“They will kill us and our children without hesitation,” says Ukraine’s former chief mufti, watching Russian soldiers crawling over their dead.
The man who once led interfaith prayers for peace in Donetsk’s central square — now firmly under Russian control for over a decade — serves as a combat medic, wondering what transforms a human being into something that devours everything in its path: your home, your bed, your children’s future, simply because their government said they could.
In the ruins of Vovchansk, once a bustling city now reduced to rubble, Said Ismagilov asks what drives men to die for nothing — only to find his answer in an ancient prophecy about gold and the ninety-nine percent who die reaching for it.
“They will eat from your plate and wear your shirt without a second thought”
They run and crawl in hordes — like locusts. Their raison d’être is to move forward at any cost and seize our homes and new territory.
Every day in Vovchansk, they attack in small groups of three to five. They trample and climb over the corpses of their comrades who stormed the same position just hours earlier. There is no logic, no meaning, no success — only the relentless throwing of bodies at us.
The difference from Marshal Zhukov’s meat-grinder assaults is that now they come in small waves, and the goal is not kilometers but a single position, mere square meters.
Day after day, methodically, one assault after another. They lose ground. They retreat — if anyone is left to retreat. Yet they persist with a kind of mad determination. The individual dissolves into the swarm, where the death of a few insects is of no consequence. I cannot explain it any other way: they advance even when they know we are about to kill them.
My philosophical education stops me from viewing this daily carnage through the eyes of a mathematician, simply recording: minus one, minus five, minus forty. My background in philosophy and theology compels me to try to understand why this conditional Homo erectus and I say “upright man” because I cannot, in good conscience, call them Homo sapiens, as I see no rationality in their actions — why he climbs over the corpses of his swarm mates toward certain death, across the ruins of a city that now resembles a Martian landscape.
What for? What is your motivation? What do you hope to gain?
When I spoke with Russian prisoners, all of them said they wanted to earn money from the Putin regime to improve their financial situation. Not one of them mentioned ideological motives, higher values, or noble goals. Only credit, debt, mortgages, poverty, and children to feed…
Did you come to kill our children so you could raise your own? He is silent. He lowers his eyes. But that’s the truth.
They will kill us and our children without hesitation. They will occupy our homes, sleep in our beds, wear our clothes. And they will feel no shame or disgust. Their government has given them permission, so they think it’s all right.
They will eat from your plate and wear your shirt without a second thought, because their king and their church have blessed them to do so.
They come to take and devour our resources, to populate our land with their own. And while the upper echelons of this pathetic swarm try to dress up these actions with reasons — why they invaded, why they kill — down at the bottom, among the swarm, it’s simple: they want to get rich by killing and looting.
The Prophet Muhammad once gave a striking description of human stupidity and greed:
“The Hour will not come to pass before the River Euphrates dries up to reveal a mountain of gold, for which people will fight. Ninety-nine out of one hundred will die, and every man among them will say, ‘Perhaps I will be the one who survives.’”
I look at them and wonder — maybe each one advancing, charging at us, believes he will survive, he will get rich.
But then our guys get to work.
And the statistician in me says:
Minus five more.
The mufti who lost everything — twice
Said Ismagilov, former mufti of Ukraine’s Umma (Muslim community) has twice lost his home to Russia’s invasions. A Volga Tatar, Ismagilov’s ancestors fled Soviet collectivization in central Russia.
He studied in Donetsk and Moscow before becoming an imam and helping build Islamic religious life in the Donbas, which by 2014 had Ukraine’s largest Muslim population outside Crimea — including Crimean Tatars illegally deported from their homelans during the Second World War, ethnic Tatars from Russia like hiw own family, and Meskhetian Turks — a Muslim group forcibly relocated during the Soviet times.
On 12 April 2014, a group of Russian saboteurs led by Igor Girkin (Strelkov) entered Sloviansk in Donetsk Oblast. Protests against the disguised Russian takeover erupted across the Donbas. That same year, Ismagilov helped lead a five-month Interreligious Prayer Marathon, where believers of different faiths gathered daily in central Donetsk to pray for peace in Ukraine.
However, the peaceful interfaith action was seen as a threat by the occupation forces. In September 2014, the marathon was forcibly disbanded and the prayer site destroyed; sixteen participants were detained and tortured. Warned of danger, Ismagilov fled Donetsk with his family.
From interfaith prayers to frontline service
He resettled in Bucha, outside Kyiv. When Russia invaded again in February 2022, Bucha was quickly occupied. Ismagilov evacuated his family and volunteered as a paramedic after being rejected for military service due to inexperience. He helped evacuate the wounded from Bucha and later from the eastern front lines.
“Our main weapons were our hands… to save the wounded,” he said in an interview.
In October 2023, he was formally drafted, serving in Kyiv’s air defense forces, then with the 57th Brigade’s drone unit near Kharkiv, and later along the Donetsk line. Though he stepped down as mufti in late 2022, Ismagilov continued to lead prayers when possible, including in front-line mosques and even amid the ruins of Bakhmut.
Some Muslim observances are impossible during active duty, but Ismagilov emphasizes the integration of Muslims in Ukrainian society:
“We fight together, build together, and defend together, and this is because there’s a normal attitude toward Muslims in Ukraine. They’re not seen as aliens or enemies or immigrants, but as an integral part of the Ukrainian nation.”