ISBN 988 1 4728 5822 1
For a country one hundredth the size of Russia, Chechnya has exerted an outsize influence on its bigger neighbour since Tsarist times. A nation of fiercely independent gortsy, mountain peoples, and an ancient culture of feuding teips, clans, and banditry, Chechnya declared independence in 1991 as the Soviet Union imploded.
After a failed FSK sponsored punitive expedition to wrest back control, the First Chechen War of 1994 began with a hurried and bloody attempt to capture aptly named Grozny, ‘Dread’. Stubbornly defended by the rebels it was indiscriminately pounded into rubble and followed by a messy attempt to subdue the country against guerrilla raids, hostage seizures at Budyonnovsk Hospital, and a dramatic though brief recapture of Grozny; the conflict came to a negotiated end. An abortive al-Qaeda sponsored Islamist incursion into Dagestan was the catalyst for Vladimir Putin’s Second Chechen War. Slower, more methodical but no less bloody, Grozny was bombarded by air, artillery, OTR-21 Tochka, Scud, and TOS-1 thermobaric rockets, and significantly aided by defecting Chechen warlords and clans, increasing rebel disunity and rising jihadist tensions in Chechnya and North Caucasus; terrorist attacks occurred at Beslan school and Moscow’s Dubrovka Theatre.
The despotic Chechen Kadyrov regime and Kadyrovtsy militias became strong Putin allies receiving a large degree of independence and Russian funding, in return supplying fighters for later Russian colonial conflicts in Donbas, Syria, and in the 2022 Ukraine War.