In Tamerlan’s Footsteps

In the mind of the average Russian, the impoverished Muslim region of Dagestan evokes any number of stereotypes: meek women in headscarves, leathery highlanders with tall sheepskin hats, Islamist fanatics with long beards and ceremonial daggers, streets patrolled by military vehicles, masked troops with assault rifles, and random, indiscriminate explosions. Those last three images also applied to Boston during the manhunt for the alleged marathon bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers, the older of whom — Tamerlan Tsarnaev — spent six months in Dagestan last year. I traveled from Moscow to Dagestan on April 20, the day after news broke of the Boston connection, in search of clues to Tsarnaev’s motives in the attack that killed three, wounded hundreds and brought terrorism back to America’s front pages. I found people who’d met him and the mosque where he prayed. I also found that the region in southern Russia is a lot more complicated than cosmopolitan Muscovites imagine, and in its own way, a lot more charming. Just make sure you pack enough clean clothes.

On my first night in the capital, Makhachkala, a few local journalists and academics — the self-described dregs of the intelligentsia — invited me to a basement café in the center of the city to share a discreet bottle of brandy and talk about their republic. Dagestan is a rough place in a rougher neighborhood. To the west lies Chechnya, whose two separatist wars against Russia in the 1990s spilled over into Dagestan in waves of refugees, Russian troops and Islamic extremists. The influence of radicals who trickled in from around the Arab world made a tinderbox out of Russia’s southern flank, turning a series of post-Soviet struggles for independence into an ongoing holy war to evict the Russian heathens from Muslim lands.

(PHOTOS: What Tsarnaev Saw: Dagestan by Dmitry Kostyukov)

The toastmaster that night was Sabir Geybatov, an artist and philosophy professor with a mangy goatee. He dropped the names of 19th century German thinkers into our discussion of contemporary Dagestan, but his view on the problem of Islamic radicalism was more straightforward. “How can you fight an idea?” he asked. “You can hope to change it through dialogue. But you cannot kill it” — though people have tried for centuries. Dagestan is on “the front line in the war of civilizations,” said Geybatov. It is the point where Persians and Turks from the south have tended to meet the Christian crusaders from the north, a place where holy war is not an abstract concept. It has at some point taken lives from nearly every family in this region of some 3 million people.

At present this war has two opposing fortresses in Makhachkala. On Dakhadaev Street stands the hulking base of the FSB secret police, which maintain Moscow’s fragile hold over this region as they always have — by brute force. A far less imposing bastion stands a short walk away on Kotrova Street — a green-domed mosque where the local Islamists congregate. That is where Tsarnaev spent a lot of his time last year, during his pilgrimage to his homeland.

The history of the Kotrova Street mosque deserves its own biopic. Its founder, Nadyr Khachilaev, is a Dagestani hero. In 1998, two years before he built the mosque, Khachilaev was serving as a member of the Russian parliament when a mob of his supporters, on his instructions, armed themselves with rifles and stormed the headquarters of the corrupt local government, briefly taking it over. The year before, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al-Qaeda, had visited Dagestan, and Khachilaev was his host. Among the Islamists on Kotrova Street, he has been seen as a martyr since he was shot dead near his home in Makhachkala in 2003. In his honor, the mosque was named An-Nadyriya (Arabic for “belonging to Nadyr”).

I found most of this out from one of the men who helped build the mosque, Magomedtagir Temirchiev. Stooped and weathered from the six years he spent in prison on charges of abetting terrorism, Temirchiev agreed to meet me on the terrace of a café around the corner from the mosque. As we spoke, he seemed to be almost proud of being a prime suspect in Russia’s war on terrorism. “Every time something blows up, they drag me in for questioning. They want to hear my alibi,” he said, laughing. “Something blows up in America, in Boston, they come to the mosque on Kotrova Street.” After a pause, he added, “I guess I can’t blame them.”

