BY MATTHEW LUCAS
The soldiers beating on the thick iron door yelled for Isa Sakaev to surrender. Two of his sisters, Khutmat and Lursa, barefoot and in the clothes they had slept in, stood outside, surrounded by Federal and pro-government Chechen troops.
Isa, a law student in Moscow, knew that it was dangerous for him to visit Chechnya. According to another sister, Gistam, he still came often to see his family, even though he knew what happened to people who were taken away.
Isa refused to surrender to the soldiers.
“When other people decide to do whatever they want with you,” Gistam said, “I think its better to die.”
Within moments he would be killed and his sisters led off to prison.
The day after her brother was killed in Grozny, the news alleged that Isa was the “right hand” of Shamil Baseyev, an infamous rebel commander, according to his sister Gistam. Kommersant, an online Russian newspaper, also linked him to Arbi Baraev, a renegade Chechen commander implicated in the 1998 murder of foreign engineers in Chechnya.
Her brother was never involved in the fighting, Gistam said.
To Gistam, “Isa was the most peaceful person I have seen in my life.”
“He was very honest,” she said of her brother, “very gentle.”
Gistam talked about the apple trees that Isa planted near their home outside of Grozny and how he cared for their mother when she was sick. The spring after Isa’s death, when the apple trees were in bloom, Gistam found her mother sitting in the kitchen, looking out at his trees, crying and begging God to protect the rest of their family.
Gistam quietly withdrew.
The day before his death, Isa and his sister Khutmat were together in Chechnya, waiting at their sister Lursa’s office in Grozny for her return.
As they waited, Isa told Khutmat about a dream he had.
He had seen himself in his dream, he told her, sitting on the grass eating with his friends who were already dead.
“If you eat together with dead people,” Gistam said, “you are going to join them very soon.”
It was getting dark when Lursa returned. Knowing it was unsafe to travel at night, even the 20 minutes to their house, they decided to sleep at the office.
That evening, according to Gistam, the two sisters watched as Isa paced the room. After looking out the window, he sat down, but refused to eat.
After dinner, Khutmat and Lursa, thinking little of Isa’s behavior, went to bed.
Waking up early for morning prayers, Isa discovered the office was surrounded by Russian and pro-government Chechen soldiers.
Quietly, he went into his sisters’ room.
“Please get up,” he said. “We have guests.”
“Guests? What guests?” asked Lursa. “It’s not time for guests.”
“I expected them,” Isa said. “They are here so please get up.”
Looking through the window, Lursa saw the soldiers, Russian and Chechen, taking up positions around the office.
She began to cry.
“Don’t cry and don’t be frightened,” Isa told her. “It will not help.”
He told his sisters to open the door and surrender to the soldiers, but refused to go with them.
“At the moment they are strong, they have guns, they have power and I have nothing,” he told them. “I don’t want them to take me away.”
He knew that if he were detained, Gistam said, he would disappear.
“If you’re at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Gistam said, “you’re already dead. This is what happened to all his friends.”
As his sisters left the building, he barricaded himself into a room.
The soldiers flooded into the building. Expecting Isa to be armed, they yelled for him to open the door and surrender.
He refused.
The soldiers pushed grenades through the iron-barred window.
Seconds later, the explosion shook the building, filling the room with smoke.
The soldiers sent his sister Khutmat into the room to see if Isa was still alive.
The bitter smoke burned her throat, suffocating her. She began coughing. Unable to see, she knelt on the ground and blindly felt along the floor. Finally, her hand rested on Isa’s body.
He wasn’t moving.
She pulled away, his blood thick on her hands. She fled the room.
The soldiers pulled open the door and windows, allowing the cold winter air to flush out the pungent smoke.
When it cleared, they could see Isa’s body in a heap on the floor.
The soldiers went through his pockets, looking for an identity card. Then they just covered him and left, leaving the body behind.
That morning, Gistam, then living in a neighboring republic, got a phone call from another family member. They told Gistam that soldiers had detained Isa, not realizing that he was already dead.
It took Gistam four hours to reach Grozny.
“I went directly to the place where this mop up operation was held,” Gistam said. “I just saw an empty office that was completely destroyed.”
“By that time,” she said, “my brother was already exploded.”
Her two sisters were already arrested and taken away.
As Gistam stood helplessly outside the ruined office building, a neighbor approached.
“When they saw me, they came to me,” she said, “and they told me that my relatives came to pick up the body of my brother.”
“I just left everything and ran home.”
“When I arrived,” she said, “my brother, he already was on the floor.”
The family had wrapped Isa’s body in a blanket to prepare him for funeral rites.
Gistam knelt down to see her brother, but her relatives pulled her away.
“They didn’t allow me to pick up the blanket and see his face,” she said. “They just took me away.”
“It’s better you not see him,” they told her. “Keep him in mind as if he is alive. If you see him right now, it will be hard for you to forget.”
Her family led her out of the room, away from the body of her only brother.
Outside, Isa’s apple trees, stood bare, crippled by the harsh Chechen winter.