in the campaign “"Bombs Rained Down on the Auls": Repression and Air Strikes on Mountain Chechnya on the Eve of the Deportation (1941-1942)”
In September 1941 the USSR created special departments for the struggle against "banditry" within the local NKVD organs (a predecessor of today's FSB), including in Chechnya, and permanent operational groups in the Shatoy, Galanchozh and Itum-Kale districts, whose task the historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov render in the words "to quickly suppress any manifestations of banditry"[1]. The first came the military operation of 30 October - 15 November 1941 across the districts of the declared "uprising": according to the report of the 141st Regiment of the NKVD Internal Troops (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia), 36 people recorded as "bandits" were killed and 251 detained - "insurgents — 127, bandits — 7, bandit-insurgents — 13, deserters — 104"[2]. On 5 December 1941, in the village of Gikhi in the Urus-Martan district, the regiment in a two-hour battle destroyed a group of ten people that the report calls the "cadre band" of Kaidov Azak: three were killed, seven detained[2]. In the same December, to support the operational groups, the USSR formed the 178th Motorized Rifle Battalion in Chechnya, expanded the following year into the 141st Regiment of NKVD troops (in the commander's report the regiment is called a rifle regiment, by the historians - a mountain-rifle one)[1]. The regiment's count for 1941, from 25 October to 1 January 1942: 59 people killed, 390 detained[2].