Chechnya

Malika—not the real name of a young Chechen doctor and mother of two—has lost nearly every member of her family to a vicious war of secession that has turned her homeland into a hell that would stretch Dante's imagination. A Russian bomb killed her mother in 2001. Her father survived the blast but couldn't withstand the horror surrounding him and soon succumbed to illness. Russian forces hauled off her brother and held him at a grim makeshift jail for five months. Through the help of the Red Cross he was released, only to die of a heart attack a short time later.

The worst blow came on a spring night in 2002. At one o'clock in the morning, heavily armed men in masks and helmets broke into Malika's apartment in Groznyy, the capital of Chechnya, and took away her husband. "To this day I don’t know if he's alive or dead," she says. Local officials have offered no help. At the Groznyy prosecutor's office, her husband's file is but one of thousands that bear a single heading: "Disappeared."

Malika carries her grief with quiet dignity. But the despair that hangs like a pall over this war-torn enclave has driven some Chechens—including women—to commit desperate, horrific acts. On the first day of September 2004, 32 Chechen-led terrorists seized Middle School Number One in the town of Beslan in the nearby republic of North Ossetia. The 52-hour siege that followed marked a new low in the annals of terrorism. Some 330 people died, more than half of them children.