Bombshell. Mia Bloom
men's will be Ganiyev. I have followed standard usage in academic literature and used the a rather than the e for Russian transliteration—for example, Basayev rather than Basaev or Besaev. Also, where either a b or a p is used, I have deferred to the p, and so, for instance, have used the name Vagapov rather than Vagabov, although both occur in journalists' accounts.
For Chechen names, an additional complication is that Chechens often have official names, which appear on their passports but are rarely used within the family, and nicknames, regularly used at home. For the purposes of consistency, I have provided the reader with both. In many cases the nickname makes sense, and Raisa becomes Reshat, for example; in other cases, however, the nickname has little or no connection to the passport name, and thus Fatima might become Milana.
As for Arabic names, I have used the most common spelling for the names of individuals and organizations, although this too might cause some confusion. Thus the Lebanese terrorist group Party of Allah, more commonly known as Hizb'allah, can be spelled as Hezbollah, Hizbullah, Hizbollah, or Hizballah. I have chosen the most anglicized version, Hezbollah. The same considerations apply to the name Muhammed, which can also be spelled as Muhammad or Mohammed. Where possible, I have provided the reader with the simplest translations of foreign material when I have used sources in Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, or Russian.
PROLOGUE
MOSCOW, MARCH 2010
In the early-morning hours of Monday, March 29, 2010, two men and two women left an apartment in central Moscow. They had used the apartment as a base where they had assembled two improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the form of belts, which the women had then wrapped around their stomachs. Each IED contained between two and three hundred grams of explosive and one was packed with nails to maximize the carnage.
A second apartment in the city housed more explosives—up to one kilo of TNT—for future attacks. The apartment had been rented by Akhmed Rabadanov, who had allegedly accompanied the two women from Dagestan to Moscow and eventually taken them to the Sokolnicheskaya or Red Line subway that traverses the center of the city.1 Along its route are some of Moscow's most important buildings, including the Russian Duma (parliament), the Kremlin, Red Square, and, significantly, the headquarters of the old KGB, now occupied by its successor, the Federal Security Forces or FSB.
The younger of the two women, Djennet Abdurakhmenova (a.k.a. Abdullaeva), boarded the train headed toward the Ulitsa Podbelskogo station around 8:20 A.M. The rush-hour crowd filled the cars to capacity and she had to stand in the middle of the fifth car for the whole journey. As many as half a million commuters were riding the trains that morning. As people rushed in and out of the car and the train made its way through the center of the city, Djennet looked at her watch nervously. The train was taking longer than usual to reach its destination. Instead of six minutes, it was taking more than twenty minutes, and the delay seemed to agitate her. The attacks were planned to occur consecutively to achieve maximum psychological impact, and Djennet wanted to make sure that she kept as close to schedule as possible.
Djennet wore a bulky purple jacket to hide the bomb, but the jacket looked far too big for her tiny frame. Her exotic Asian features were hallmarks of a mixed Azeri-Kumyk parentage. Muscovites were now chronically afraid of Chechen women, and a few shot nervous glances in her direction, even though it had been five years since a female suicide bomber had launched an attack on the Moscow metro. Djennet's baby face made her look very young, but her strange demeanor and behavior did not match her innocent appearance.
In the middle of the car twenty-three-year-old Sim eih Xing, a Malaysian medical student from Penang, stood behind Djennet and observed her curiously. Djennet's posture was all wrong and her pupils were dilated; she barely blinked at all. Xing assumed that she was on drugs or perhaps mentally ill, and he slowly moved away from her. As he brushed past her, he confirmed that there was definitely something wrong with her. But his thoughts drifted to his impending surgical exams and how tired he was from the challenges of medical school. For reasons that Xing still cannot explain, he decided to exit the train three stops early, at Park Kultury, though he had planned to stay on until Okhotny Ryad. The Red Line trains were stopping and starting every few minutes, frustrating everyone on board. Later, people would realize that the delay had been caused by the first bomb, which rocked Moscow's metro at the Lubyanka station at 7:52 A.M.
As Xing exited the car by the middle door, a massive shock wave hit him from behind and knocked him to the ground. When he regained consciousness seconds later he could not hear anything, but saw bodies all around him. Smoke billowed out of the subway car and the smell of burnt rubber and skin permeated the air. When his hearing returned moments later, he could hear screams and the wail of approaching ambulances on the street above. Bloodied people ran past him as he stood up and walked out of the station in a daze. He looked back over his shoulder at the smoldering subway car and on its floor saw a dozen bodies piled up and various body parts strewn about. On the bloodstained floor lay Djennet's motionless corpse, her severed head a few feet away.
Xing climbed the stairs to the street. In his head he repeated an Islamic prayer over and over again, worrying that there might be a second bomb and hoping the prayer would afford him some protection. As he reached the top of the stairs, he stumbled and fell into the street. There was something on his leg. He lifted his jeans' pant leg to reveal bits of shrapnel and human flesh. The flesh could belong only to Djennet, whose upper body had been blown apart by the bomb. (Other victims were either crushed or killed by shrapnel.) Xing suffered only minor injuries, singed hair, and some cuts and bruises. He was lucky; his impatience and instinct had saved his life. Fourteen people were killed by the blast and dozens more were injured.
Another eyewitness, Angelika Penalgieva, recalled seeing bodies lying all over the platform at the Park Kultury station after the blast. People tried to use their cell phones to call friends and family but most of the calls did not go through. The FSB, worried that the bombs were triggered by cell phones and that there were other bombers on different subway lines, had jammed the cell towers.
Djennet was only seventeen years old when she blew herself up on the Moscow subway. She had grown up in Khasavyurt, a town in northern Dagestan close to the border with Chechnya. She was the widow of Umalat Magomedov (a.k.a. Al-Bara), a jihadi commander for Shariat Jamaat, the largest militant organization in Dagestan, whose founders were trained by Chechen separatist leader Shamil Basayev and fought alongside their Chechen brethren in the wars with Russia. Djennet's father had abandoned the family when she was a little girl. Her mother's brother, the oldest male in the family, was responsible for her, but drank heavily. In short, she came from a broken home and sensed that others in the traditional Kumyk society regarded her as inferior.2 Marrying a jihadi leader afforded her the respect and status she did not have growing up.
According to Vladimir Markin, spokesman of the Investigations Committee in the Russian prosecutor-general's office, the special operation that led to Umalat's assassination on December 31, 2009, had been one of their most successful. Umalat was killed during a shoot-out with Russian security authorities. After her husband's death, Djennet was interrogated and photographed. Then she disappeared. Markin claimed that Djennet went straight to a Wahhabi training camp for three months of instruction.3 At the end of the training, she was sent onto the subway as a suicide bomber.
Djennet was a classic Black Widow: a teenaged bride now alone and vulnerable to jihadi recruiters. Russian sources claimed that she was radicalized and recruited only after Umalat's death, but private photos of Djennet and Umalat have emerged in which she holds a pistol in her hand and has a look of fierce determination on her face. She was clearly radicalized before Umalat's death but probably became active only afterward. The Russians believe that Djennet was trained by Shariat Jamaat to avenge Umalat's death.4 It seems likely, however, that the attack against Moscow's subways was retaliation not just for one man's death, but also for the policy of assassination by which the FSB was picking off jihadi leaders, one by one.
Across town, at 7:45 A.M., Djennet's colleague, Maryam Sharipova, boarded a different train on the Red Line. Maryam was unlike Djennet in every respect. She was older, twenty-eight, and her alleged husband was still alive. More important, for a woman, Maryam was highly