From Chelni To Guantanomo
Tatar's City Jihad Goes International
NABEREZHNYI CHELNI -- Just over ten years ago, Emina Bakhtova was a lot like Soviet professionals all across the USSR's provincial cities: she wore conservative polyester Soviet suits, an Eastern Bloc beehive hairdo that personified the golden years of Brezhnev's Stagnation, and went to work every day pushing around figures that had little relation to the world outside.

TOTs President Rafis Kashapov.
Today, it's not easy to discern Bakhtova's hairstyle; a heavy veil obscures it. Her clothes are still polyester, but instead of Soviet conservative, the style is traditional Muslim, covering her entire body except for a small portion of her face. She is a part of a small community of deeply devout Muslims in Chelni that the Russian government labels as extremists and would like to stamp out.
At first glance, the government seems to have a point -- Bakhtova's son Airat is currently being held by American troops in a prison in Kandahar, where he was presumably answering the call to jihad. Two of the three Russian prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Shamil Khazhiyev (alias Almaz Sharipov) and Ravil Gumarov, also have roots in this dismal eastern Tatarstan town. Eleven others from the area are doing time for setting off a bomb along a gas pipe on the road from Kazan to Kirov.
I arrived in Chelni with my CNN and Disney informed image of foul smelling Islamic fundamentalist psychos whose minds have been warped by an overdose of Koran-feeding. I hoped to get a glimpse into the culture that spawned such radicals. Instead, I found a marginalized cross section of Tatar nationalists and pious Muslims struggling to exist and survive despite oppression at the hands of the Russian state and society. They were just about the only people among the general vodka-drenched despair and post Soviet decay that is Chelni who had an ideology coherent enough to give their lives meaning and coherence. Far from being bloodthirsty radicals, the people I met seemed better able to cope with the post-Soviet crisis better than anyone.
"We don't want everything, just what is ours," said Bakhtova. "They [the government] abuse the land, they pollute our water, they take all our money and resources. It's not just the Muslims who think this, either; ask the Russians and they'll agree." It would be hard not to; Tatarstan is one of a handful of Russian regions that contributes more to the federal budget then they receive. 60 percent of the republic's tax revenues are sent to Moscow. Abuse is everywhere.
Even the men taken prisoner in Afghanistan were not the inhuman Al Qaeda fighters I expected to hear about. In fact, most of the people I talked to believe that they fled Russia to escape persecution from the FSB. If they hadn't run away, they'd probably be doing time alongside the eleven men convicted in the gas pipe bombing.
It is a story that has already repeated itself throughout former Soviet Central Asia with devastating consequences. In response to the crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, a portion of the population turns deeper towards its religion; the government, in fear, represses them; and in response to government repression, the Muslims become radicalized.
Chelni is a prefab Soviet city of 600,000 that sprang into existence in 1972 with the founding of the KamAZ factory on its outskirts. Inexplicably, it is now divided into the New City and the Old City, even though I only counted four pre-Brezhnev-era buildings in the entire Old City. Ethnically, like the rest of Tatarstan, Chelni is pretty evenly split between Tatars and Russians. There is only one real street, and to get around town you simply tell your driver a number; saying the street name would be redundant.
To this day, the massive truck factory is virtually the city's only employer. This didn't even change after a fire hobbled the plant several years ago and left it virtually idle. Production is slowly picking up, and the number of low paid workers along with it, thanks to high tariffs, but the region remains among the most depressed in oil-rich Tatarstan.
According to Shamil Shamsutdinov, Tatarstan's deputy representative in Moscow, the lack of jobs is what made Chelni so popular among radicals. "Chelni is a young city and, unfortunately, KamAZ fell on hard times with perestroika," he said from his large office looking out on the Moscow River. "Now, they've got the most active radical community in Tatarstan."
That "radical" community has two main branches, although both groups are small enough to be familiar with the other. The Tatar Public Center (TOTs) represents the secular nationalists and has about 300 active members. Ironically, in spite of the fact that TOTs' primary goal is landlocked Tatarstan's political and economic independence from Russia, the government feels much less threatened by them, and is content to harass them periodically.
The other branch is that of the devout Muslims. While all Tatars identify as Muslims (much like all Russians are Orthodox), most enjoy eating pork and drinking alchohol as much as the next infidel. Observant Muslims make up an insignificant minority and, from what I saw, hardly seemed threatening.
