The zavesa, literally “curtain” in Chechen, covered almost all her face, so that only those startlingly beautiful turquoise blue eyes and the bridge of her nose were visible.

As she recited her zaveshchaniye, a kind of last testament, her voice was a emotionless monotone and her eyes, unblinking. She had started with a brief narration of her early life, first as a little girl, then an adolescent with a crush on Dani Tashayev, the reigning pop star of her day and finally, as Raslan Muzhakhoyev’s wife and little Tania’s mama.

She didn’t attempt to glorify her Ingush-Chechen warlord husband who had been killed by the FSB the previous year. Raslan Muzhakhoyev had been a violent and abusive man and Zarema Muzhakhoyeva was in fact secretly relieved when they brought her the news of his killing.

Now, as she spoke, her voice was flat and her look, deadpan. A true believer, about to go out and die in the service of Allah, is expected to be filled with excitement and happy anticipation. Not Zarema. She had already died within.

After a while however, something akin to emotion, in the form of a tremor, did enter Zarema’s voice,  when she began speaking about her younger brother, Avtorhan. She called him her ‘lyubimaya Avi’, whose unruly hair kept falling all over his eyes. Avi was an obedient child who grew up to be a respectful young man, she recited, one who loved his family and would do anything for their happiness.

She was soon unstoppable. Zarema began relating little anecdotes about Avi’s naughty escapades in primary school, his skill at sketching and his talent for fixing household appliances.” When anybody in the neighborhood had a problem with their fridge, or their TV, they always came to my brother,” she said and for perhaps the first time, her lovely eyes crinkled at the edges as, inside her zavesa, she smiled.

The smiley crinkles abruptly disappeared however, as her eyes filled. Her head bowed now, Zarema stared down at her hands, her voice now a faint whisper, “He was so happy when he was mending things.”

Struggling to remain calm and collected, Zarema Muzhakhoyeva continued,” When the Russians first came to Urus, Avi sketched them in their heavy trucks and presented the sketch to their commander, who was very impressed.”

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Avtorhan volunteered for his own suicide mission in early 2003 and instead of trying to dissuade him, Zarema helped him prepare.

Just prior to a mission, a suicide bomber goes through a transformation, brought on by the realization that he is going to die. The bomber’s religious beliefs suddenly grow stronger as he uses them desperately as a crutch to help him face death without falling apart.

The handlers have to act swiftly. Suicide bombers are very fragile weapons. They need to be constantly groomed and kept at an adrenalin-drenched pitch, to the point where they’re ready to give their life. They continue to be indoctrinated till the very last hour, to ensure that the determination does not waver. Fanatical ideologues in the group stay close and keep feedinğ them a non-stop drip of pep-talk about heaven and those 72 virgins.

Here’s the thing- once a suicide bomber is at that frenetic state, you can’t then put him back on the shelf and expect him to wait until you’re ready to execute the plan. But for Avi, the operation was a go from the start and that companion ideologue in charge of grooming was Zarema who took it upon herself to perform with extraordinary zeal.

On a chill February morning Avi was driven out to the gates of the security perimeter surrounding the Russian army barracks in the Urus-Martan Military District, by fellow jihadis of the Riyad-us Saliheen. One of them tried to adjust his belt as the buckle was hurting him near his belly button. In his cramped position, the bearded handler had to twist his torso to reach down and loosen the buckle and must have pressed down on the remote button inadvertently.

The vest went off with a thunderous roar as 50 lbs of RDX, crammed with 500 small screws and bolts, exploded. In an instant, just 500 yards from the main check-point of the perimeter, the small hatchback turned itself inside out, like a peeled banana, destroying everything living and non-living in it.

Since it was a bit early in the day and the weather was particularly cold that morning, there were no pedestrians or vehicles around and therefore, there were no other injuries.

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Zarema was devastated that her suicide bomber brother was dead, killed by his own bomb, and here is the Islamic Jihadi version of an oxymoron. On one hand she was devastated because the brother she had doted on was dead and on the other hand, she was devastated because he had failed to complete his mission to die.

