SLEPTSOVSKAYA, Russia, Dec 25 (AFP) - As Russian troops launched a drive to take Grozny on Saturday, Muslim refugees cold and gaunt stood in Ingushetia's sludge praying to Allah for a safe return home to the Chechen capital.
"Whatever Allah wills, will be. I just want to be with my relatives," said Tamara Sudikova as she stood with her two children at the local bus station here, where refugees mingled in the mud with market-day shoppers.
Three-year-old Musa, in pale ill-health, stared blankly at the bustling scene around him with bulging blue eyes, as his mother explained why the family was embarking on such a perilous Odyssey.
"The children are starting to get ill [in the Sputnik camp where they were staying], so we decided to try and go today [Saturday]," she said. "I don't know what's happening in Grozny, but they say it's okay in Znamenskoye and Pervomaiskaya [outside the capital]," she added, her voice trailing off at the prospect of returning to a conflict she fled two months ago.
Nearby, Tamara Sudikova, 26, and her husband Ibrahim sought to scrape together the 300 rubles ($12) they needed to buy two seats in a minibus bound for Grozny.
At their wits' end after months of aimless, endless penury in refugee camps in Ingushetia, which neighbors Chechnya, the two families are part of a steady tide of civilians going back in search of a future.
Russian special police guarding the border-crossing around two km (less than one mile) away say some 350-400 vehicles pass into Chechnya daily, taking some 4,000 people to what is left of their homes.
An official 12-truck convoy pouring out clouds of stinking blue diesel fumes rumbled through the Adler 20 checkpoint early Saturday bound for the town of Achkhoi-Martan, west of Grozny.
In the Severny train camp, meanwhile, Ruslan Umarov explained why he and his family had fled into Ingushetia two days ago - less than a week after being railroaded back to the western Chechen town of Sernovodsk by Russian officials.
"They told us that everything was ready in Sernovodsk, that all the necessary facilities to cater the refugees were ready," said the 54-year-old headmaster of a Grozny boarding school destroyed in the latest war.
"But when we arrived there was nothing there: no toilets, no food, no coal, no electricity. Then they said it would be sorted out during the day ... but we got no food for two days."
Four tanks, the barrels of their guns pointed towards the refugee train, added to the feeling of oppression and misery, said Ruslan, and helped decide him to return to Ingushetia with his wife and three children.
Several hundred yards away across a sea of mud, stones and snow, scores of women sought to rustle up a lunch of sorts, reheating the previous evening's watery soup, supplemented by fried bread and gristle substituting for meat.
"We get hot soup or borsch once a day, but it's just water really with a bit of meat and rice," said Malika Zhabrilova, 40, who fled Grozny more than a month ago.
Like dozens of other women packed into the communal canteen, Malika uses the more than 100 gas stoves to feed the 5,000 to 6,000 people crammed onto 90 railway wagons that make up the camp.
Daily chores of cleaning, cooking and scrounging cash for "luxuries" such as carrots, potatoes and onions help relieve the wall-to-wall tedium of life in a railway carriage.
Over bitter mugs of cheap tea, refugees like Ruslan have plenty of time to ponder the present and Chechnya's ill-fated quest for independence.
"I want to remain inside the Russian Federation. I don't want independence because I believe independence doesn't mean having bread, clothing, and money, work and food," Umarov said. "When we went for independence, Russia grabbed us by the throat and showed us what we'll get. The independence we've got now we don't need," he concluded.