MORE: The Boston-Bomber Trail: Fresh Clues in Rural Dagestan

Rules of the Mosque
On the advice of Temirchiev, I went the day after our meeting to check out one of the hot spots in Dagestan’s civil war. These places are known as KTO zones, the Russian acronym for counterterrorism operation. Seemingly at random, the FSB draws these zones on the map of Dagestan, seals them off to isolate the real or phantom militants inside and imposes martial law there until they are killed or captured. Under Russian law, the constitutional rights of anyone inside these zones are suspended for the duration of the KTO regime, which can last a few days or a few years. There is usually at least one under way on any given day in Dagestan, and the bloodiest one at the time was in Gimry, up in the mountains.

The drive to Gimry goes up through jagged cliffs, which proved too steep for my driver’s old Lada. Less than half the way up the mountain, he burned out the clutch, and we had to roll and push the car backward a few kilometers toward a service station. (This happened to coincide with the only rainfall during my 17 days in Dagestan.) It was only then that I noticed the camouflaged dugouts carved into the sides of the mountains, where Russian snipers perch to watch the road. Apart from the military checkpoints dotting every highway, these trenches are the only places in Dagestan you are sure to see a bona fide Russian Slav, blue eyes showing through the holes in their balaclavas.

(MORE: Exclusive: Dagestani Relative of Tamerlan Tsarnaev Is a Prominent Islamist)

By this point the conditions of the trip were becoming challenging. My backpack held enough clean clothes for only four days — which had passed — and the hot water had been out in the entire city of Makhachkala since my arrival. At first people said it would be back on in a few days, then two weeks. Nobody seemed to care. My plan was to hang around for another few days until Friday, when the imam on Kotrova Street was due to give his weekly sermon.

I had never been inside a mosque before, and had never been close to one associated with Salafism, the brand of ultraconservative Islam that has been spreading throughout the Muslim world. That first time on Kotrova Street was initially unsettling. The tone was set by the alms boxes labeled: FOR THE CHILDREN OF SHAHIDS — a term for someone killed in battle that is often applied to suicide bombers. As the worshippers gathered, I mimicked them washing their hands and feet and tried to look inconspicuous. My aim was to hear the sermon from up close, but my only thought was how not to get outed as an interloper and expelled, possibly lynched. Even before the service began, I was sweating. My nerves must have given me away, but instead of booting me out, the men around me explained in whispers how to pray and why each gesture was significant. By the end we were laughing, and one recommended the name Suleiman — the great 16th century Sultan of the Ottoman Empire — in the event of my formal conversion. “But first you’d have to do the snip-snip,” he said, pointing at my crotch and smiling.

The imam, Khasan-Khadji Gasanaliev, agreed to an interview a few hours after the service and invited me up to his office on the third floor, just beneath the emerald-colored dome. We had been talking amicably for about 20 minutes when one of the imam’s assistants, who had the tough look of a special-forces alumnus, entered the office and sat down. For a few minutes he eyed me with a smirk, and broke in only when I turned the conversation back to Tsarnaev’s time in the region. “And what is your ethnicity?” the man interrupted.

Pride or stupidity — maybe both — did not let me lie. “My mother is Russian,” I said. “My father is Jewish.” He was already aware that I wrote for a U.S.-based publication, and the rant that followed killed any chance of continuing the interview. The imam sighed, got up and began preparing for the next call to prayer, washing his hands and feet in a sink in the corner of the room while his assistant stood up and continued yelling: “Americans are bombing the Muslim world for how many years? And you help them do it! Don’t lie to me! You are carrying these mortal sins!”

Still, the visit was worth it — one of the friends I made on Kotrova Street, a taxi driver named Magomedgadzhi, gave me a tip about Tsarnaev. Magomedgadzhi had agreed to show me the house of a suspected terrorist who had been blown to bits by the special services, and he mentioned in passing as we were driving there that his cousin had seen Tsarnaev in the flesh. (This is what we call in the news business “burying the lede.”) The cousin turned out to be a 36-year-old construction worker named Gussein, a lapsed Salafi who had been invited early last summer to a cookout on the beach attended by a brash young American boxer named Tamerlan. “He said none of those black fighters in America ever hit him in the head, that’s how good he was,” Gussein told me.

MORE: A Dead Militant in Dagestan: Did This Slain Jihadi Meet Tamerlan Tsarnaev?

