Anthony Loyd was kidnapped, shot and then escaped from Syria in 2014. He has reported from conflict zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Sierra Leone as well as Chechnya and Bosnia, the period during which he wrote this memoir and fought an addiction to heroin. He is the Press Awards foreign reporter of the year.
Chechnya, New Year 1995
The war in Chechnya was like nothing I had ever seen before. In terms of the scale of violence, fear and horror, it left anything in my experience so far behind as to make it almost insignificant. You can grade conflicts according to intensity if you desire: low, medium and high. Chechnya blew the bell off the end of the gauge.
I had been a soldier at the end of the Cold War and had heard so much about the Russian army. I wanted to see it in action. Returning to London I asked my editor if I could go to Grozny and they agreed.
In one of the curious anomalies of war the road through the western side of the Chechen border remained open. Russian and Chechen forces faced each other across a few hundred metres of snow-covered plain.
I passed through this strange mirror in mid-January. One minute there were Russian armoured personnel carriers and bunkers beside the car, the next there were Chechens: swarthy, bearded fighters touting rocket-propelled grenade launchers and automatic rifles.
Advertisement
The mud and soulless squalor of the first town gave way to flat, featureless terrain on either side of our decrepit Skoda. Abu, the Chechen driver, pointed to fresh cratering and muttered something about planes, winding down his window so that he could hear the sound of any approaching jet. It was a precaution, I was soon to discover, that was of no use whatsoever. By the time you heard a jet, it was already too late to do anything about it.
Goyty was similar to any one of the score of Chechen villages we had driven through since crossing the border. Six miles south of Grozny, its high street was an expanse of mud, ice and slush between rows of nondescript one-floor brick houses. The light was fading as I arrived, reducing everything to a single shade of grey. A ragged group of urchins hung around by the main intersection. As a car slowed down for the potholes, two of them rushed out, grabbed its bumper, and were dragged off along the ice on their arses, shrieking with delight as their mates hooted and clapped while they waited for the next ride.
In Goyty there was a handful of journalists with transmitting equipment crammed into a small room in a house. A familiar face appeared in the room, that of David, an American photographer whom I had met two years before in Bosnia.
There were widespread rumours that the Presidential Palace, so long the symbol of the Chechens’ resistance, had fallen that day. David and I left together as the last trace of light dimmed from the sky.
The sky ahead became a pulsing orange glow, while the sound of shellfire grew louder and louder. Grozny was burning. There were shells falling everywhere, screaming in like freight trains, exploding in waves among the houses on either side of us, while volleys of Grad rockets streaked fire trails like comets across the sky.
Advertisement
We stopped abruptly in the lee of a stone-walled house and unloaded my rucksack into an unlit hallway. Electricity and water supplies had long since ceased. The ground floor of the empty building had been requisitioned by the photographers as a sanctuary against the shelling. In one of the apartments, candlelit faces turned to look at me. I knew some of these faces from Bosnia. “Hello, Anthony,” someone said calmly. “Would you like a whisky?”
At dawn we emerged from our shelter having spent the night huddled in sleeping bags listening to the thunderous shelling outside, whispering and giggling in our uncertain security like children in a storm.
Then a Russian voice, ghostly and detached, floated mournfully towards us: “Lay down your weapons. You are surrounded. Lay down your weapons. Your only hope is to surrender.” The repetitive thump of approaching rotor blades revealed its source: a Russian helicopter cruised north of the river, speakers rigged to its sides. The presidency had fallen during the night, and the gunship was flying on a psy-ops mission in an attempt to undermine the resolve of the Chechen fighters.
Then that moment of stillness ended, seemingly swallowed in an instant, and the shelling intensified once more. There were no more lulls. During the second half of the battle for Grozny the Russians sometimes fired more than 30,000 shells a day into the southern sector. And so Grozny had the life torn out of it by the second most powerful military machine on the planet and the lethal dynamics were breathtaking in every sense. Artillery, tanks, mortars, rocket systems, jet aircraft, helicopter gunships – the permutations of incoming fire were endless.
