May 26, 2006

A grisly graphic documentary on Showtime Cable TV about the siege in Beslan by Chechen Mujahideen

by Jerry Gordon

My wife and I watched “Three Days in September” last night. It is a made for TV documentary on the Showtime Cable network about the assault by Mujahideen rebels, and siege involving more than 1200 parents and students hostages on September 1, 2004 at the century old School No. 1 in Beslan in Ossetia in Southern Russia located 30 miles from the war ravaged Muslim Chechen republic.

The documentary was grisly and revealed the barbarity of Chechen Mujahideen fighters engaged in a purposeful jihad against defenseless non-Muslim hostages.

As I indicated in an Israpundit commentary on an article by Lee Kaplan, “Jihad Against U.S. High School Students” about a purported Saudi “dry run” that occurred on Tuesday involving possible seizure of school buses in South Florida a Beslan event could happen here. Only 30 heavily armed Chechen mujahideen rebels including two women wearing explosive belts were involved in the assault and hostage taking in Beslan. After a bloody ten hour assault by Russian Speznost Special Forces on the third day of the Beslan siege, over 330 innocent civilians laid dead, half of them children. All but one of the Chechens is either blown up by explosive belts and bombs wired in the school’s gymnasium or killed in the Speznost assault. The connection between the two Saudi “students” who boarded the bus in South Florida and the Chechen slaughter of the innocents in Beslan in 2004-what the documentary calls Russia’s 9/11 was the influx of Saudi Wahhabis into the Chechen Sufi culture beginning in the 1980’s.

The Chechens have been in rebellion as Muslim separatists in Russia for over three centuries starting with the Czarists wars in the Caucasus region in the early 19th Century depicted in famous literary works such as that of Mikhail Lermontov, author of “A Hero of our Time.” During World War II, Stalin ordered the Chechen’s removed from the region as they were viewed as being Nazi collaborators. The Chechens and Russians have been embroiled in two devastating wars that have flattened the Chechen republic capital of Grozny (aptly named as “frightening” in Russian). Chechen Mujahideen have fought alongside bin Laden and others in the decade long Secret war in Afghanistan that saw the defeat and withdrawal of the then Soviet 40th Army in the 1980’s. Chechen Mujahideen figured in the Bosnian and Kosovar actions in the Balkans, the U.S. led wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq as “foreign fighters.”

But the Chechens, despite the recent influence of Saudi Wahhabism remain Sufis whirling in their mystical Zikr dances, violent separatists in a Muslim war with Russia that is incessant and interminable resulting in tens of thousands of casualties and in the case of Beslan, the locus of the Showtime Cable TV network documentary, hapless children.

The assault and capture of hostages-parents, children, teachers- as the Showtime documentary points out graphically was deliberately planned for September 1st by Chechen rebel commanders.

September 1st is traditional “Knowledge Day” in Russian schools. Children families and educators make it a festive celebration. The opening segments showing home videos of the arrival of parents and children dressed in typical Russian formality carrying flowers, balloons and gifts for the teachers indicates the joy of the occasion-quickly devolve into terror and death.

The film’s story of the bloody hostage taking, siege and assault is told through the eyewitness stories of a 16 year old Russian exchange student who spoke impeccable English, walking through the bullet ridden and shelled hulk of School No. 1, the mother of two children, one a tot and the other an older sister and first grader entering school for the first time that fateful day, the surviving wife of a husband killed in the opening stages of the assault and hostage taking whose home video is used by the rebels to film their siege, a surviving husband who loses both his wife and daughter in the assault and is grievously injured in the ensuing battle to retake the school, a Russian photo journalist whose still pictures riveted the world’s attention of the horrors and grisly carnage that unfolds. The American film actress Julia Roberts is the voice over narrator who provides continuity.

The home videos portray the Chechen Mujahideen fighters wiring the gymnasium filled with sweltering dehydrated fearful adults and children, with bombs, the two women fighters swathed in black hijabs and equipped with explosive belts-later to be triggered with grisly graphic results and the pile of 21 bodies thrown unceremoniously out of the second story window that include the owner of the captured home video camera. The video footage is ironically found as Roberts narrates by two teenagers sifting through the rubble of what was School No. 1.

The home video footage depicts the commander of the assault team “Colonel” who sports a red henna dyed Muslim spaded beard - a symbol of his religious devoutness engaged in giving orders and in negotiations with the lone government representative, a former Russian General and President of the Chechen Ingush Republic.

There is footage of the previous Chechen terrorist takeover of a Moscow Theater in 2002 during which Russian security forces used sleeping gas that resulted in the deaths of the hostage takers and unfortunately more than 130 hostages.

After the bloody assault President Putin arrives in Beslan to make a quick inspection tour of casualties in the hospitals, but as the film’s narrative says he doesn’t visit the site of the siege, School No. 1 and the visit is so short that his plane’s engines are kept warmed up.

At film’s end, the sibling, the mother, the school deputy principal and the Russian photo journalist are reunited with their siblings, children and subjects both physically and emotionally scared by the experience.

As my wife pointed out, only once is the religion of the Chechen mujahideen mentioned: Muslim. The term terrorists is used over and over again to identify them. Thus, the truth of the Beslan siege emblematic of Muslim Jihad is never broached. Rather the fingers are pointed at Russian government authorities or in the case of the lone negotiator sent in on not resolving the Chechen “crisis.” Subsequent to the Beslan siege several Russian Police commanders in the Ossetian region are tried for their incompetency.

Gripping and grisly as “Three days in September” is, it is also a warning that what happened in Beslan at School No. 1 in September 2004 could happen here in this country. It is the message that one correspondent who read the Lee Kaplan article said: was a definite Saudi “dry run” on vulnerable yellow school buses transporting innocent children and driven by untrained drivers here in America.

Watch the reprieve of “Three days in September” on Showtime in your respective viewing areas, despite its politically correct narrative flaw