July 3, 2001

***
On the outskirts of Assinovskaya station, an armored personnel carrier was blown up by a landmine. According to official data, the position of the federal forces was fired upon, one policeman was wounded. In the morning, the village was blocked by troops: tanks and armored personnel carriers stood at all intersections. The numbers on the military equipment were either smeared with paint or covered with tarpaulins and rags. On some of them, local residents noticed a swastika.

Soon the "cleansing" began, accompanied by beatings and seizures of people, robberies of their property. The military threw attics and basements with grenades, shot at private and state vehicles. Gold jewelry was taken from women.
68-year-old Islam Gaurgashvili, who tried to interfere with the military carrying out things, was severely beaten. Relatives managed to take him to the Sunzha district hospital (Ordzhonikidzevskaya station), and only thanks to this he remained alive.

The military drove up to 66-year-old Ali Machuev in an armored personnel carrier and a UAZ vehicle. There were no young men in the house, and the documents of the owner himself were in order. As he believed, he had nothing to worry about. Nevertheless, breaking the furniture in the rooms, the military conducted a search, and then took out the most valuable things: a TV set, a video recorder, and leather goods hanging on a hanger.

Ali Machuev noticed that, leaving with a TV in his hands, one of the soldiers looked at a small refrigerator standing in the corner. He quickly moved it to another place and threw on top of the blankets, pillows and other things scattered on the floor during the search. He himself went out of the room into the yard.

The two robbers returned to the room and from there called out to him: “Where is the refrigerator?” Pointing to the UAZ, he replied: “And those guys over there loaded it.” The military left without realizing that they had been outwitted.

But they took a lot of audio and video equipment from the wealthy home of the Borchashvili family. The military cynically accompanied all these actions with the words that, they say, now the inhabitants of the village will have nothing to transmit information to A. Maskhadov and his detachments.

In total, up to 300 people were detained in Assinovskaya (according to eyewitnesses, only on the first day of the “cleansing”), many of whom were minors and the elderly, sick and disabled. They were delivered to the so-called. Kulikovo Pole and squatted down, with their hands behind their heads and their heads bowed low, they were forced to sit until late at night. Some were forced to lift one leg and keep it in the air, calling it all the "pose of an ostrich." Those who let go were beaten.

The teenagers were separated from the rest and herded into several pits where tanks had stood at the beginning of the war. The passages between the pits were also packed with people.

The head of the administration, Nazarbek Terkhoev, and local policemen, who had been disarmed, were taken to the field. They were beaten and insulted in the same way as the rest of the inhabitants of Assinovskaya.

During the “cleansing” operation, four women were brought to the VOVD of the Achkhoy-Martan District. In particular, the sisters Aishat and Raishat, aged 17 and 18 respectively, were detained because of their clothes: they were wearing long dresses and headscarves. The military said that this is how “Wahhabis” dress up, and therefore they should be “passed through a filter.” Both were released three days later. Relatives had to pay US$1,000 for this.
Two other girls (aged 26 and 28) were taken away after tools and equipment belonging to an electrician brother were found in their home. The military stated that all these items are used in the installation of landmines and mines. My brother was not at home, and the military took his sisters away. In order to obtain information about who sets up landmines on the roads, in the building of the temporary department, both were beaten and tortured with electric current. But for the release, as they later claimed, the money was not paid.

There were also men in the village of Achkhoy-Martan. After being tortured and beaten, they were taken from there to the location of some military unit and placed in a pit.

Taking him upstairs, they interrogated and beat him for several days, then they released him. According to the released people themselves, all this time they were kept in Khankala. At least two people were put into the helicopter, which then flew off towards Grozny. Who those detainees were, what happened to them later, Memorial Human Rights Center is unknown.

The entire Ganiev family was taken away for filtration: father, son and two daughters. Bullying people sometimes took extreme forms. So, on the back of Said-Akhmed Khadzhimuradov, the Russian military carved a Nazi swastika with a knife. They brutally beat an absolutely defenseless deaf-mute young man.

At the field where the detained residents of Assinovskaya were kept, their mothers, sisters and wives began to gather. The military kept the women at a distance, sometimes shooting at their feet and throwing smoke bombs. What will happen to the men, no one said anything. Worried about them, they stood there until the next morning.

On the night of July 4, people who had been taken to the Kulikovo Field were released. Groups of 20 to 30 people called them to the table, wrote down the data, gave them to sign that they supposedly had no claims against the military, and after a warning about the undesirability of appearing in their village within the next two days, they offered to leave s.Bamut. Since the beginning of the second Chechen war, this settlement has been a stronghold of Russian troops in the west of Chechnya. Civilians did not live there, any movement in its vicinity, even during the daytime, was an extremely risky undertaking. Therefore, the liberated, bypassing military posts and places where one could stumble upon mines, moved towards neighboring Ingushetia, towards the settlements of Chemulga and Nesterovskaya.

Meanwhile, the purge continued. Four soldiers destroyed the local hospital. They got out of it, leaving an explosive device, which then had to be cleared by detonation, and a grenade.

Later, two residents of the village were detained. They were taken away in an armored personnel carrier and thrown into pits located, presumably, near Bamut. There they were subjected to the same beatings and abuse. According to one of the soldiers, no one was released alive from these pits. But the Assinoites were lucky, perhaps because by that time the general public both in Russia and abroad had become aware of the scandalous "operations" in their village and neighboring Sernovodsk.