“Grozny was burning. There were shells falling everywhere. Rockets streaked fire trails like comets across the sky
It left the dead plentiful: dead people blown out of their flats; dead pigeons blown out of their roosts; dead dogs blown off the street. Death became too frequent and too abundant to deal with, so that often the bodies were left where they had fallen to become landmarks in their own right: “Turn left past the dead guy with the yellow shopping bag and his wife, then right to Minutka …”
Advertisement
Journeys of the shortest duration became a sort of ambulatory Russian roulette. Beneath another grey sky I passed a dying Chechen soldier, croaking pitifully from his broken head, assumed he was the victim of a shell splinter, ran across railway tracks, suddenly under fire from a sniper, and reached the other side to be told that it was this same sniper who had shot the Chechen; 50 metres further on, along the route I would have taken had I known about the sniper, a shell turned five other fighters to red chaff. And always the emptiness, the blood in every street, the ravens pecking into the scarlet ice, the body scraps, the shells and the fear, the terrible weight of fear.
Pathetic graves accumulated in the dismal parks and gardens as the thousands of civilians who remained as troglodytes in the city, leading a subterranean existence in cellars, emerged to bury their dead whenever the opportunity arose. Bearing the brunt of the Russian army’s fire, they were the wretched victims of the war, dying for what Moscow deemed “salvation”.
“We are Russians,” a woman told me as her friend was lowered into a shallow scrape in the hard ground on a day unremarkable for its violence and misery. She had a gentle singsong voice and clutched a small dog wrapped in a woollen coat to her breast. “We don’t have anywhere to go. It is so cold. There is no water. There is disease. We are dying.” By the time Grozny fell a month later, 25,000 would be dead in the city.
Dying in abundance, too, were Russian soldiers. The army so laden with artillery assets still sent its troops, many of them teenage conscripts, to be gunned down in bungled assaults through the alien streets, or incinerated in their flaming APCs (armoured personnel carriers).
The children of a warrior nation, the Chechens’ tactics were simple: most of their time was spent beneath the city streets in cellars and bunkers sitting out the furious artillery barrages, while watch was kept for Russian movement by observation posts high in the buildings above. Word of an enemy move was brought by a runner, at which point the fighters deployed to defensive positions to combat the advance.
Advertisement
Slamming into key points – the railway station, the Sunzha River and the arterial Leninska Avenue that linked Minutka to Freedom Square – then careering wildly into unsuspecting suburbs, the fighting pinballed through the city. Outgunned and, eventually, outmanoeuvred, the Chechens were driven slowly and expensively from their capital, bouncing back against their opponents in garrulous flurries of gunfire as the Russians tried to reorganize, then melting away beneath the suffocating weight of retaliatory artillery.
It became increasingly impossible to work. The shelling all but paralysed our movement. Even when we did endure the frightful risk of the streets it was a disproportionate expenditure of energy, for the fear and horror of it all eroded our resilience.
Sheltering in our squat from the bombardment one day, we heard a young Russian woman calling us from the street. “Our house is hit,” she said simply. “There are many dead and wounded.” She led us a short distance to awful carnage.
Derbentskaya Street, Grozny. We ran slap into a thickset woman muffled in a coat held together by a string belt. She was shrieking hysterically, unhinged with rage, shock and grief. In one hand she brandished an awkward- looking club. It took me a few seconds to realise it was the severed leg of a man. With her left hand she tugged frantically at a sledge. On it lay the chopped bloody bundle of a corpse. Through some sacking the remaining leg dragged a scarlet wake in the snow. Then suddenly she raged off into the wilderness dragging the sledge with its dismembered body behind her. Dumb with shock we next walked into a scene every bit as dreadful. In a nearby street, shellfire from a Russian battery had landed among a group of old people. As we approached we could see their corpses sprawled in a random shatter of torn flesh and body parts.
Everyone was dead. We thought. But as I passed the body of an old man, one leg missing, the other a tangled mash barely connected to his torso, a hand twitched and grasped my ankle. “My God, oh my God, my legs,” he started to cry. I freed my foot and began to take photographs of him, so shut down in those moments that a part of me even noticed that the spread of the other bodies was too wide to allow for a strong composition. Then I knelt down beside him to put tourniquets on his wounds until one of my friends stopped me.
