 An influential warlord Rizvan Chitigov (aka Marine, American, Chemist) was killed in Chechnya yesterday. He was considered the third person in the Chechen resistance after Shamil Basayev and Dokku Umarov. Having terminated a special training course in the U.S., Chitigov, aka Marine, returned to Chechnya to command a tank battalion during the first Chechen war. During the second Chechen war, as the Federal Security Service (FSB) claims, he sent Shaheeds to Russian cities and planned terrorist attacks involving poison-gases.
Rizvan Chitigov, 38, was born and grew up in the village of Shali, Chechnya. Nearly the good half of the locals are relatives and friends of Chitigov. On the one hand it was good for him, since being outlawed he could always find shelter there. On the other hand, it was bad. The point is that, Shali is traditionally a peaceful village, therefore many of the warlord's friends have become his enemies in the recent years.
So, it is no wonder that Chitigov's wish to visit Shali about which he told one of his accomplices became known to many other people. Among those were Shali residents who work at the Criminal Investigation Department. "We knew that Chitigov who was spending winter in Baku, was to come last Sunday," one of the local detectives says. "So we got prepared to meet him: we invited Kadyrov's Special Forces unit [former Chechen president Akhmat Kadyrov's security service. Kommersant]. But we didn't know for sure where exactly Chitigov would put up at. We laid ambushes at several places simultaneously, but on Sunday night we started getting worried he was nowhere to be seen. We thought: have we frightened him away or just missed him?"
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It was only on Tuesday night that one of the Special Forces officer heard in a walkie-talkie by a mere chance a familiar voice of Marine: âIâm here, at Aliâs,â he was telling his invisible interlocuter, âbut I canât get in â Iâm rounded up. Need help.â The officers supposed that he was talking about a flat 11, 10 Frunze street, which belonged to Ali Chitigov, the commanderâs uncle. But this empty flat had been searched three times and nothing had been found there. Officers decided to search it one more time on Wednesday. âIt was an ordinary uninhabited three-room flat,â the participant of the operation says, âthere was a sofa and a few armchairs in one room. The other was quite empty, and the third one had been turned into a store of homemade potted goods. One of our guys even thought that somebody had recently had a meal at the table: there were crumbs, and it seemed that a can with cucumbers had disappeared. Well, we argued a bit, then decided that the crumbs were old and all the cans were there, and went away. Weâve just gone out to the stairwell and then heard a bang. We rushed back to the flat, and got under the tommy gun.â
Later it turned out that Rizvan Chitigov had come to Shali on Sunday as he had promised. He and the ambush missed one another within a few minutes. He entered the flat, looked around, then â out of the window and saw the Special Forces. The militant had no place to go: the house was rounded up. He could either force his way out with fight or hide himself. Marine chose the latter. Luckily for him, the flat was suitable for that purpose.
He spent three days in a small cold recess hollowed out in the bearing wall of the house from the side of the loggia and covered by a little tiled hatch on the outside. âWe tried getting into this âcryptâ ourselves,â the officer recalls, âand I must tell you, one canât spend even an hour there, let alone three days. The recess is so small that an adult can sit there only on all fours.â As it became known later, the militant left his hide-out only for several times â to have something to eat, to come in contact with his accomplice (Chitigovâs Motorola didnât get the wireless signal in the brick recess) and go to the toilet. Yesterday Rizvan Chitigov must have broken down: as the Special Forces officers left, he hurried outside and dropped a tiled hatch on the concrete floor. He opened gunfire on the policemen, didnât strike anyone, but he was killed at once by return shots instead.
The body of the killed militant has already been identified by half of the villagers. in addition, he was wearing an American marine badge on his neck which said: âChitigov Rizvan Umarovich. Chechnya. 1965.â There was also a small cellophane pack on the chain with the prayer in Arabic hanging on his neck.