Malik Ibragimov, one of the two imams in Chelni's central mosque who trained in Saudi Arabia, has a voice that sounds closer to an American convert to Zen Buddhism than to a radical Islamic fundamentalist. Talking with him only made me more aware of my own ignorance. During my time in Chelni, I realized I'd never exchanged more than a few words with a religious Muslim before.
Far from the firebrand I expected and even hoped to find, Ibragimov defined Islam as a personal inner struggle between good and evil (which, in fact, is the greater jihad according to the Prophet Mohammed).
Only when prodded did he discuss his politics. He asked that I keep his opinions off record, but I will say that everything he said about Israel, bin Laden, Chechnya and Afghanistan fell well within the Muslim mainstream.
And yet this soft-spoken 38-year-old imam and his followers are treated like a serious threat to the state. His predecessor at the central mosque, Airat Bakhtov, was jailed for two months without a warrant just as Ibragimov started working there. Around the same time, Ioldyuz, the madrassah attached to the mosque, was shut down by court order for not having a license to teach. Other members of his congregation claim to be harassed regularly by the spets sluzhba, while TOTs alleges that the FSB detained over 1000 young Muslim men throughout Russia in a 1999 post-apartment bombing roundup. And then there are the eleven prisoners that Ibragimov and others consider political prisoners who were framed by the FSB.
"They call Islam radical when we preach against using alcohol," said Ibragimov.
The bizarre story of Imam Airat Bakhtov, Emina's son who later wound up in Afghanistan, illustrates just how far repression can push a man. Airat's story has gotten some international attention, with an article about him by Natalie Nugaired published in Le Monde in February after Agence France Presse journalist Pierre Luilre discovered him in American captivity in Kandahar last January.
I expected a Johnny Walker sort of narrative of alienation that lead to spiritual awakening and jihad. But he and the other two Tatars known to have been in Afghanistan followed a very different path to the Taliban. "Bakhtov, Sharipov, and Gumarov were all very quiet and mild mannered," claimed Rafis Kashapov, the president of the Chelni branch of TOTs, who knew them through TOTs events.
Emina claimed that nobody in her entire building -- Tatar or Russian -- had a single negative thing to say about her son. She has no doubt that Airat ended up in Afghanistan because of FSB repression.
Emina, who now covers her head at all times, only became observant around the collapse of the Soviet Union. "I always believed in Allah, but I wasn't educated in religious law," she said. "I dressed and studied like everybody else until freedom of religion was introduced."
Her spiritual awakening was a quick one, though, and when Chelni's first madrassah opened in '93, Emina encouraged Airat to attend. Ever since he had meningitis in the first class, he had been a sickly kid and was regularly beaten up. "He was being raised by the TV and his school didn't teach him morality," she said.
So, as a scrawny loser in the ninth class, Airat reluctantly joined the madrassah because of his mother's insistence. At first he would come home every day to veg out watching hours of cartoons, but he gradually adjusted to his religious education and even excelled.
Unfortunately, his middle school education and three years of religious training didn't help him get a job. After a long search, his first job was at a new mosque in the town of Mendelevsky, but the long commute and his weak health made it impossible to maintain that schedule for long. Soon he quit and lived off his mother's meager salary.
His luck seemed to change when the new central mosque in Chelni opened across the street from their apartment. He became a popular imam and worked steadily until he made the ill informed decision to study in Chechnya for several months in 1999.
He was in Chechnya in between wars, but that was enough to draw the FSB's attention. Upon returning to Chelni, the FSB arrested him, in a wave of anti-Muslim arrests that TOTs head Kashapov said victimized over 1000 young men. "They held him for two months without any reason, just because he had studied in Chechnya," said Emina.
Rovil Kashapov, an FSB lieutenant colonel working in the Kazan bureau's press center, said as much. "He was arrested in '99 because he was in a camp in the Caucasus where both armed rebels and religious students trained," he said. "After two months, there was no proof of his involvement in military training and he was released."
