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

At Checkpoint Chermen, between Ossetia and Ingushetia, they stop us to check our passports. But our ally – let’s call him Oleg – shows them his ID and presents us as officers in his organization. We arrive without incident at the Verkhny Lars border post. Oleg goes into an office and he soon emerges, having agreed a deal. Of course the guards realize who these guys in the cars must be, seeing as they don’t want to produce their passports. But this does not stop them from coolly taking their bribe and making things easy for all of us. After all, if they tried to detain us, we’d have no option but to attack them. And there’s no telling how that would end.

Having taken us just over the border, Oleg returns while we drive on in cars that have come to meet us. In the depth of the night we arrive in the capital of Georgia and the next day we go our separate ways. Each of us has his own mission, and we each now embark on it. I have no alternative but to ply my trade as a journalist, so I busy myself in these new conditions. And, thanks to the large number of Chechen refugees, there is plenty of work.

Today, I’m dying. No, not from wounds; from stupidity. From my own unforgivable stupidity. I let myself be tricked and broke my resolution. I drank water. Not much – just a few sips. But it was enough to make me collapse on my way up from sheer exhaustion and with the bitter feeling that this folly had brought death upon my soul. No, the water isn’t poisoned. Yet this pure, life-giving moisture, which I once craved more than life itself, has now turned into a poison, slowly killing me. And this has never happened to me before, in all my long years at war, where I’ve often covered vast distances in speed marches with the Chechen fighters. What a strange, unpredictable trick of fate! That same substance that can save your life at other times can kill you. Whatever made me drink it? I’ve never drunk water while climbing up a mountain. But today the mountains deceived me. Looking up towards the summit, I decided there must be five hundred metres left at most. Meaning as the crow flies – along the track it would, of course, be further. Five hundred metres is nothing, and it is a very hot summer day. So I had a sip of water from the flask. But when I’d climbed those five hundred metres, I discovered that I still had a steep ascent of several kilometres ahead of me. It was five hundred metres only to a bend in the ridge. You should never trust your eyes in the mountains – you need to double-check everything in sight.

We have been on the road for a week. We’re a guerrilla formation under Angel’s command. [51] This journey is the return to Chechnya of Hamzat Gelayev’s guerrilla unit. Until this time, he was based in the forests of eastern Georgia. And I’m with them from force of habit. They are returning to Chechnya, and I’m returning with them. After around a week of speed marching, we rest for a few days, setting up camp in some remote spot where people prefer not to venture. We cannot travel like normal people: we are guerrillas. So the roads are off limits to us. The enemy air reconnaissance is almost ever-present in the sky. Our enemy is cunning and wily. And so we have to be even more cunning and wily. They have planted agents among us. We don’t know who, but we know for sure they’re among us. This means only a very restricted circle can be told the next day’s route. This is the key to our success. The agents in our midst can only send their masters information about the ground we’ve covered, not about the route ahead. They can also pass on intelligence about our weaponry, but this intelligence is rarely accurate. Whenever there’s a skirmish the guerrillas invariably seize trophy weapons, and so the quantity of arms is always in flux. We need to take particular care: we know the enemy are waiting for us. Only recently another guerrilla group was travelling along one of these routes when they were ambushed, surrounded, and almost completely wiped out. And the fact that they fell as warriors and sold their lives dearly was cold comfort to us. Now the enemy are waiting for us in several locations. But the bulk of their forces are concentrated on the same route that the ambushed group were taking. They think this route holds the greatest strategic value for us and they’re expecting us to repeat the mistakes of the first group. And their agents are encouraging them in this belief, having been cleverly hoodwinked by Angel’s commanders just in time.

For the moment we are moving towards where the enemy are waiting for us. The enemy have underestimated us and this is good. If your enemy is laughing, laugh with him. But do not laugh like him. For he is laughing at his own carelessness, while you are laughing at his weakness. Rejoice with him, only rejoice at the unexpected gift which this powerful enemy has handed you by making you stronger through his carelessness. A complacent enemy is a weak enemy. He thinks himself smarter and stronger than you, and that makes him weak. This description fits our enemy perfectly. Having masterminded a top-secret operation under the self-congratulatory name ‘Snare’ in the direction of the ‘probable enemy breakout’ and laying small ambushes in a few other areas that he knows about, our enemy has relaxed, thinking that victory will now come running to him on our legs. But alas! Once again his hopes will be bitterly dashed. We will perform our mission and grant him no such joy.

So that’s how I’ve come to be lying in a forest halfway to the top of a mountain pass. And all I need now is to sleep for at least fifteen minutes. I feel intuitively that sleep will restore my strength, and I have some time to spare. In around fifteen minutes the rear guard will arrive. But no matter how I try, I just can’t get that sleep. Every fighter thinks it his duty to wake me up to check what’s happened, offer me some water or food and try to help me walk on further. I try to explain to them that all I need is fifteen minutes’ sleep and I’ll catch up with them when the rear guard reaches here. But the men are used to seeing me in the advance guard and they’re not too impressed by my explanation. How galling to be dying from such folly and how ashamed I feel of my own body. The sensation that I’ll die if I don’t get some sleep is very real. I don’t dare move out of the way for my sleep – the rear guard might not notice me. My survival instinct is ordering me to sleep and heal myself. But I yield to the fighters and stand up with one of them. Remembering the maxim, ‘Work your hardest, then work harder,’ I walk on ahead. I conquer the mountain and make it to our overnight camp. It has been very difficult walking. The heavy rucksack has been cutting into my shoulders and something bad is going on with my feet inside the army boots. My right foot feels particularly sore. I only get a chance to examine it properly two days later, when we stop for the next break in a deep ravine. And once I’ve seen it, I have to go to great lengths to get hold of a pair of civilian mountain boots, and the front of my ankle, rubbed raw by the army boots, takes a long time to mend. The abrasion is fairly deep, and the daily wading through the many fords does not speed its recovery. So I have to tend it for quite a while before it heals. But never again! Never will I drink water while climbing a mountain.

Our journey is not without curious episodes. One day we had set up camp in the forest to rest. We needed several days to refresh ourselves. After a couple of days the guards apprehended a man heading towards the camp on a three-wheeler all-terrain motorcycle. Astonished by his answers to their questions, the guards came and reported to the commander. It turned out the man was from a nearby village. He had fitted his three-wheeler with a refrigerator and was selling ice cream from it. And this is what brought him to the forest: he wanted to sell the fighters ice cream. He knew that guerrillas were staying in this forest, and he knew the area well. But, unaware of the location of the camp, he decided to try his luck. Angel asked him why he needed to travel into the forest to sell his ice cream, and the elderly man replied bashfully, ‘See, what happened is I lost my job. Well, I have to feed myself somehow, so I took up selling ice cream. But these days I can’t shift it. Too many competitors. After all, they’ve got to eat too. So I thought maybe the fighters would buy some of my ice creams.’