I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Criminals were coming to Chechnya from all over the world - they did not have a place in their own countries. But they could live perfectly well in Chechnya.
I've gone to war zones before and never got shot.
When I visited Chechnya, I was taken aback at first because people would regularly make jokes about kidnapping me.
My first real awareness of Chechnya came when I was a college student studying in Russia. I arrived in St. Petersburg about two months after Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated for her reports on Chechnya. I lived with an elderly woman and her grown children in an apartment that was not too far from the neighborhood military cadet school.
Other places are also generators of far-flung violence beyond their own borders - Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are obvious examples - but none has as long a history of war, resistance, and terror as Chechnya.
Since the early '80s, I've found myself in war zones in various parts of the world.
My life isn't always at risk, even if I'm in a war zone. A lot of these places have areas of calm, so covering war doesn't necessarily mean being shot at all the time.
I have spent the past ten years in just about every war zone there was.
Yes, life in Chechnya so far looks more like a life after a natural disaster.
I didn't know a single person who had ever been there. I wasn't even sure how to spell Chechnya.