Mikail Eldin - The Sky Wept Fire - My Life as a Chechen Freedom Fighter

You don’t know the route through this forest. So you ask an old childhood friend to guide you. And, to his cost, he agrees. By setting off alone on this path, you are breaking orders. You were strictly forbidden to travel alone without an armed group. That doesn’t mean you’ve been given your own guard of honour or personal security team, just that you are carrying important intelligence. But you cannot wait around for the group to arrive. Your path runs two hundred metres from the militia base, so you and your friend are at ease and you chat as you calmly walk on.

Suddenly you are overcome by a burning wave of inexplicable fear, just like after the bombing in Shatoy. Your foreboding is so powerful that for a while you cannot take a step, while your friend walks on several metres ahead. You realize your intuition is alerting you to danger; you also know that you should trust your intuition – it has never let you down. Right now the most logical action would be to drop to the ground, keep low, and crawl ahead on all fours to find out the source of this sudden foreboding. But, overcoming your fear, you shut out your intuition through an effort of will and switch on your cold reason. And according to your reason there cannot be any danger; the enemy could not have come so close unobserved. So, feeling calmer, you continue on your way. All of a sudden your friend stops and says something quietly to you. You ask him to repeat it. Again you cannot hear him; you sweep your arm through the air and walk towards to him. You imagine he must have stepped on a mine and that’s why he is acting relatively calmly. You’ve caught up with your friend, and you look over his shoulder to find a group of fighters who have stopped dead with their weapons aimed at you. They are about six or seven metres away. Bearing in mind that in the forest everyone keeps their weapons on the ready for encounters with strangers, you are not too alarmed. In any case, almost all of them are bearded, and some are wearing green headbands, the identifying mark of the resistance.

‘Why have you stopped? They’re friendlies,’ you say, taking a step forward. You are armed. Rather nicely armed. Putting your right hand on the unfastened holster containing your loaded pistol, you walk towards them, saying, ‘Don’t point your guns! They could go off by accident. We’re on your side.’ At that moment the cold barrel of a VSS silent sniper rifle presses against your temple and you hear the quiet command: ‘Hands on your head! Lie down on the ground!’ Without waiting for you to obey, they whack you behind your knees with their rifle butts and bring you expertly to the ground, face down. They’re not on your side. You realize that your war ends here. The blows from the rifle butts snap you out of the stupor of fear that in the first moments washed over you in a searing wave. Your first thought is to fight them. You wouldn’t have a hope of surviving, but you would have a hope of taking at least one of the enemy with you… But just in time a sobering chill runs through you. If you attack, they’ll take fright and gun you down. And once they’ve shot you, they’ll kill your friend. And he’s unarmed. They strip you of your weapons, tie your wrists with a belt, and one of them deals you some punches, asking how many of you there are. Then they gag you and lift you up. They go through the same process with your friend. They haven’t yet searched you properly, merely taken your ID from your trouser pocket. While they are lifting you up, you deliberately lean forward and the capsules with the codes fall out of your breast pocket, unseen by the enemy. You are relieved. But the notes – they must have taken them along with your ID. Well, you could have acquired such information legitimately, as a journalist, and so you are not hugely worried. You’re surprised at your ability to reason with such cool detachment at a moment like this, as though it was all happening to someone else.

They are now leading you some place, and you mentally run through your survival chances, concluding they are nil. What they have found on you ought to be more than enough for the firing squad. The only question is how long the torture will last. You know what awaits you there, and this knowledge doesn’t make things any easier. Your best option would be to die before arriving. Then your death would be far swifter and easier. A wild, crazy idea comes into your head: you could charge into one of your captors with your shoulder and leap with him into the gorge. As luck would have it, you are on the edge of the gorge just now. Then, even if you should survive the fall, they’d be certain to finish you off. Having made up your mind to go through with this seemingly crazy plan, you suddenly pause. You cannot seek such a way out. You are a believer, which means you cannot commit suicide outright. Suicide is the most heinous of mortal sins. Besides, fatalists – and you count yourself one – do not run away from their rendezvous with destiny. Of course, your fatalism is grounded in realism. Yet none the less at this moment it has taken control. And so you walk on. You walk on towards your terrible meeting with destiny. There are thirteen of the enemy. They are a reconnaissance and sabotage group, professionals in their field. They operate boldly and skilfully. If they weren’t courageous warriors, why would they have come so close to your base – and disguised as resistance fighters? One of them stares you in the eye and says, ‘Look at him glaring like a wolf. I wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley. If he’d realized who we were, he’d have killed us on the spot. I can see it in his eyes.’

Another answers, ‘So let him look. That’s all he can do now. His time is up.’

You listen to them and realize they don’t intimidate you. Well, they don’t really need to. They have already earned their reward. They are simply discussing the reality of what lies ahead for you. During a rest, as we get closer to their side, one of them gives you a second, more thorough search and finds a capsule which has got stuck in your pocket. He opens it. He finds the piece of paper with the numbers. He looks into your eyes. The commander asks, ‘Well, what’s he got there?’ He winks at you, tearing the paper into little pieces with the words, ‘Nothing.’ You are grateful to your enemy for having understood you. For understanding that you are doomed. And as one warrior to another, he shows you respect in your ill fortune.

Before long you are delivered to the base of the 245th Motor Rifle Regiment near Shatoy. They tear the blindfold from your eyes and a colonel begins the interrogation. It is what is known as a ‘high-speed interrogation’, applied while you are still in shock. The colonel is holding your passport and press card in his hand; inside the passport is a photo of President Dudayev taken a month ago and dated. And he has your notes and some new poems written in your native Chechen and in Russian. The broad-shouldered, heavily built colonel looks you in the eyes and asks,

‘Are you a combatant?’

‘No. I’m a journalist.’

‘Who is your commander?’

‘I don’t have a commander. I’m a journalist.’

‘A journalist, carrying a weapon? If you’re a journalist, then why are you armed?’

‘There’s a war on.’

‘Where do you work?’

‘You can see from my ID.’

‘You’re a combatant!’ He’s no longer asking but telling you.

‘No.’

He steps forward and strikes your face twice with his elbow. In hand-to-hand combat, an elbow strike at close range is considered one of the most powerful blows. He knows this. You know it too. Your hands are tied behind your back. You sneer at him. That makes him see red. He grabs an assault rifle from one of the soldiers and fires a burst near your feet: ‘Are you a rebel? Answer!’