Advertisement
“Ant, leave him. There’s no point. There’s no point,” he said.
Across the ravaged city streets the giant tread of artillery fire continued. It seemed to be moving back towards us.
Our fear was tangible. The old man sensed what was about to happen and grasped again at my ankle. He was crying loudly by then, begging us not to leave him. One fresh barrage and we ran. We were gibbering with self-loathing and guilt, but we ran anyway.
“In one hand the woman waved an awkward-looking club. It took me a few seconds to realise it was a severed leg
Back in shelter we sloshed whisky down our throats and argued frantically with each other about what we should have done, or could have done. If only it had been as simple as run or die. It wasn’t.
All we had done was to take our photographs and leave the only survivor to die. It was one of those situations that war sometimes throws into your life. Whatever you do, you come out of it feeling degraded.
Next morning the bodies were still there. Stiff and cold in the stained snow.
For days, whether my eyes were open or closed, I could see that woman shaking the severed leg at me; she still comes to me sometimes now.
The incident seemed to break our resolve to stay in the city. Seizing a rare opportunity to share a ride out, we drove to Goyty, shocked, tired, bedraggled.
As we left we passed through the site of a recent barrage. The shells had left wide brown whorls in the snow. A wounded dog was eating a bit of flesh at the edge of the street and a Chechen kid emerged with a sledge. He sat down on it and pushed himself along with his legs, eyes completely empty.
Within three days my friends all departed from Goyty bar one, Jon, a photographer. The others either left Chechnya or went to work the Russian side while Jon and I based ourselves in a fairly affluent Chechen household in the village, which had somehow managed to stay untouched by the fighting. The house was run by a middle-aged man named Magamet. For all his apparent riches he was a delinquent thug who used to attract the attention of his wife by throwing clods of frozen earth at her. His relationship with Jon and me was at best strained and he made us pay our rent in advance each day because, he told us bluntly, we would soon be killed. We saw him as a mannerless profiteer while he, a devout Muslim, objected to the way we drank and smoked.
Jon and I hired a car and gold-toothed driver, and began to work the war in the countryside.
One morning we saw a Sukhoi jet completing a bombing run on a village in the mountains, rolling back down over the target to rake it with cannon fire before swooping low away above us. Rather than lose ourselves trying to find the village without a guide, we headed for Shali, a small town south of Grozny, to see if they had brought any casualties to the hospital there.
We found many faces of President Yeltsin’s war in the stinking wards: the burnt, the blind, the maimed and disabled.
Soon after our arrival some villagers entered carrying two little girls along corridors slippery with a muddle of used dressings, urine and blood. The children were sisters. Marika was four years old. She was missing the lower part of her back and buttocks, but was still alive, just, and her pale, doll-like form lay motionless facedown on a table as a doctor removed large pieces of metal from her wounds, allowing each to drop on the table with a heavy clunk.
Her sister, Miralya, was a year older. I do not know what it takes to make a tiny child weep tears of blood, massive blast concussion I guess, but as she shook with noiseless terror it ran in thick lines from the corner of each eye, joining the scarlet streaks from a head wound to form a cobweb mask that covered her face.
Neither the villagers who had brought them in nor the exhausted hospital staff appeared to know what had become of the children’s family.
Then through the mêlée stepped a tall man dressed in a black suit, overcoat and wide-brimmed trilby. He was about 60. “Come with me,” he said mysteriously, in English. “I shall take you to their village and you shall see everything you need to.”
After an hour’s journey into the snow-covered mountains we found the girls’ family; their two sisters, brother and mother. They were laid out in an empty house in a village on a bed in bundles, none of which was bigger than a supermarket bag. The boy was the best preserved, the mother barely recognisable as human. Of the other sisters, a small pair of legs emerged from a cloth, and the two heads lay at the end of the bed. Apparently their father had been vaporised. I remember that scene every time I hear a military spokesman use the phrase “collateral damage”.
Jon stayed inside to take some photographs while I walked out to have a cigarette. I found our man in black addressing the men of the village. About 50 of them stood in a silent semicircle. Whoever he was he seemed to carry a lot of authority. The villagers may not have hated the Russians before, but by the look on their faces they hated them now.
