«How many of us will be left before they take note?»
Notes of a doctor at a rural Chechen hospital

“Where’s my mom?” - asks a little boy, stopping me, as I walk across Lestnichny square.
“Whose boy are you, little one”?
He answered in a language unknown to me: not in Russian or Chechen for that matter, but some unknown nationality.
“ Tell me, who does this boy belong to, who knows?
Silence. And then someone’s voice:
“Maybe the woman who was brought in: the one now at the first aid station”.

The woman in question was in a coma, having lost a lot of blood. Shrapnel wound to the shoulder, bone broken, arm hanging. Differences between the doctors: one recommends amputation, the other to find the pulse and stitch. Shame. A woman, you know!

At the first aid station, a table and couch. She on the table and her saviour on the couch. A 45 year old man with a hip injury, bleeding profusely, but asks for the woman to be treated, her situation being much more serious. They are the first injured from the SS-20 (SCUD) missile attack on Grozny’s central market.


Later it came out that the woman was from Azerbaijan, trading at the market, while the man had gone there to do his shopping. Seriously wounded, he had crawled back to his car and asked the bystanders to put one of the seriously wounded in it too. She was chosen. Bleeding heavily, he drove from Grozny to Stariye Atagi with the Azeri lady. All this we found out later. They were the first of the injured.


Barely 15 minutes had passed before it all started...the flow of casualties would not let up. Vehicles kept arriving and leaving. There were not enough medical staff. There were not enough stretchers, beds, medicine, bandages, solutions, everything... they put one doctor outside to meet the cars. He looked inside each one in turn, chose the seriously injured and sent the others on: to Chiri-Yurt, Shatoi, and so on.


This 21 October 1999 was the small 22-bed hospital’s war christening. Two surgeons, one anesthetist, one trauma specialist (sitting in his armchair at home, seeing this nightmare on the television, he came from Chishki to help his colleagues at the hospital), a few nurses, orderlies, and many other people here helping in whatever way they could. And so many young lads ready to donate blood. Though we were unable to determine the blood groups and rhesus factors…

The Azeri woman’s arm did not heal; it had to be amputated after a month. And after another 2-3 weeks she too was gone, leaving behind three orphans – 2 girls and this little boy from Lestnichny square. He was taken in by a local family until the arrival of his relatives.

Each day brought more injured, and together with them doctors from the ninth and fourth Grozny hospitals, along with other medicinal personnel. After the first SCUD missile strike, a second one occurred in the area around the Luch department store. Then followed an attack on a humanitarian corridor for refugees, not to speak of all the other missile strikes on anything that moved. How many died on the spot; how many on the way to hospital; how many in the hospitals? Uncounted.

You look at a patient, on the way to recovery, already up, moving, and suddenly: a sharp deterioration, delirium, temperature, and then death. No antibiotics will help. Doctors wring their hands in despair. How many passed away without regaining consciousness?

How to forget the nine year old boy, Batukayev, who spent six weeks in bed with a fever raging between 103 & 106 Fahrenheit, and then died without ever regaining consciousness? And nothing at all would help, not even strong antibiotics.


How to forget the piercing cry of the young woman who, when asking for help to stand up, is told that both her legs have been amputated? It turned out she had married someone several days before being injured.


How to forget the beautiful young girl, 22-25 years old, with one arm amputated, who was taken to Moscow afterwards without their telling her the truth that her husband and two children were dead? In answer to her question why her husband would not come, they answered, “He is with the kids, it is unsafe to come”. Her story was as follows. She had decided to travel with the kids to her parent’s village, Chernorechye. Having got almost as far as the reservoir, they saw a plane. They dashed out of the car, wanting to hide behind anything. The husband seized their five-year-old girl and three-year-old boy under his arms and ran. But only she survived.


...They wanted to bring one young injured man out of the Republic, but he died on the way. And on that very night his wife gave birth to a boy.

One Russian “crack” pilot did not regret the usage of two missiles fired at an eighteen-year-old girl. And this is how it happened. Three girls, all friends, decided to nip out to get some water from the river. Already having returned, they were almost at the gate when a plane started to circle overhead. Two of the friends succeeded in running into the house, but the third, putting down the buckets, started to call out to them, saying, “Come here, they won’t do anything to us”. The plane circled twice, but after the third time, when the dust settled, the girl was lying on the ground, with two craters from the missiles, to the left and right of her. And in the hospital, she died without regaining consciousness.

How many men and women are left without arms or legs? Here in Baku I sometimes see our patients.

During a “cleansing” operation, at seven in the morning, the Federals took out an injured lad from a house, and on the second day he was found in a forest, hung upside down from a tree with wire through his ankles. He was without his eyes and ears, had been scalped, missing three ribs, and his fingers had been “sharpened”…


Many lads came to the hospital unconscious. The hospital was small, space for 22 patients, but afterwards it was necessary to adapt two corridors, a boiler house and a kitchen for the school, as the school’s classrooms were needed for convalescing patients. As soon as the patients regained consciousness, those who could sit completed their ablutions in sand (the lads brought it in bags and placed it under the beds).

As with everything, there were problems with water and electricity. Operations were performed by candlelight at best. To be fair we did have a generator, but as soon as planes appeared, the generator was turned off. As soon as new victims arrived, these lads asked, “Please, if medicine is required, we have some, take it. Just save these people!”

But if death happened, then these young lads died with honour intact. Enough was to listen to the murmuring from their lips, it was possible to hear not pleas for help, but sura from the Koran: may Allah take their gazavat!

This is a dirty war: we all know this. The destruction, the genocide of the Chechen people is in progress. The (Chechen) lads who are fighting, they are not bandits or terrorists: they are our brothers and sons, and they are fighting for our earth. And if an anti-terrorist operation is to be undertaken, then it is necessary to start in the Kremlin and Moscow.


In the world there are many various parties and organisations for the protection of one or the other species of animal. Several animals are now on the endangered list. I want to ask the world community: “If in your opinion we Chechens are animals, how many of us should remain for you to note us and put us on the endangered list”?
The patients named me Isha (sister), so I will sign as Rosa Isha.