Allah's Mountains

Allah’s Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya
By Sebastian Smith

Before I picked up this book I knew absolutely nothing about the conflict in Chechnya. Allah’s Mountains provides both a rich historical context and a detailed first-person account of the Russian response to Chechnya’s declaration of independence in 1991. It is as educational as a historical text, but as readable as a novel.

Smith is a journalist and was one of few foreign journalists in Chechnya during the First (1994-1996) Chechen War. His account of the conflict is made more powerful because he intersperses descriptions of political and military events with intensely personal vignettes of his experiences in Chechnya.

Allah’s Mountains is exactly the kind of book I like best. I found Smith’s writing style completely engaging and I also gained some understanding of what’s been going on in the Caucus over the past few decades. I think that we in North America are reluctant to look too closely at these kinds of disputes (I’m thinking also of the former Yugoslavia). It seems that we tend to write them off as internal religious or ethnic conflicts that are none of our business. I find our willful blindness about what’s really happening in other parts of the world to be terrifying. We live in a time where information can be transmitted half a world away in an instant, yet we are still ignorant about so much of what happens in the world.