According to Emina, they only let Airat out because of his weak health and a campaign headed by the Chelni TOTs to set him free. She also claims the FSB continued to harass her son, tapping the phones and repeatedly trying to recruit him as a spy. On Dec. 29, 1999, Airat left home for a week and hasn't been seen in Chelni since. Apparently, during his absence, the FSB called on his home in what Emina believed was an attempt to re-arrest him, and she told her son it would be better for him to disappear for a while.
Kashapov denied that the FSB harassed him after his release.
Around this same time, on Dec. 1, the gas line was bombed. According to the FSB's Kashapov, a group of Muslims who objected to the new Chechnya campaign planted the bomb, reasoning an attack on a gas pipeline would attract the attention of natural gas-dependent Europe. Within a month, ten suspects of various ethnicities were arrested and eventually convicted. The eleventh was caught on the border of Tajikistan and Afghanistan.
TOTs has a different version, blaming the blast (and that year's apartment bombings) on the FSB. They claim no convincing evidence was presented during the trial, and the suspect caught on the border was, like Airat, only trying to escape government repression.
The next time Emina heard anything from her son was on Dec. 14, 2001, when he called from an AFP cell phone in Kandahar, repeating "Mama, I'm free" over and over until the phone disconnected. In the interim, he had traveled to Afghanistan via Turkey, Iran and Central Asia, only to be arrested upon arrival by the Taliban, who believed he was a Russian agent. When the Americans arrived, he had been waiting for his death sentence to be carried out.
His and Emina's euphoria didn't last long, though. Within a week, he called again saying the Americans had taken him prisoner. At the beginning of January he called again, still a prisoner, and Emina hasn't heard from him since, except for a few brief letters dated December and routed through Geneva.
Russian newspapers have hypothesized that Airat will be arrested the minute he crosses into Russia for his illegal border crossing, which is one of the charges that will be leveled against the Russian Guantanamo prisoners. Emina, who has carefully saved every scrap written about her son or on his behalf since the persecution started, was desperate for any news of him.
As weird as Airat's story is, Kashapov, president of the Chelni TOTs bureau, claims that the chain of events that landed him in Afghanistan is far from unique. From a shabby, computerless office on the ninth floor of a ratty Soviet residential building, he agitates for Tatar independence and an end to persecution of Muslims. It was immediately clear that he wasn't in it for the money or glamour.
He claims that up to 1000 religious young men from Tatarstan and the surrounding regions, including Airat, Khazhiyev and Gumarov, were "thrown out [of Russia] for their Islamic beliefs." Although he doesn't have any proof, he believes that many of them probably wound up in Afghanistan.
Kashapov is clearly not a very observant Muslim, but he said he sympathized with everyone who went to fight against the Americans. "How can a Muslim watch bombs fall on a mosque with indifference?" he asked.
Kashapov was the only person I met who knew all three prisoners being held by the Americans. While he only knew Khazhiyev casually as Almaz (the name he often went by), he told me in some details about Gumarov, who often attended TOTs events with his wife Liliya and three daughters.
Gumarov had become religious in the mid-90's and was a small-time businessman involved in trade with Chechnya during the interwar period. According to the FSB's Kashapov, Gumarov, like Airat, came into their radar in 1999, around the time Putin was gearing up for another war in Chechnya. No actions were ever taken against him, the FSB's Kashapov said.
Understandably, the war was bad for Gumarov's business and it failed. Soon after, for reasons that are still not clear, he decided to leave Russia and wasn't heard of again until the Pentagon released his name as one of the prisoners in Guantanamo. When his wife Liliya heard the news, she flipped out and moved her family to Kazan. She could not be located for this article.
The TOTs president is convinced that Russian government pressure was at least part of the reason why Gumarov left Russia -- setting him on the course that led him to battle and surrender to the Americans.
Kashapov is familiar with government harassment tactics; TOTs used to have a somewhat nicer office, until the organization was expelled from it -- unconstitutionally, he says -- less than a year ago. A collection of OMON, FSB and militsia agents forced 50 TOTs members out on July 2, 2001, in what Kashapov labeled a pogrom.
Kashapov doesn't hide TOTs' ultimate goal of uniting the surrounding regions with large Turkic populations into a confederation independent of Russia; he even showed me a fanciful map with a united state stretching from Central Asia to Turkey that would impress any pan-Islamicist. "The faster Russia falls apart, the sooner this will happen," he reasoned.
