Crying Wolf

This is an account of the first Chechen war with Russia in the 1990s. It was written after I’d spent time in Chechnya covering the fighting and its impact on locals. Crying Wolf is the story of the one million Chechens who, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, found themselves cast as the enemy of the new Russian state. Trapped between a leader who felt compelled to assert Chechen independence and the huge Russian army, the ordinary post-Soviet people of Chechnya found themselves caught up in a war which destroyed their land, their homes and their families.