Ten-year-old Leila Malueva may not remember the first war she lived through, but images of the second one are fixed crystal-clear in her mind.
She remembers, for example, when her chattering little sister Iman was born -- on October 11, 1999, two months after her fifth birthday.
For nearly two weeks, their neighbors had filled cars with suitcases and children and driven off, fleeing advancing Russian troops who had returned three years after a humiliated Moscow signed a truce to end its first war against Chechen rebels.
Russia's new steely-eyed prime minister, former KGB spy Vladimir Putin, ordered them back after a series of mysterious apartment bombings in Russia.
Putin blamed the blasts on "terrorists" operating in an evermore lawless Chechnya and sent soldiers to "liquidate" them, if necessary, "in the shithouse."
He promised the nation a quick, "anti-terrorist" campaign.
The tanks rumbled into the north of the republic on October 1 and it was on a morning 10 days later that Leila's parents rushed to the hospital at the crack of dawn because her mom was going to have another baby.
With bombings from the first war still fresh in their minds, Grozny residents fled the capital en mass, so Leila's parents got to the maternity hospital quickly -- to find the staff packing supplies in an eerily empty building with no heat or electricity.
We'd love to help you deliver your baby, the staff told Leila's mother, but we're evacuating as you can see.
"Please help my wife give birth, please," Leila's father Vakha begged the rushing nurses. Eventually he convinced a few to relent and Iman came into the world in a deserted, freezing hospital, in darkness. She became the second war girl in the family.
Within a half hour of the birth Leila's parents sped through emptied streets with the wrapped-up baby. "I was so glad when I saw her," Leila says. "She was so little." But there was no time to waste -- Leila's house no longer had any electricity or gas, so the family debunked to the house of her grandmother down the street where gas lazily leaked from a pipe.
They stayed two months. "We didn't have any heat. The baby's cloth diapers would never really dry out. We couldn't really cook, so we just made flat bread every day," Leila's mother says.Leila's family was practically the only one left in the neighborhood -- the rest fled to nearby republics or mountain villages.
"We didn't leave for so long because we didn't think it could happen again," Leila's father says. "It had just happened a few years back. How could it happen again?"
Leila remembers the day they had to leave the house, for it was the day her grandmother came home after a car she was in got caught under the bombs and shrapnel wounds covered her body like a rash. "The door opened and she stood there, bleeding all over," she says. "We had to leave then because otherwise she would die."
They first drove west, but had to stop because the road was being bombed up ahead. So they took the only open road left, to the east. Leila remembers staring out the window
as their car raced past tanks and armored personnel carriers
along the road. Helicopters circled in the sky.
They ended up in the village of Kurchaloi, in a house of her father's distant relatives where they squeezed into a single room and where Leila's mother dressed her grandmother's wounds twice a day.
And Leila remembers returning back to Grozny, in May 2000, because she nearly didn't recognize her house -- the roof had caved in and holes gaped from the walls hit by ordnance.
There was only one room that was still more or less intact and it was there that Leila's family -- she, her parents, baby brother and sister and two older half-brothers from her dad's first marriage -- settled.
Today the house is whole again, as are some of the houses of their neighbors. Leila still hears automatic gunfire at night and every so often big booms -- chased into the mountains by Moscow's troops, rebels continue to lead a guerrilla war against its soldiers, as well as the pro-Kremlin Chechen government currently in place in the republic.
Adults say Chechnya is still a lawless place and will continue to be so
for a while. But Leila says "it's not a real war. Real war is when houses fall
down and people die."
Today Leila frets when one of her brothers lies watching TV on the
couch -"one of the boys in school watched TV in the house and then a bomb hit the
house and killed him."
And she is scared to death of Russian soldiers. "They stop cars and
sometimes shoot the people inside."
If she were granted magic powers, she would "make it so all the houses
would be like before, and all the dead people would no longer be dead."
After a moment's thought she offers: "Especially Mom's brother. I don't
remember him, but he was the only boy in the family and Mommy is sad
without him. Sometimes when she thinks of him, she cries."