Even at the beginning of the war, Assinovskaya station was officially declared a security zone. People who left the most dangerous regions of the republic lived here: Grozny, the villages adjacent to it and the foothills. Many of them also suffered from the military who arrived for the “cleansing”. Nevertheless, already on July 4, representatives of the commission of the government of the Chechen Republic on the return of internally displaced persons reappeared in the village. Officials, like more than once before, began to offer people to return to their former places of residence. At the same time, they did not provide them with any additional guarantees, including security guarantees.

The events in Sernovodsk and Assinovskaya, as mentioned above, caused a wide public outcry. The leaders of the republic appointed from Moscow were forced to express their attitude towards them. Prime Minister Stanislav Ilyasov, for example, said that during the "cleansing operations" in these settlements, law enforcement officers committed violations of the law. However, even such a mild remark caused the displeasure of the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, Boris Gryzlov. Speaking to reporters a few days later, he said that "these operations are being carried out, they must be carried out, and they are carried out taking into account the legal norms that are enshrined in counter-terrorism operations."

In turn, the commander of the grouping of internal troops in Chechnya, Alexander Chekalin, admitted that the military, under the influence, however, of "emotional factors", could have committed "certain violations."

However, the head of the administration of the Chechen Republic, Akhmad Kadyrov, claims that "a large-scale crime against the civilian population" has been committed in Sernovodsk and Assinovskaya. He stressed that during the operation in these settlements "not a single bandit was detained, not a single gun was seized, no explosives were found." At the same time, "the population is humiliated and insulted." In his opinion, Boris Gryzlov was “incorrectly informed” about the goals of the operation and its results, while only “60 thousand rubles were taken from the Assinovskaya school, intended to pay salaries to teachers, and 33 certificates.” He added that 11 people are still in the hospital, who were “beaten during the “cleansing” of Kurchaloy, and eight local residents were missing.” In turn, the Presidential Plenipotentiary Representative in the Southern Federal District Viktor Kazantsev assured that all those responsible for violations during the "cleansing operations" would be punished without fail.

***
At about four o'clock, having knocked out the front door, the Russian military broke into the house of Yakub Zaindievich Dzhabrailov, born in 1956, who lives in the village of Germenchuk. They tied up the owner and his wife and, “so as not to make noise”, threw pillows over their children. Then they searched the premises, which ended in robbery: they stole a watch, a camera, and many other valuable things.

Bound Yakub Dzhabrailov was taken away in an armored personnel carrier towards the city of Shali. However, where he was taken, on what basis, the relatives do not know. According to them, the abductee never took part in hostilities. According to Memorial Human Rights Center, he was released on the same day.

***
From July 3 to July 10, another “cleansing operation” took place in the village of Starye Atagi. The Russian military blocked the settlement from all sides, restricted entry and exit from it. Then they dispersed into different streets and began a thorough inspection of households. The operation involved units transferred from Khankala and servicemen of the internal troops based on the outskirts of the village on the territory of a former mill. On July 7 they were joined by officers of the OMON of the Chechen Republic stationed in the village of Tolstoy-Yurt.

During the “cleansing” there were cases of rough treatment of local residents and illegal seizure of documents. In some houses, the military overturned furniture, scattered things, rummaged through photo albums, books, and stole household items and food. Up to 30 people were there at the same time, and it was impossible to keep track of everyone. Taking advantage of this, they took away everything of value that caught their eye.
For example, in the house of Shamsuddin Khasanovich Akhmadov, born in 1924, at 27 Mayskaya St., the military took away the clothes of their sons, the work book of one of them, documents, photographs, a driver’s license and a passport of another son, who had already died by that time . Leaving, they climbed into the basement and carried away winter supplies from there. Video cassettes were taken from Beslan Solsaev from Nagornaya Street. Several houses on Tsentralnaya Street also turned out to be “cleaned up”. And at 68 Nuradilov Street, where the Takhaevs live, all the men were forced to undress for examination. Leaving the central part of the village, the military stabbed two calves with bayonets and took their carcasses with them.

There were no casualties either. Shamsudi Bachaev, 60, had a heart failure. He decided that they had come to pick up his son, who, after being detained at the beginning of the year, returned from a filtration camp with poor health, and he had a third heart attack. On the way to the hospital, he died.

Early in the morning on July 8, a skirmish took place in the southern part of the village. The military surrounded the house where the militants were allegedly located and opened fire from automatic weapons and grenade launchers. In the ensuing battle, according to residents of neighboring houses, the military lost two people killed and several wounded. When help arrived in time on five armored personnel carriers and a UAZ vehicle, the participants of the CRI VF had already left the battlefield. By evening, it became known that an infantry fighting vehicle had blown up near the mill on a landmine; among the military who arrived for the "cleansing", there were new victims.

Local residents expected more repression, but nothing out of the ordinary happened over the next two days. The most memorable episodes of the ending operation took place on July 9 - it was the blowing up of the only bridge over the Argun River that survived during the war and the illegal detention by the POM officers or, as the locals call it, the commandant's office of Sh.A. Ibragimov. On this fact, the prosecutor's office of the Grozny (rural) district on August 13, 2001 opened a criminal case No. 19129 (part 2 of article 127, item "a"). “Due to the impossibility of detecting the person to be brought as an accused” (Article 195, paragraph 3 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR), on October 13 of the same year it was suspended. Nothing is known about the further fate of this man.

From the book "People Live Here", Usam Baisaev, Dmitry Grushkin, 2006