It all seemed a bit absurd. Shamsutdinov, the deputy Tatarstan representative in Moscow, didn't seem too worried about their activities, saying "they have their ideas about independence, but the majority in Tatarstan understands that we are part of Russia."
Tatarstan was colonized by Ivan the Terrible 500 years ago; it is one of the last remnants of the Golden Horde that once ruled over Russia.
While Shamsutdinov isn't breaking a sweat over Tatar radicals, the Russian government isn't taking any chances -- on April 15, Russian tax inspectors ordered the Chelni TOTs to pay 23,995.23 rubles (about $770) in profit tax. According to Kashapov, the inspectors didn't make it clear what had been profited upon, or why it was suddenly acceptable to tax non-profit organizations.
Shamsutdinov claimed that such actions were taken as punitive measures because members of the Chelni TOTs fought in Chechnya against the Russians. "Local power took mild actions against TOTs there because, well, they live in Russia, are Russian citizens, and are bound to the law in Russia," he said.
Kashapov denies the allegation that they sent any fighters to Chechnya, although he is obviously sympathetic to the Chechen plight. They even organized a convoy of humanitarian aid (in KamAZ trucks) to help victims in Chechnya. As proof, Kashapov showed me a picture of him and Basaev together. "We are taking the political route to independence," he said. "While we have sympathy for the Chechens, we don't want any fighting here."
There are 148 TOTs offices in Tatarstan, with another 50 or so in neighboring regions, although Shamsutdinov claims that the Chelni branch is famous for its radical politics. They used to produce several newspapers, including Alechy Urda, Izvestiya TOTs, and Nezavisimost, although the last stopped printing in 1997, allegedly because of FSB harassment. "In Tatarstan, the FSB now controls all the media," Kashapov claimed.
He and others I talked to seemed particularly sensitive to the lack of representation of Muslims in the Russian media, even though there are 20 million Muslims in Russia. While Kashapov and his organization have catalogued long lists of attacks against Russia's 20 million Muslims by everybody from skinheads to politicians, he says the media usually only shows "a mosque, prayers and then some Wahhabi extremist with a Kalashnikov around his neck."
This lack of representation and the other obvious shortcomings in the Russian media, such as the Putin cult and the jingoistic Chechnya coverage, only strengthen the credibility of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the eyes of many Muslims. None of the Chelni nationalists or religious Muslims I talked with were entirely convinced of bin Laden's guilt.
As Airat's sister, who held up her veil so that I could only see her eyes, said, "Islam is a peaceful religion; it's the [Russian] soldiers returned from Chechnya who run around drunk saying, 'We've seen your type in Chechnya, and we raped and killed them.'"
Chelni's citizens' experience directly contradicts media reports.

In spite of the repression, the religious community in Chelni continues to practice. The madrassah that was closed by the courts continues to function in a semi-legal, unofficial capacity with about 70 students. According to Ibragimov, the imam, 80 percent of the students are girls since, he believes, "When a society is rotten, women are hurt by it more."
The numbers of practicing Muslims have steadied in recent years, he said, and Chelni's 10 mosques are currently enough to serve the community. The problem is funding, which is only available to 'official' mosques.
In a replay of a Soviet policy meant to control Islam and make it compatible with Communism, the Tatar government funds some mosques and a madrassah. The republic openly supports the Russian Islamic University, according to the mufti of Tatarstan Guzman Iskhakov. It is the only one of its kind in Russia, and he hopes to get federal funding for it soon. A degree from it even counts as an official document.
Meanwhile, the small community in Chelni remains completely segregated from the power structure financially, politically and culturally. Shamsutdinov, who depends on Russia for his comfortable Moscow lifestyle, rightly claims that most Tatars want to remain a part of Russia. But that's only because most Tatars and Russians are too busy trying to survive, or too hungover from trying to forget, to consider radical politics.
"We live in a colony and everything goes to Moscow," Airat's veiled sister said. "The Chechens didn't want to live in a colony any longer, and who can blame them?"
Luckily for Putin, there aren't any mountains where rebels can hide on the Tatar steppe.
Also in this Issue
Bardak Calendar
Zemfira at Maxidrom, Stanley's B-Day at Voodoo Lounge, Freestylers at Respublika Beefeater, Roger Waters at Olympiysky Stadium...
