As the female terrorists mingled with the audience, several hostages got to know their captors a little better. It is from those hostages that we have the most information about the female terrorists' state of mind and motivation. Many of the female hostages showed signs of Stockholm syndrome: they identified with the hostage-takers and empathized with their plight. Tamara Starkova, a forty-two-year-old pediatrician who lost her husband and daughter at Dubrovka, recalled watching the Chechen men running around shouting and screaming at the hostages, but the women were different. The women said “please” and “thank you.” They were surprisingly polite under the circumstances. The women did not discuss politics. Tamara listened to the women's stories of Russian atrocities and understood what had led them to Dubrovka. One woman explained that her whole family had been killed by the Russians. She had buried all her children and was now forced to live in the forest. She had nowhere to go and nothing to live for. Another of the shahidat confided to Tamara that she had lost her husband and child, and Tamara thought to herself that any mother would be capable of terrible acts under similar provocation.37
The hostages were struck by one of the terrorists, named Asya, most likely Aset Gishnurkayeva from Achkoy-Martan, who reassured them that the terrorists' motives were actually peaceful. Asya hoped that there would be a negotiation with the government and that the crisis would end well. She was involved in this mission so that her children could grow up in peace. Asya was particularly helpful during tense moments when the men onstage started shooting their weapons into the air.38 She tried not to frighten the hostages and begged them not to worry. She explained that it was their war, not the hostages'. Asya's friend, Madina Dugayeva, also helped her calm the hostages. Madina had studied to be an actress at Chechen State University and was exceptionally pretty. Another terrorist, Sekilat Aliyeva, was a teaching assistant in the university's history department. Hostage Irina Filipova, found herself sympathizing with the female terrorists and concluded that the women must all have different motives: for some true believers it might have been a divine mission; some of the others might have been drugged; she wondered whether the younger girls had been forced.39
While some of the hostage-takers made repeated references to Islam and Allah during the fifty-seven-hour ordeal and the men placed a banner with the words “Allahu Akbar' (God is great) over the stage, many of the women were not well versed in Islam. Several mispronounced their prayers in Arabic and could not answer the most basic questions about the tenets of the faith. When asked questions about Islamic doctrine or practice, the women had no idea how to respond. Most of the terrorists just talked about the persecution that they suffered at the hands of the Russian forces in Chechnya. Their ignorance suggested that they had only recently been taught about Islam. Several wore their Islamic garb incorrectly. In one case, a female terrorist had tied her headscarf improperly and had to get help from one of the hostages to fix it.
More important, several of the women would have been disqualified as shahidat according to the strictest interpretation of Islam: one, Koku Khadjiyeva, was mentally ill and another, Medna Baraykova, was sick with tuberculosis and constantly coughing up blood. Russian survivors said some of the women in the group had talked of their eagerness to get home to Chechnya because they were pregnant. In May, four months after the attack, the official autopsies were completed and the Russian weekly Moskovsky Novisti revealed that three of the women—Amnat Isueva and two sisters, Raina and Ayman Kurbanova—were indeed pregnant. According to Islamic law, these women would not have been permitted to go on a martyrdom operation.
It's hard to know if these stories are true. It is likely that the Russian security apparatus disseminated disinformation to make the terrorists seem even more monstrous than the events suggested. According to her cousin Usman, Ayman Kurbanova (known as Rajman within her family) could not possibly have been pregnant. Usman reported that her first husband had left her after only a few months of marriage because she was infertile. Usman explained how Rajman's first husband had dishonored her; he literally shoved her out of the house and, in the process, broke her heart. The experience devastated her and left her forever changed. Like so many other Chechen women, in her despair she connected with the Islamists and, at forty, she married her second husband, a jihadi warrior.
Many of the Chechen women clearly suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and were emotionally fragile. “You're having a bad day, but we've had a bad ten years,” one Chechen Black Widow barked at the hostages. Another survivor, Nastya Kruglikova, recalled that one of the women had placed a grenade between her, her cousin, and her aunt. Kruglikova asked: “What is going to happen, are you going to blow us up?” The terrorist assured her that everything would be all right. However, after a few seconds of thought, she seemed to change her mind, and said: “Well, maybe you will be blown up but at least you won't know anything about it. You won't regret it. You don't know what's happening in Chechnya. You can't know what your soldiers have done there to our people. You can't have any idea how terrible our lives are.”40 She said she had left behind a child, but inshallah (God willing), God would look after him. Most of the shahidat were so fragile, they cried as they related the stories of their childhood and the years of war. The hostages remembered how the female terrorists tried to hide their tears. Many of them looked no more than sixteen years old.
On several occasions the hostages asked whether they could go to the bathroom. Each time, the women terrorists asked the men for permission. It seemed as if the women were not really in charge. One of the hostages claimed that the men controlled all the detonators, including the ones for the bombs attached to the women. Other hostages recalled seeing the women carrying their own suicide-belt detonators but still asking permission for their every move. The women bombers of Dubrovka appeared not to be in control of the situation even though they, not the hostages, were the ones with guns. Unlike female terrorists in other parts of the globe, they seemed weak.
One terrorist, Zura Barayeva, appears to have been an exception. She is reported to have been at ease with what was going on in the theater and more in control than the others. During the siege she took off her bomb belt and slung it nonchalantly over her shoulder. This may be because Zura was Movsar's aunt and one of the widows of Arbi Barayev. She is alleged to have trained the other women for the mission and may have recruited some of them. One of the hostages recalled that Zura seemed normal. She would ask people if they had children. She would always say, “Everything will be fine. It will finish peacefully.” She seemed to take pleasure in the situation, particularly in how people were listening to what she had to say and wanted to know what she thought. She was most pleased about being in charge.41
THE SISTERS GANIYEVA
At least three pairs of sisters were among the terrorists at the Dubrovka House of Culture: the sisters Khadjiyeva, Kurbanova, and Ganiyeva. The last-mentioned pair, Larissa (Fatima) and Khadizhat (Milana) Ganiyeva,42 were part of a large family of six boys and four girls. Two of the boys were killed fighting in the First Chechen War. Another brother was killed during a Russian aerial bombardment in 1999 and the oldest girl had worked as a nurse in Grozny treating the war wounded. She disappeared one day in July 2000, never to be seen again.
Fatima had tried to find her first brother's remains back in 1996, braving checkpoints and harassment by Russian soldiers, but the Russians refused to give up his body for a proper burial. For Fatima, this was just one in a series of humiliations that the family was forced to endure at the hands of the Russian military. The family's next encounter with Russian troops was in October 1999, not long after the outbreak of the Second Chechen War. Russian soldiers entered their village, shot five of the Ganiyevs' cows, and left with two of the carcasses tied to their vehicle. In July 2000, Russian troops returned and robbed them of their most valuable possession, a brand-new videocassette recorder. They also took several lambs and chickens and, just before they left, threw a grenade down into the cellar where the family stored their winter provisions.43
The last straw occurred during the summer of 2002. Russian soldiers stormed