| Jihad in the Caucasus -- Part Three |
The Advent of Shaykh Shamil
Raging, the Russians rampaged through Lower Chechenya, burning crops, and destroying sixty-one villages. Slowly, the Chechen and Daghestani murids retreated to the mountains behind them. Ghazi Mollah and his leading disciple Shamyl decided to make a stand at Ghimri. After a bitter siege, with many casualties on both sides, the aoul was stormed by the Russians troops, who found Ghazi Mollah among the dead. In the meantime, his deputy, fighting with sixty murids in defence of two stone towers, picked off with unerring aim any Russian who came near. At last, when only two Murids remained alive, Shamyl emerged, to inaugurate a reputation for heroism in combat which would resound throughout the Muslim Caucasus. As a Russian officer described the incident:
It was dark: by the light of the burning thatch we saw a man standing in the doorway of the house, which stood on raised ground, rather above us. This man, who was very tall and powerfully built, stood quite still, as if giving us time to take aim. Then, suddenly, with the spring of a wild beast, he leapt clean over the heads of the very line of soldiers about to fire on him, and landing behind them, whirling his sword in his left hand, he cut down three of them, but was bayoneted by the fourth, the steel plunging deep into his chest. His face still extraordinary in its immobility, he seized the bayonet, pulled it out of his own flesh, cut down the man and, with another superhuman leap, cleared the wall and vanished into the darkness. We were left absolutely dumbfounded.
The Russians paid little attention to Shamyl's escape, confident that with the destruction of the Murids capital they had achieved a final victory. They could not guess that thirty years of war, at a price of half a million Russian lives, awaited them at his hands.
After his dramatic escape from Ghimri, the wounded Shamyl painfully made his way to a cottage in the glacier-riven heights of Daghestan. A shepherd sent word to his wife Fatima, who came secretly to him, and nursed him through a long fever, binding up his wounds. Months later, Shamyl was able once more to travel, and hearing of the death of Ghazi Mollahs successor, was acclaimed by the Muslims as the Imam of all the Caucasus.
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