Russia’s 9/11 in Chechnya:  Waging Jihad against Muslims who Hijack Islam

by Dr. Robert Dickson Crane

I.            The Causes of Chechen Terrorism

On September 3rd, 2004, nationalist extremists from the Caucasus region of Russia demonstrated their demonic hatred of everything sacred by taking a thousand teachers, parents, and children hostage in a school and then shot children in the back when they tried to escape.  This has been called Russia’s 9/11, but this act of terrorism was perhaps worse than 9/11 in its sheer evilness because the terrorists did not first dehumanize their targets by lumping them all as unknown ciphers in a group condemned by collective guilt.  Instead, they knew many of the victims as individual persons.  They had taken these innocent people hostage with the precise purpose to kill them as an act of war.

The moral issue here is not merely whether suicide bombing can be justified, because only those who have lost even the rudiments of civilized values can possibly think that it is.  The larger issue is whether the terrorists’ actions can be categorized as war.  If so, what limits does the “just war doctrine” impose as recognized universally by the classical scholars in all the world’s religious traditions. 

The terrorists justify their actions based on cause and effect.  All terrorists are alienated in one way or another and they pursue a cycle of escalating violence by claiming that the other guy started it all.  This begs the question whether their response to their perceived grievance meets the standards of “just war.”

The terrorists justified their crime as an act of self-defense against the Russian military, who four years earlier at the turn of the century had flattened an entire city of a half a million inhabitants, Grozny, because it was the capital of Chechnya and had become a symbol of resistance throughout the Caucasus at a time when the disintegration of the old Soviet Empire into sixteen independent countries still threatened to spread into Russia proper.

Over the previous five years, since the Russian invasion of 1994, Chechnya was collapsing toward the status of a “failed state.”  The last freely elected president of Chechnya, Aslan Maskhadov, was losing control to a radical coalition of foreign Arab fighters, led by the Saudi Emir Ibn al Khattab, an Omar bin Laden protégé, and the followers of the Chechen war hero, Shamil Basayev.  When these two radicals invaded neighboring Dagestan on August 7th, 1999, in order to launch a general uprising throughout the entire Caucasus and install a Caliphate “from sea [Black] to sea [Caspian],” the fate of Chechnya was sealed. 

Two days later, Vladimir Putin, the head of the Russian secret police, succeeded Boris Yeltsin as Prime Minister and immediately declared that Russia must an