Just before sunrise one morning this month, a dozen armed men in camouflage uniforms and black masks burst into the house of Zalpa Mintayeva, shouting, “Do you have a man at home?” The men were all dead, Mintayeva answered, according to her daughters. So the intruders grabbed her instead, beating her daughters with their rifle butts and threatening to shoot anyone who interfered. They stuffed Mintayeva into a vehicle and sped away. For years, Russian troops have stormed into homes in Chechnya in the middle of the night to seize young men they say are separatist fighters; often the men were tortured, killed or simply disappeared. But as Chechen guerrillas increasingly recruit female suicide bombers such as the ones who blew up two planes in August and helped seize a school in Beslan last month, Russian forces are sweeping through Chechnya abducting women from their homes as well, according to residents and human rights investigators.Full Story
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