As Western news anchors struggled to pronounce the unfamiliar place-names, their viewers watched in disbelief, unable to grasp how human beings could descend to such depravity. Russians, too, watched the tragedy in horror, yet they understood the roots of the terror unfolding in the Caucasus, the mountainous region on their country's southwestern flank that includes Chechnya and other predominantly Muslim republics within the Russian Federation.

For more than a decade the war in Chechnya has been a bloodbath in which both Russian soldiers and Chechen separatists have paid little attention to the niceties of the Geneva Conventions. In 1991, buoyed by the tide of nationalist movements rising across the U.S.S.R., Chechen Dzhokhar Dudayev, a little-known former Soviet air force general, mounted a secessionist campaign and by year's end declared his ancestral home independent. Moscow condemned the move, fearing that if Chechnya were allowed to secede, other republics would follow suit. "We cannot stand idly by as a piece of Russia breaks off," declared Russian President Boris Yeltsin, "because that would be the beginning of the collapse of the country."

On New Year’s Eve 1994, Yeltsin sent hundreds of tanks into the center of Groznyy, launching a conflict that continues to this day. The fighting has taken between 100,000 and 300,000 lives and displaced upwards of half a million Chechens in a republic that spans just 5,800 square miles—an area slightly larger than the state of Connecticut. Groznyy has suffered the worst destruction in Europe since World War II.

Chechnya is the bleeding heart of the Caucasus, which stretches 750 miles from the Black to the Caspian Seas. This has been coveted ground since the days of Genghis Khan: Warriors have sought the sanctuary of its mountains; traders have jockeyed for access to its ports; and, most recently, oilmen have converged on the petroleum fields of the Caspian. Its Russian name, Kavkaz, conjures a potent genie—not only a crossroads of tumult, but a realm of romance. These are the perilous lands where brides are still kidnapped, blood feuds are fierce, and a centuries-old struggle for sovereignty rages on.

In the post-Soviet era the mountains have separated Russia from the countries of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan to the south. The lands north of the massifs, a linguistic and ethnic maze known collectively as the North Caucasus, comprise seven Russian republics: Adygeya, Karachayevo-Cherkesiya, Kabardino-Balkariya, North Ossetia, Ingushetiya, Chechnya, and Dagestan.