Jon left me a day later. He had to go to Ingushetia to ship some film.
In his absence I hung on in Goyty alone as the war spread through the countryside around me. I felt isolated and more tired than I had ever felt before.
By mid-February there were rumours in the village that the Russians had penetrated the southern half of Grozny, and that the position of the Chechen forces there was becoming increasingly tenuous as they faced encirclement. I had only left the capital about ten days earlier, but knew that this news meant I should return once more. It was not a prospect I relished.
There are places, wars and ways to die. I had fantasised about my death many times with an almost prurient fascination: narcissistic visions of a swift and bold exit, thumping down painlessly beneath a bullet with my boots on, just enough life left to spit the blood out of my mouth and whisper no regrets before the big sleep – the ultimate hit. The prospect of squealing around in the snow in Grozny smashed to pieces by a Russian shell, alone, in agony and terror, did not feature too high on my list of preferences.
I managed to track down an English-speaking Chechen fighter, Maksharip, and hired him as an interpreter. Humorous, intelligent, he proved an ideal fixer. Hoping I could close my mind down for one final horror venture, I planned to go back into Grozny and find General Maskhadov, leader of the Chechen independence movement. Maksharip seemed enthusiastic enough, though he rather spoilt it by repeating, “Maybe we live, maybe we die – only God knows,” as we finished our discussion.
“Two heads lay on the bed. Their father had been vaporised. I remember the scene every time I hear the phrase ‘collateral damage’
My shaken nerves were strengthened the day before our departure by the arrival in Goyty of two British TV journalists. They were both friends of mine and I greeted them as though they were the long-awaited relief for a beleaguered garrison, their fresh faces, smiles and rationality giving me the sustenance I so needed. One kept talking about his wife and kids in Wimbledon. I urged him to talk more of his family, as if a little bit of Wimbledon would rub off on me: I knew no shell could reach me there.
Late in the afternoon the three of us walked towards Grozny with Maksharip as our guide. The situation was confused. We encountered only isolated bands of Chechens – heading unnervingly in the opposite direction – who told us that the order had come for their forces to withdraw from the city.
We continued to move south as the light went, the glow from burning buildings casting strange shadows around us. We were heading towards the one area that still echoed with gunfire and received the odd artillery round.
Eventually, we found a Chechen post that was holding firm. Two particularly belligerent-looking warriors appeared, both of them wounded. They were members of Maskhadov’s personal guard. The taller of the two, his eye and forehead serrated with stitches, spoke hurriedly on a walkie-talkie as his limping comrade took up position behind him. The general himself was on the other end. “I have three English journalists here who want to see you,” the fighter said. There was a pause, then we heard an amused voice reply, “What can I tell them? Bring them along.”
Maskhadov’s HQ lay in a cellar complex beneath a four-storey building. Sitting at a desk beneath maps of the city, he looked tired though not dispirited and spoke with tremendous sincerity. “I can only wonder at the strength with which my men fight. But we cannot match the Russian weaponry, and will have to fight a different type of war. This is not a retreat from Grozny – it is a planned withdrawal.”
It was not until he marked the new Russian lines on my map that we knew the full extent of the Chechens’ withdrawal. Except for our location in an emaciated urban finger to the extreme south of the city, and the access route’s entrance around Chernoreche, Grozny had been abandoned to the advancing Russians.
He invited us to stay, and we saw that his mood of fatalistic optimism was shared by others in the building’s cellars. Mad Max appeared to have met the Saracens: there were shaven heads; wild black beards; turbans; clanking layers of bandoliers; curved daggers and scimitars; green bandanas emblazoned in Koranic script; flowing Afghan-style coats and snow-smocks; dancing and music in the wavering candlelight – an unforgettable scene; the brave and wild singing as their city burnt.
As the revelry subsided the fighters snatched sleep wherever they could, or filed away to reinforce rearguard positions nearby.
At midnight came sudden word to move. Without dissent or confusion they went loading ammunition boxes and medical supplies into rucksacks, departing into the darkness for a rendezvous far to the southwest. The shelling had come much closer as the Russians pushed forward, and it appeared that, rather than be caught in their loop, Maskhadov had decided to fall back towards Grozny’s remaining gateway.