What Tsarnaev Saw
Over the next two days, I hounded Gussein to track down some of the other guests at that cookout. He returned with odd news. All the guests he remembered had been arrested a week before in the town of Kizlyar, charged with resisting arrest and fighting with police. The event had been all over the news the week before. A wedding convoy of 20 cars had been stopped at a checkpoint for flying Islamic flags. The police deemed the insignia extremist, and when they ordered the wedding party to remove them, a brawl broke out. Gussein looked at my screenshots from the news footage of that incident and identified several of the men who had been with Tsarnaev on that beach.

One of them turned out to be Tsarnaev’s distant cousin, Magomed Kartashov, the leader of a regional Islamist group called the Union of the Just. (The organization renounces the violent methods of the local militants, but shares their dream of establishing an Islamic caliphate under Shari’a.) The ride up to Kizlyar to find him took a few hours the next day. The cheapest way to get around Dagestan and the surrounding regions is on the marshrutka taxis, minivans that race from town to town along designated routes. You get used to them, but driving in Dagestan does present surprises. At one point we fell behind a military truck that the driver was unable to pass. Sitting in its bed was an enormous soldier who was resting the muzzle of his Kalashnikov on the back door — pointed directly at our windshield. So with the gestures of a man telling a slowpoke to get out of the fast lane, the driver tried to signal for the soldier to point his weapon somewhere else. His eyes smiled through the slits in his balaclava, and he shifted the barrel to the left.

(MORE: Tsarnaev Neighbors: Older Bombing Suspect Spent Time in Dagestan Helping Dad With Construction)

The young men from that wedding party, mostly members of the Union of the Just, were the first people I’d met who were willing to talk about meeting Tsarnaev. He would have been hard to miss. As several people later told me, Tsarnaev had shown up at Friday prayers wearing a brown knee-length jubbah cloak like you might see in Morocco, but not in Dagestan, where men prefer T-shirts and track pants. He would slick his hair back with olive oil and pin it to his head with one of those plastic bands that David Beckham used to wear on the field. He would paint his eyes with the black eyeliner that men in the Persian Gulf sometimes wear. “He looked like an Arab,” recalls Tagir Razakov, a young Salafi who knew Tsarnaev. “It’s like he was trying to prove something.” One afternoon Tsarnaev had almost gotten into a fistfight at the mosque when a young Salafi told him how ridiculous he looked.

On my second night in town, Rasim Ibadamov, a local Salafi from the Union of the Just, invited me to stay at his house, and he introduced me to his father as an American journalist. “American?” the father said before I’d even had a chance to sit down. “You know the guy who blew something up over there? He was here.”

After his father went to bed, Ibadamov and I stayed up well past midnight discussing the Islamist desire for a society governed by Shari’a. It was not fanaticism or a medieval sense of justice that drove this mission. Most of the members of the Union of the Just had grown up in Soviet households with only the glancing presence of religion. But a few years ago, Ibadamov’s computer store in Kizlyar had been run out of business by rent-seeking bureaucrats. Not long before that, his older brother had been killed in a fight with a local official’s son, who went unpunished. “The laws of the state have ceased to function,” he said. “So people naturally start to turn toward a higher law.”

The next morning we went to the jailhouse to meet a few of the other men from the Union of the Just, who were due to be released after serving their time for the wedding incident. A handful of their friends were waiting on a dusty stoop. Some were well educated, even bookish, with an encyclopedic knowledge of Islamic doctrine that they liked to show off. Others were athletes, mechanics or former convicts with nicknames like Crowbar and Racket. (The nickname of Tsarnaev’s cousin is tamer: the Intellectual.)

After about an hour of waiting, seven of their friends walked out of the jailhouse, and the group drove out to a house on the outskirts of Kizlyar to wash off the filth from their prison cells. They trimmed their beards and changed into clean clothes before laying down rugs and towels in the living room to pray. As they bowed toward Mecca and sat in meditation, led in prayer by a freestyle wrestler named Umar Umarov, I thought about the fact that Tsarnaev had spent weeks in their company last year. I could not fathom how his time with them could have inspired him to murder innocents on the other side of the world, supposedly in the name of Islam. America wants to know why Tamerlan Tsarnaev did what he did — but the answers won’t be found in Dagestan alone.

PHOTOS: Dagestan and Russia’s Long War