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Not long after Avi blew himself to bits, one night Zarema locked herself inside her one-room apartment and grasped the sleeping Tania’s tiny neck in both hands and squeezed, until she felt the toddler’s hyoid bone crack. As her daughter’s body convulsed one last time and lay still, she emptied a small bottle of rat poison inside her mouth. Then, as the stomach cramps began, she put on a thin nightgown and lay down, drawing Tania’s still body to her and waited and prayed for a quick despatch.

That deliverance never came. Zarema survived, only because a couple of hours later, a neighbour’s daughter, looking to play with Tania and finding no one answering the doorbell, caused her parents to raise an alarm. Her front door was broken open and they found her.

A sister who lived in Grozny took her away and nursed Zarema back to health.

It wasn’t long after she returned to an empty apartment a year later, when Zarema finally concluded that the only way to redeem her brother’s ‘unfinished martyrdom’ was to complete his mission herself.

The video clip ended with Zarema’s impenetrable stare and her clear flat voice, “Now I am ready to join Avi and Tania in Paradise.”

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I am curious. What do female suicide bombers get when they go to heaven, 72 circumcised studs? Or do they have to be content floating around, dressed only in ethereal white silken robes?

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What struck me about the video, apart from the surreal feeling of watching someone willingly march off to her death, was the fact that there was not a single religious or political utterance in her monologue. Neither was there any mention of any atrocities by Russian forces on her own family. There was no intonation of  ‘Allah o Akbar’ or ‘Death to Russia’, nor even a hint of hate or bitterness, in her voice.

The other thing that haunted me for days was the sight of her angelic eyes and the contours of her beautifully sculpted nose. There was no doubt in my mind that Zarema Muzhakhoyeva was one very beautiful woman. What a pity, I remember saying to myself. If only I could snatch her from Urus and take her some place far away, maybe a Christian d’Or fashion show. She would have been a hit. For a moment I forgot I was looking at a completely mind-controlled fanatic nut job with no feelings whatsoever for ‘infidels’ like me.

Good looks are the norm all across the dozen or so nations in that part of the world. But among all of them, the women from the Caucasus, such as the Chechens, are known to be the most strikingly beautiful.

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The Caucasus mountain range runs west to east, along Russia’s southern border with Georgia, cutting through the tiny Republics of Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan, from where it enters the northern boundary of the sovereign state of Azerbaijan and meanders along till it touches the shores of the world’s largest inland body of water, the Caspian Sea.

All the above mentioned tiny republics are Russia administered and except for North Ossetia (which is majority orthodox Christian), the rest are majority Turkic Muslim nations.

Beauty is not just restricted to humans, in the Caucasus. The Almighty Lord has bestowed breath-taking scenic grandeur and bountiful natural resources to the entire region. Fertile farm lands and starkly beautiful meadows abound, fed by all the melt water from the Caucasus range. There is so much extraction potential of vast reserves of energy, in the form of hydro-electric and geothermal power, oil and natural gas, that this region could easily have been a prosperous exporter of energy if it had wanted to.

Instead this patch of the world map is a cesspool, of religious extremism, dictatorships and warlords, most of whom have tied their fortunes to Putin in order to survive.

While the other republics (Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia,etc) within the Soviet Union broke away and became sovereign nations thanks to a drunk called Boris Yeltsin, the Muslim majority republics remained inside the Russian Federation, leaving their Muslim populations with the constant urge to secede.

Seething with discontent, they began their insurgencies and slowly through the decade after the breakup of the USSR, Chechnya emerged the leader among them. From a vibrant and beautiful tourist destination Chechnya degenerated to one of the world’s most dangerous locations to live in, much like India’s Kashmir. The common denominator, as always – the isolationism of Islam.

For a while, the de-facto leader of the hodgepodge rebel movement was a very dangerous Chechen named Doku Umarov, a hard right Salafi-Takfiri whom the Russians called the ‘Russian Bin Laden’. Umarov’s stated goal was to combine the two neighboring Muslim-majority Republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan with Chechnya, into an Islamic emirate governed by the barbaric medieval tenets of Salafi-Takfirism.

Umarov began calling himself ‘Emir’ of the new ‘Caucasian Islamic Republic’.