The Herd Instinct: Catholics
For those of you who missed our eXclusive web premiere, my name's Guy Beazley and I'll be your guide as we follow the rarely elusive Moscow press corps throughout their habitat with the eXile's Hack Herd Tracker...
SIC!
PEACE WHORE, KON-ARTIST, GIMME JIMMY!, BOX MUENCH-ER, SCHWARTZOCLES, KRA-Z ATTORNEY, HEN-PECKED...
Ze Angry European
Wat is een Premium Banana? Is Derk Sauer een Premium Banana?...
eXile Contest!
HEY, DEVUSHKI! SURVIVE TWO WEEKS WITH AMES... And WIN WIN WIN a free trip to Cyprus!...
Putin's Soul Evades Responsibility
Editorial
After the first historic meeting in Genoa between President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, the newly-elected American leader told the world press, "I looked the man in the eye and I was able to get a sense of his soul."...
Death Porn
The neighbor in Russia is an institution not to be underestimated... A rare Moscow murder reject linear progression... A couple of hit men were out pounding the pavement to make end meet over the holidays, too, just to keep us from noticing anything awry...
Crossing The Finnish Line
In every crime there is a pattern. Take a look here and see if you can pin the pattern on the pee-pee...
Searching for Little Shit
Chess
Kid's aren't THAT bad!" you might say. Well, the eXile sports desk has found one more reason to hate the little ones: they beat our asses in chess...
Dyev Endurance Journalism
Moscow Babylon
I got the idea for the dyev-endurance contest from Olya. We were together for the third day in one week. That's a lot of time for me to spend with a female in such a short period. I want to repeat that: three (3) days in one (1) week with the same woman...
Holy Shit!
The first thing airport security asked when we landed in Ben-Gurion Airport was, "Why did you decide to come to Israel? Don't you know there's a war here? Aren't you afraid?"...
Mighty Midget Does Moscow
Book Review
Let me be the first in the Moscow media to congratulate Derk Sauer on his new book, Typisch Russisch (Typically Russian). Why am I the first to do this?...
Tom Clancy Is Not One of Us
War Nerd
My first fan letter from the eXile was an email from some guy in Michigan who wanted the latest news on Tom Clancy. Yeah sure, that's why I'm here -- to help you kiss that rich fat coward's ass...
What Big Pupils!
Club Review
Sometimes it gets so intense that I need to step out and aWAY from the party - hang in the chill-out room of life. That was the plan when I got invited to KRASNAYA SHAPOCHKA's B-day celebration...
Drunk Record Reviews
CD REview
Sparklehorse's latest album is billed as having been recorded with drugs, which all music fans should recognize as a sign of Complete Shit. Boards of Canada do the whole "intelligent dance music" thing, while entirely forgetting that they play dance music...
The Secrets of Russian Cooking Revealed!
Cheburek, that deep fried staple with its crispy outside and processed innards... If you are someone who has only ever tried one on the street, you don't know what you are missing...
Dios Mio!
Restaurant Review
Should a Moscow restaurant be so proud that it serves mojitos that it is justified in placing that info in a disproportionately large red font? The answer, for the management of the new Spanish joint PINCHOS, is an unqualified "Yes"...
Whore-O-Scopes
I had plenty of time to chart your stars on those long waits on the side of the MKAD...
Creepy Crawly Clones
Kino Korner
This week's crop of new releases -- Spider-Man, Star Wars Episode 2 -- Attack of the Clones, and Blade II -- presents an especially difficult dilemma for the discerning moviegoer...
I, Michael McFaul, Writes Good
Press Review
Let me just say right off the bat that I am in the middle of an ongoing conflict with Stanford professor and Carnegie Fellow Michael McFaul, a conflict that involves lawyers on both sides and the very real possibility of future legal actions...
Leninsky Hoops Action: It's Pussy-tastic
Sports Section
The summer pick-up basketball season has started up here in Moscow. Is there a better place to start shit with someone than on an asphalt basketball court?...
Set Font
Email Article
Affiliate Links
By buying from these merchants, you help to support and enhance our online presence.
200 beautiful
Russian Brides
a week!
Photo galleries, personal profiles, introduction services.
Travel to Russia
Visa support, hotels, train tickets, tours and cruises.
See your message here! Write to
Interested in advertising? Write to