Posted Sunday, September 28, 2003; 12.48BST
The Russians suspect that many of Kadyrov's Chechen police are "legalized guerrillas" who actively fight with or provide intelligence to the insurgents. According to one Russian officer, these "loyal" Chechens regularly feed information on troop movements to the rebels. When his unit goes into the field, this officer is supposed to inform his local commander's office, which is staffed by Chechens. But he never lets his chopper land at the planned destination. "I always order the pilot to land some two or three hundred meters higher, and open fire at our supposed landing site," he says. "Then we find dead rebels who have been waiting to ambush us there."

With rebel loyalists in his ranks, can Kadyrov possibly make good on his pledge to put down the guerrillas? The Kremlin has so far tried to crush the revolt by air strikes, house-to-house sweeps and now, its critics assert, by abducting suspected separatists in the night. These tactics have changed nothing, and the new Chechenization policy probably won't either. All it will provoke, says Ruslan Khasbulatov, former speaker of the Russian parliament and himself a Chechen, is civil war as the guerrillas turn their guns on Kadyrov's men — Moscow's Chechen proxies. "Nothing good will happen here if he [Kadyrov] is elected," says a prominent Chechen academic.

The grim district known as mikrorayon, a collection of half-destroyed apartment blocks with a muddy makeshift market, rarely sees a Russian military patrol these days. "The Russians occasionally swoop in," says one resident, but usually give it a miss. "There are too many hoods and Wahhabis here."

Through suicide bombings, those hoods and Wahhabis killed at least 85 people outside Chechnya this summer. Most of these terrorists are said to be the former pupils of a preacher known as Fatkha, a Jordanian citizen of Chechen origin who trained young Chechens in the mid-'90s. According to one former student, Fatkha was eloquent enough to turn his listeners into "zombies." As for those innocent deaths, "Too bad," says one of Fatkha's pupils. "Russians kill innocent Chechens every day."

Near Mikrorayon, the settlement of Staraya Sunzha is also spared Russian raids, but for a different reason. Nighttime snatches were common here until last February, when the residents — many of them police and security officers working with the Russians — decided enough was enough. According to Umar, a government official who lives in Staraya Sunzha, the last time two local Chechen policemen heard on their radios that a Russian patrol was approaching, they took their guns and confronted the raiding party. The two policemen died in the firefight, but not before killing several Russian soldiers, locals say. The troops have not been back. "They know we have 1,000 men under arms here," Umar says. "They got the message."

Staraya Sunzha is the exception. Elsewhere, Russian-led raids and abductions are nightly events, duly chronicled by the Chechen police. The police generally use the same formula to describe abductions: "Unidentified persons in masks and camouflage uniforms, armed with automatic weapons and riding on APCs," take people away "in an unknown direction;" later, bodies are found with "scratches, bruises, signs of electrical burns and handcuff abrasions on the wrists."

Human-rights workers and Chechen officials — two groups that rarely agree — claim the abduction raids are usually the work of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) or the military Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). Putin denies this. "The Russian security services have no need to abduct people. We control the territory and can legally detain anyone we like," he said in conversation with U.S. journalists. "As far as abductions are concerned, this is part of the culture, unfortunately." Even Kadyrov blames the Russians for the abductions, saying they are proof of the "negligence" shown by Russian commanders in controlling their subordinates. "I've raised this with the President myself," Kadyrov told Time. But the situation is only getting worse, local people say. About 60 people a month disappear, according to police reports.

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