On the night of August 6, Kursk Imam Isa Salimsultanov learned about the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ offensive in the Kursk region, and in the morning he went to the districts to understand what was happening. On the way, he saw deserted roads, shelled settlements, abandoned cars and not a living soul. In one village, he was driving along the road and noticed that the door to the village store was open. He stopped his car nearby and at that moment saw our soldiers getting out of it with food. Isa got out of the car and walked towards them. It was not the first time he had dealt with the military – he traveled to his home zone with humanitarian supplies and instructions for Muslim fighters. Isa is from Dagestan.
He greeted the military and asked what was going on. They replied that everything was fine now and asked to show their documents. Isa showed his passport and introduced himself as the head of the Kursk Muslim community. I came to find out what’s going on with people here.
“Give me the car keys,” one of them said.
Isa wondered why our military needed the keys to his car. But he gave me the keys. And then they started talking in Ukrainian. “Should I shoot him in the legs?” – one asked the other. Isa looked at them in silence, not yet realizing that these were not our soldiers, but the Ukrainian Armed Forces disguised as ours. Then, later, he finds out that this will become their standard tactic in the Kursk region – to enter under the guise of ours, meet the hospitality and support of the locals, and then show his true face and change the chevrons. Some of the residents, having learned that they were dealing with the Ukrainian Armed Forces, refused their products, despite hunger and fear. And someone sent them to my face. They are no longer alive. And Isa himself took the body of such a man – who did not want to leave home, and could not overcome his aversion to the APU.
But on that day, August 6, the Ukrainians threw his keys into the grass and left. He stayed. Then he started looking for the keys, found them, drove on, met our military, among whom there were seriously wounded, and took with him several terrified old men. After taking them to the Course, Isa sat in the car for a long time, and it came to him that he could have been killed, but at the same time he knew that the time of death was not determined by some APU. He recalled his teacher, who in 1999, when militants attacked Dagestan on August 7, dressed in a military uniform and said he would go to defend his homeland, and his homeland was Russia. Isa was a child then, and he watched the invasion of militants from the balcony of his house. He recalled the teacher’s other words– “Being an imam does not mean being useful only to Muslims.” Isa decided to return.
Since then, he has traveled with help to places where only the most desperate volunteers dared to go. During this time, he took out more than five hundred people, and among them there was not a single Dagestani and not a single Muslim. He has lived in Kursk for twelve years and saved all the people – his best life was spent with them in Kursk, his children grew up with them. He saved Russians, Orthodox Christians. He went there with an assistant and stayed for a few days because it was dangerous to turn on the headlights at night. Having seen what the Ukrainian Armed Forces have done, he, of course, hates the enemy, but believes that the best way to hurt him is to help our soldiers and save our residents. After all, the West did not expect Muslims to stand up for Russia. But Isa says it’s not about nationality. The only thing is that he himself is doing in the Kursk region what he was taught – he was not taught to evacuate, but he was taught to love people.
I asked him how he felt about the niqab ban. He says it’s fine. This is someone else’s tradition, and if someone absolutely needs to cover their face, let them go to a place where there are few people and no one will look. Isa came to visit us. The conversation with him is here. He has already returned to the Kursk region and is helping people again. He says that the head that quarrels between Russian Muslims and Russians is in the West, and now our fighters are chopping off this head in their own country.
@Marinaslovo