Numerous attempts by the Russian FSB, to liquidate Umarov failed, until in 2013 a rival Chechen warlord by the name of Ramzan Kadyrov, a satanic Faustian who had sold his soul to Putin, orchestrated the emir’s murder by having some Ingush fighters feed him grilled chicken kebabs laced with Novichok, the now infamous Russian-engineered nerve agent that kills a victim slowly, painfully over the period of a month and has no known cure or antidote.

Most suicide bombings by the emirate have been carried out by women (over 70% so far). Interestingly, in the other suicide terrorism birthplaces – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Somalia – female suicide bombers have been practically non-existent.

Even the motivations are very different. While the others are driven by religious fervor, individual honor and the guarantee that their families shall be financially well provided for, the Chechen women are motivated by a sense of utter despair and hopelessness.

Perhaps the most important difference is the support of terrorism among the common folk. Ordinary Pakistanis and Afghans may not support the violence but most of them sympathize with the cause, blaming the west, especially America, for just about everything that has gone wrong with their lives. This translates to tacit support of terrorism.

In comparison, a sizeable number of common Chechens condemn the mayhem that the Chechen terrorists perpetrate. Putin had a real hearts-and-minds opportunity here but instead, he decided to be the bull in the china shop. With Kadyrov in power, maybe he has succeeded. For the moment.

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In July 2003, Zarema Muzhakhoyeva finally got the chance to complete her brother, Avtorhan’s mission.

Customers in the crowded upscale Moscow cafe had not noticed Zarema when she entered in an attractive pantsuit and chose a table in the center of the main dining area, settled down calmly and ordered a Moka with lots of sugar and cream. After a while, her coffee still warm, she slipped her hand inside her black shoulder bag, groped around for the detonator and pressed the button.

Nothing happened. She repeated the procedure nearly twenty times but the explosive device refused to go off.

As she kept trying, Zarema started to get frantic and sweat began pouring down her face. A return back to Ingushetia was not an option. For her failure, she would almost certainly be shot. And if she stayed, she had nowhere to go, the only ‘safe house’ the group had, now revealed and taken over by the FSB, its inhabitants tortured and slaughtered.

First a waiter and then folk sitting around, began to notice the bizarre way she was behaving. Someone called the cops thinking she was having a nervous breakdown of some sort. A passing cop car responded within seconds and a cursory search revealed the deadly contents of her bag. Zarema was arrested.

The bomb did go off eventually, killing a member of the FSB’s Bomb Disposal Squad who was attempting to defuse it.

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Not all Black Widows join up to be suicide bombers the way Zarema Muzhakhoyeva did – of her own free will. A sizeable number, more than 50% actually, are threatened, coerced, drugged and then brainwashed into it. These are women who seen to have brought ‘dishonor’ to their families by being raped or through promiscuity or even for not being able to have children.

And widows….. It is Doku Umarov who began using widows as suicide bombers to devastating effect. They became known as the “black widows” of the Caucasus.

In conservative Chechen and Ingush society, widows are seen as burdens and the death of their husbands are made to seem like punishment for their sins. They are no longer considered fit to be wives and might even have to face ‘honor killings’. Suicide terrorism is held out to them as a means of ‘redemption’ in the eyes of their community. This is even when they had done nothing to redeem themselves for.

There are very few choices for the widows. Refusal means death by a single gunshot to the back of the head. Guaranteed, no tears will be shed in this highly patriarchal hell hole.

In 2014, just prior to the Sochi Winter Olympics, reports emerged that a group of three “black widows” might have penetrated the security cordon around Sochi. A leaflet distributed in the Olympic city showed mug shots of the women in headscarves with dark, impassive eyes. The leaflet said that the women, widows of insurgents, had been spotted in recent days in central Sochi.

Ultimately nothing happened but even if there was no bombing and the Olympics went off without incident, taut tension prevailed throughout the event. A sizeable number of athletes from the west refused to participate, turning the spectacle into a mediocre show. The terrorists won anyway.

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For the choice that she made, Zarema got a 20-year sentence in the dreaded high-security Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, where her chances of survival are very limited.

I have not been able to ascertain if Zarema Muzhakhoyeva remains incarcerated. Most likely she still is or maybe she is dead. The suicide bomber was housed in the same solitary cell that had once hosted Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Raoul Wallenberg.

Interesting…. From Nobel Prize winning writer to WW2 hero diplomat who saved countless Jews from the Nazis, to failed suicide bomber.