

Her grandmother, Zuda Khasukhanova, said she had been kidnapped on the orders of her half-brother. The authorities said she joined one of Chechnya's rebel groups.She had not married. According to her grandmother and a neighbor who knew her all her life, she displayed little interest in the radical Islamic ideology that has increasingly characterized Chechnya's separatist fighters. She planned to continue studying medicine.

"We had such a good family," Ms. Khasukhanova said in an interview, punctuated with tears, in the house where she had lived with her granddaughter. "She was like an angel."

Imran Yezhiyev, the head of the Society of Chechen-Russian Friendship, an advocacy group in the region of Ingushetia, on Chechnya's western boundary, said in a telephone interview that the suicide attacks were an inevitable response to the "most crude, the most terrible" crimes Russian forces had committed against Chechen civilians during the war.

"They are desperate because they see no prospect of this horrible war ending," he said of the suicide bombers.

At the same time, though, he said he and other elders had denounced the tactic as anathema to Chechen traditions of honor.

Most Chechens, in fact, have not embraced a cult of martyrdom, as have, for example, Palestinian suicide bombers in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In Kurchaloi there are no posters or graffiti celebrating Ms. Yelikhadzhiyeva's suicide. Those interviewed here in Chechnya professed shock and horror.
"How can a person who kills somebody get to heaven?" said her grandmother, who is 63. "It's horrible what's going on in Chechnya right now."

Russian officials, who bristle at any suggestion that abuses by Russian forces could have inspired any of the suicide attacks, have blamed the influence of Islamic fundamentalists, including foreign groups associated with international terrorism.

Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky, President Vladimir V. Putin's senior adviser on Chechnya, suggested in an interview published in the weekly newspaper Sobesednik last month that Islamic extremists had co-opted the "black widows" against their will to become suicide bombers.

"Chechens are turning these young girls into zombies using psychotropic drugs," Mr. Yastrzhembsky said. "I have heard that they rape them and record the rapes on video. After that, such Chechen girls have no chance at all of resuming a normal life in Chechnya. They have only one option: to blow themselves up with a bomb full of nails and ball bearings."

Mr. Yastrzhembsky and other officials have provided scant evidence of links to international terrorism. They seem to know little about how the suicide attacks have been planned, organized and carried out.

According to some reports, there may be as many 36 "black widows." Last month Russia's deputy prosecutor general, Sergei N. Fridinsky, said the suicide bombers were being trained inside and outside Chechnya, but he did not elaborate.

The Russian authorities have now expanded their arbitrary security checks to woman dressed in scarves or other clothing characteristic of Chechnya's Muslim majority, prompting the country's largest Muslim organization to warn of "religious and racial apartheid."

Prosecutors' greatest lead came with the arrest of Zarema Muzhikhoyeva, a 22-year-old Chechen who was arrested after trying unsuccessfully to detonate a bomb at a cafe on Tverskaya on the night of July 9.

Her husband is reported to have died, but in a car accident, not in the struggle against Russian forces. She also reportedly has an infant daughter.

The newspaper Kommersant, citing unidentified investigators, reported last month that Ms. Muzhikhoyeva arrived in Moscow from Nazran, the capital of Ingushetia, a week before the attempted bombing.

She was met by a Chechen woman - named Lyuba and dubbed Black Fatima in news reports, after a common Chechen name - who provided her with the explosives and plied her with orange juice that made her disoriented, suggesting that she had been drugged, the newspaper said.

Officials said her arrest led to the discovery of a cache of suicide bombs in a small village on Moscow's outskirts on July 24, but they have so far announced no arrests of accomplices. A spokesman for the prosecutor general's office declined to discuss the investigation into her case or that of Ms. Yelikhadzhiyeva.

Kurchaloi is a village of 10,000 about 18 miles east of Chechnya's capital, Grozny. The roads into it are blocked by bleak checkpoints manned by Russian and Chechen soldiers. Its streets are gutted and dusty, but the village has not been the center of the fierce fighting that has reduced cities like Grozny to apocalyptic ruins.

Ms. Yelikhadzhiyeva lived with her father, Suleiman, her mother and a younger sister and younger brother, said her grandmother, Ms. Khasukhanova. None, she said, were involved in Chechnya's separatist conflicts.

Ms. Yelikhadzhiyeva's father, she said, lived on a disability pension and had a 21-year-old son, Danilkhan, from a first marriage that ended in divorce soon after he was born.

Their relationship was estranged, and the son drifted into the fundamentalist branch of Islam known as Wahhabism, which has made inroads into Chechnya from Saudi Arabia.

The grandmother said Russian forces entered the village last November to arrest a cell of what she called Arab fighters who were living in two houses on the same street.

The houses were destroyed.

She said Ms. Yelikhadzhiyeva's father had been detained for questioning for 24 hours, beaten by interrogators and then released.

Afterward he fled with his wife and youngest son, living in a refugee camp in Ingushetia, though he returned on occasion. Ms. Yelikhadzhiyeva remained, with her younger sister, Iman.

Nothing is known about what happened to Ms. Yelikhadzhiyeva after she disappeared in February. Ms. Khasukhanova explained that she had been abducted on the orders of her half-brother, Danilkhan, and driven away in a white car with a man and two other women.

A spokesman for Chechnya's interior ministry, Ruslan Atsayev, said in a telephone interview that the authorities had been informed of her disappearance but concluded that she had left voluntarily.

He added that Danilkhan was known as a separatist guerrilla who went by the nickname the Afghan and that Ms. Yelikhadzhiyeva's family had been too intimidated by him to file an official report on her disappearance.

Mr. Atsayev said there were reports that Ms. Yelikhadzhiyeva had traveled at some point, possibly with Danilkhan, to the republic of Georgia, which borders Chechnya on the south. Other officials have said it was more likely that she went to Moscow through Ingushetia.

Kheda, a neighbor who would speak on the condition she only be identified by her first name, because she feared retaliation, said it was inconceivable that
Ms. Yelikhadzhiyeva had adopted extremist ideas.

"She studied," Kheda said. "She was a cultured girl, a modern girl. She could not have had anything like this in her mind."