With her husband dead her double life had come to an end. But Elina’s ordeal was far from over. She has been missing since August 17, when she was kidnapped at gunpoint by Chechen security forces in Grozny, the bombed-out capital.
“I am terrified that they have already killed her,” sobbed Rita Ersenoyeva, Elina’s mother. “I fear that the men who took her have done terrible things to her. She had no choice but to marry Basayev. Now that she’s gone I have lost hope. I have lost a golden child.”
Rita, a market trader, has received anonymous calls warning her not to make a fuss. She fears that 26-year-old Elina’s captors will come back for her two brothers, aged 15 and 22.
Until last November Elina’s family had survived two wars relatively unscathed and felt lucky. Elina, a hard-working, cheerful girl, graduated from Grozny University’s journalism faculty with top marks.
She began freelancing for a local newspaper and volunteered to work for an Aids charity. The family shared a two-bedroom flat in a partially ruined building with plastic sheeting instead of windows, but Ersenoyeva was optimistic about the future.
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She went to seminars as far away as Denmark — a significant achievement for a woman in Chechnya’s male-dominated society — and became engaged to Salman, a young man she loved. She had recently started reading the Koran and kept her hair under a headscarf but showed no signs of religious extremism.
Her nightmare began last autumn when she was approached by Kheda Saidulayeva, the wife of an extremist Islamic cleric, Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev, the rebel president of Chechnya until the Russians killed him in June. Saidulayeva, who was a distant relative of Ersenoyeva, told her that she had been chosen to marry a commander known as Ali-Khan Abu Yazidov. If she refused, her brothers’ lives would be in danger.
On November 30 Elina was approached by an envoy of Abu Yazidov. The man ordered her to get into his car. He blindfolded her and drove her to a house on the outskirts of Grozny. She was led into a room where she came face to face with Basayev, who had been on the run for more than six years and was responsible for the deaths of more than 300 civilians at Beslan in 2004.
“Elina was so shocked at seeing him there that she nearly collapsed,” her mother recalled. “He was dressed in camouflage, with hand grenades strapped to his chest and his AK-47 leaning against the wall. She was confused. She asked where Abu Yazidov was. He looked at her and said, ‘I am Abu Yazidov’. Elina was petrified.
“Basayev told her that he wouldn’t ask her to kill people or become a suicide bomber. He said he needed her brains, but that if she refused to carry out his orders or lied to him he’d kill her and us.”
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The couple were married and spent three days together at the house. Upon her return home Elina told her mother she had wed but, fearing for her family’s safety, kept her husband’s identity to herself.
Rita Ersenoyeva, 41, was surprised by the apparent cooling of her daughter’s feelings towards Salman. She was reassured when, in accordance with tradition, a delegation sent by the groom visited her and her estranged husband to seal her daughter’s marriage. Posing as Abu Yazidov’s relatives, they showed her photographs which they said were of Elina’s husband.
Elina was taken to Basayev on three subsequent occasions, staying each time for about 48 hours. She later told her mother that Basayev, who had at least three other wives, spent much of his time writing on a laptop.
Surprisingly for a Muslim extremist, he did not object to her love of make-up and encouraged her to show her hair and to wear trousers. But he criticised her Aids work and scolded her for using slang. “She told me that he was always preaching at her and once remarked that she was pretty, but not as intelligent as he’d hoped,” her mother said.
Unable to access the internet Basayev, who had lost a foot when he stepped on a Russian mine six years ago, gave Elina cash to buy a computer flashcard to download information for him from a banned rebel website. She last saw him in February when he left his hideout for “security” reasons.
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In July, two weeks after Basayev was killed, agents from the FSB, the former KGB, came to question Elina. Only then did she reveal her husband’s name to her mother, who was so shocked that she fainted. No charges were brought: the Russians said they accepted that she had been blackmailed into the marriage.
She was still not out of danger. Last month she told a human rights group that she felt unsafe and that her family was being harassed by Chechnya’s pro-Moscow security forces. Her mother had been beaten several times by men in camouflage.
Three weeks ago, as Elina and Elza Astamirova, her aunt, went to work, two cars came to a halt beside them.
“Eight men with machineguns shoved us in and drove us away,” said Astamirova. “They put sacks over our heads to stop us seeing where they were taking us. I was screaming with fear but they were just laughing. We ended up in a small room with bare walls. Elina was next to me. They let me go and kept her.”
On the day she was abducted Elina telephoned her mother three times to say that she would be released that evening. She has not been heard from since. Her mother fears that her captors may have believed rumours that Basayev left behind a stash of millions of dollars and decided to torture her into disclosing its whereabouts.
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“To think that Basayev would share that information with her is absurd,” her mother said. “To think she lived all those months in fear to protect her family is very distressing. I can’t bear to think what they are doing to her.”