Our escape was one of protracted effort and confusion. Led by Maksharip, who was now toting a Kalashnikov, we joined a gaggle of soldiers and medical staff in a halting three-hour journey to Chernoreche. It was uncertain how close the Russians were – their signal and illumination flares appeared everywhere. Each time I anticipated the eruption of gunfire around us as we tangled with the Russian noose.
A tank approached through the darkness. Lying in a ditch by the side of the road, we pressed our faces hard into the snow as it drew nearer. The night’s smoke-laden mist dimmed the spread of its spotlight and the noise of its tracks until it was almost upon us and the boulevard’s broken trees lit up on either side. I held my breath as the air filled with the sound of the grinding machine. Friendly or hostile? No one knew. It passed us. With softly murmured curses of relief, we moved off.
Back in Goyty my two journalist friends left me alone once more, and I found a temporary peace in the knowledge that I had returned to Grozny and caught its fall.
A message appeared on the screen of my sat-telex. It was from London. “Return to Moscow and London as you see best,” it read. “This phase of the story over. ENDS.” I was ecstatic, hurling my belongings into a rucksack as fast as I could.
I rushed out to get my driver. He started whingeing about the price and risk of driving me to safety across the Ingush border.
“Take what you want. Just get me the f*** out of here,” I jabbered, clutching at his lapels with one hand as I thrust a bundle of dollars into his face with the other.
-----------
Back in the UK I hailed a cab at the airport and collapsed into the opulence of the vehicle’s seat, trying to find peace in this moment that I had dreamt of for so long in Chechnya.
“Don’t worry,” I had told myself many times in Grozny, “you’re going to get out of this shit and by the time you are in a black cab it’ll all seem like a bad dream.”
“A tank approached through the darkness, lighting up the boulevard’s broken trees on either side. Friendly or hostile? No one knew
It seemed more like a waking nightmare. I still could not get the image of the woman and severed leg out of my vision, feared sleep for the return of the dead children, and had a kind of numb, shocked buzzing in my head.
I had rented a flat in Shepherd’s Bush from a friend. Lela greeted me as I arrived. She hugged me warmly in the darkness of the hallway, concern clouding her face as I walked inside and she saw me in the light.
“F***ing hell, Ant, you look shattered.”
“I feel f***ing shattered,” I replied and sank back into the sofa.
“Shall we go and see Leon?” she asked finally, after a long pause.
In his small west London flat, its walls a montage of his drawings and photographs, Leon welcomed us with the unsurprised smile of a tired guru.
“Hello, Ant,” he said quietly. “You look awful.”
Pulling a roll of foil out of a drawer, he tore off a strip, indenting a narrow trench line down the sheet. A little white wrap appeared in his hand, and from it he tipped the gear, a small heaped pile no wider than a penny, into one end of the furrow in the foil, then cooked it with an untrembling lighter. We took it in turns to run the small brown pool of processed opium up and down the foil, pursued by the hidden heat of the lighter beneath, chasing it corner to corner with a foil tube.
I sucked in the smoke greedily, and the cold wash of anaesthesia hit me. It swept over me, a wave that started at the tip of my nose, rushing across my face to encircle my head, running down my neck through my chest, crashing into a warm golden explosion in my stomach, my groin, a blissed sensation beyond the peak of orgasm and relief of nausea, as every muscle in my body relaxed and my head lolled gently onto my shoulder, every sense unwinding, unburdened of the crushing weight of pain I never even knew I had: the rush, the wave, death, heaven, completion.
For hours and hours.
You can argue over every other aspect of heroin, but you can never dispute the hit. Get it right and you may never look back. Except in regret. Many hours later, Lela and I ambled out into the night and back to the flat, where I fell into the first peaceful sleep for weeks.
I stayed in London for most of the next two months. It does not take long to get a habit, and I ran in to get mine, hands outstretched, determined, like it was all I had ever wanted.
Maybe it was.
© Anthony Loyd. Extracted from My War Gone By, I Miss It So (September Publishing, £9.99)
Next Saturday: don’t miss Anthony Loyd on the fall of the caliphate