| Jihad in the Caucasus -- Part Four |
Shamyl had been born in 1796 to a family from the Avar people of southern Daghestan. Growing up with his friend Ghazi Mollah, he divided his austere childhood between the mosque and the narrow terraces around Ghimri, where he grazed his family's sheep. Often he would look over the edges, down into the five thousand foot abyss beneath the village, and watch the lightning flash in the thunderclouds below. In the further distance, on the slopes, could be seen the ghostly glow of naphtha fires, where natural oil came bubbling up through the stones, burning for years.
This harsh landscape, and the rigorous Caucasian upbringing which went with it, accustomed the future Imam to a life with few worldly pleasures. When only a child, he persuaded his father to abandon alcohol. The difficult spiritual discipline required of him as a young scholar seemed to come naturally, and by his early twenties he was renowned for all the virtues which the Caucasus respected: courage in battle, a mastery of the Arabic language, Tafsir and Fiqh, and a spiritual nobility which left a profound impression on all who met him.
Together with Ghazi Mollah, he bacame the disciple of Muhammad Yaraghi, the Islamic scholar who taught the young men that their own spiritual purity was not enough: they must fight to make Allah's laws supreme. The Shari'ah must replace the pagan laws of the Caucasian tribes. Only then would Allah give them victory over the Russian hosts.
Shamyl's first exploits as Imam were purely defensive. The Russians, under General Fese, had launched a new attack on Central Daghestan. Here, in the aoul of Ashilta, as the Russians approached, two thousand Murids took an oath on the Quran to defend it to the death. After a bitter hand-to-hand fight through the streets, the Russians captured and destroyed the town, taking no prisoners. The stage was set for a long and bitter war.
Shamyl was no stranger to war with Europeans. While performing the Hajj in 1828, he had met Emir Abd al-Qader, the heroic leader of Algerian resistance against the French, who shared with him his views on guerilla warfare. The two men, although fighting three thousand miles from each other, were very similar both in their scholarly interests and in their methods of war. Both realised the impossibility of winning pitched battles against the large and well-equipped European armies, and the need for sophisticated techniques for dividing the enemy and luring him into remote mountains and forests, there to be dispatched by quick, elusive guerilla attacks.
The weakness of Shamyl's position in the Caucasus was his need to defend the aouls. His men, moving with lightning speed, could always dodge an enemy, or deal him a surprise blow from behind. But the villages, despite their fortifications, were vulnerable to Russian siege methods backed up with modern artillery.
Shamyl learnt this lesson in 1839, at the aoul of Akhulgo. This mountain fastness, protected by gorges on three sides, was itself divided into two by a terrifying chasm spanned by a seventy-foot bridge of wooden planks. Akhulgo had already filled with refugees fleeing from the Russian advance, and the presence of so many women and children to feed made the prospect of a long siege an ugly one. But he would retreat no further: here he made his stand.
By this time, the Muslim army numbered some six thousand, divided into units of five hundred men, each under the command of a deputy. These deputies, tough and scholarly, were a mystery to the Russians. In the thirty years of the Caucasian war, not one was ever captured alive. At Akhulgo, these men fortified the settlement as best they could, and then, in the evening after sunset prayers, went upon the roofs to sing Shamyl's Zabur, the religious chant he had composed to replace the trivial drinking songs they had known before. There were many other chants, too; the most familiar to the Russians being the Death Song, heard when a Russian victory seemed imminent and the Caucasians tied themselves to each other, and prepared to fight to the end.
The Russian attack began on June 29. The Russians attempted to scale the cliffs, and lost three hundred and fifty men to the Mujahideen, who threw rocks and burning logs upon them. Chastened, the Russians withdrew for four days, until they could place their artillery so as to bombard the walls from a safe distance. But although the walls were pounded to rubble, each time the Russians attacked, the Murids appeared from the ruins of the aoul and threw them back with heavy casualties.
Conditions in the village, however, were becoming desperate. Many had died, and their bodies were rotting under the summer sun, spreading a pestilential stench. Food supplies were almost exhausted. Hearing this news from a spy, the Russian general, Count Glasse, decided on an all out assault. Three columns he directed to attack simultaneously, thereby dividing the defenders fire.
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