âRizvan and I studied in the same form at school,â one of the Special Forces officers of the Shali districtâs Interior Department says, âat that time we mixed up with the same people. Later many of our acquaintance did their military service at different law enforcement agencies: emergency platoons, special squads of rapid action, the FSB (Federal Security Service) and landing troops. At the same time Rizvan always passed for the coolest guy. Now it seems as if he had been preparing from his childhood to become a warrior: he always shot from some guns â first it was homemade guns, then he swapped and bought real ârodsâ. He exercised to the point of exhaustion, he read some professional books. He became a fireman, not a special forces officer, though.â
Till the end of 1980s the future militant rushed about the district driving his fire-engine cart scarring the locals off by the locomotive horn which he fixed to his ZIL-130 lorry. At the beginning of perestroika the young Shali fireman left for the USA with the help of some international Moslem foundation which had opened its representative office in Chechnya. What Rizvan Chitigov was actually doing during these four years abroad is unknown, but on his return to Shali in 1994 he explained to his compatriots that he had graduated from an elite subversive and reconnaissance school and had signed on to the marine squad. He said that a career in the US Navy had been awaiting him but in the strange land he had met a co-religionist Amir Hattab who had explained to the young Chechen that he should be in Chechnya in the hard times for his motherland, not in the US. So the two set off for Chechnya.
Chitigov enrolled a small detachment of co-villagers, started preaching them Wahhabism and struggle with the unfaithful. At first he fought under the direction of his new friend Hattab. Later he commanded the only one tank battalion in Chechnya (Chechens called his tank âdeath machineâ) which was shortly smashed, though. And yet he was awarded the superior decoration of Ichkeria.
Rizvan Chitigov started his participation in the second Chechen campaign in Groznyy which he together with his platoon defended but then left for the mountains. Chitigovâs squad fought near the town of Duba-Yurt, near the entrance to the Argun Gorge and Alkhazurovo, then retreated by the paths to Georgia.
Rizvan Chitigov re-appeared in 2001 when the information about the warlord preparing to use chemical and germ weapons against the Russian federal forces was obtained. Marine allegedly met some ârepresentatives of the Ichkerian commandâ in the UAE and gave them order to âproduce poisons and poison-gases of improvised materials and carry them over to Chechnya,â as the FSB reported then. His threats proved to be not mere empty words. A consignment of improvised virulent poison (ricin) was shortly found at the underground Chitigovâs storehouse in the Gudermes region. The militant didnât have the time to use the chemical weapons, and yet he acquired the notoriety of the Chechen Chemist.
In summer 2002 Commander Chitigov (then by no means subordinate, but almost equal to the militantsâ leader Shamil Basayev) came back from the Pankisi Gorge to his home Shali region. As a member of the Military Council of Ichkeria he convoked the meeting of warlords to discuss further steps, but he wasnât lucky â someone of the locals told the federals about the militantsâ âget-togetherâ. Generals Chitigov and Akhmadov managed to break though the encirclement by a lucky chance but Marine lost his close friend Aslambek Ablulhajiev (Big Aslambek) in the operation. Rizvan Chitigovâs militants retaliated for it in a year by shooting dead Shali Major Musa Dakayev and some people of his entourage. According to the information of the Shali police, Chitigov was involved in the total of 50 murders of the locals.
But it doesnât mean that Marine was only a threat of local scale. His militants worked almost throughout the whole of Chechnya. For example, members of the formation, headed by the warlordâs aunt Rosa Sanayeva, who killed more that ten officials were arrested in Grozny. The FSB reports that a number of saboteurs sent by Rizvan Chitigov have been recently intercepted and arrested in some Russian cities â Moscow, Voronezh, Rostov-on-Don and Samara. For instance, a terrorist sent by him in Voronezh was to blow up a cinema. The same messenger arrested in Moscow, judging by a map which was seized from him, âwas preparing to become a Shaheedâ in the Red Square. But still there is one major terrorist attack he succeeded to carry out. In August 1999 a bomb was set off by his order in Oknotny Ryad shopping centre in the Manezh square, the FSB said yesterday.
âChitigov was one of the acknowledged militantsâ leaders,â a source in Chechen Interior Ministry says, âhe was not inferior to Basayev and Umarov. What is more, he was a role-model for those planning to join the militantsâ gangs. Therefore we can say that unlike the murder of Maskhadov the elimination of Chitigov is a real victory.â
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| DOKKU OMAROV | Chechnya | |
| RIZVAN CHITIGOV | Chechnya | |
| SHAMIL BASAIEV | Chechnya | |
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