Ukrainian Muslims mark Ramadan in trenches, pray for victory

Undisclosed location, UKRAINE -- Muslims are observing Ramadan in war-stricken Ukraine for a second year, and most of those who have been praying at a mosque near the eastern front line are soldiers in camouflage fatigues.

"I ask Allah to protect our mosque. I ask Allah to protect Ukraine ... and to punish tyrants," Mullah Murat Suleymanov said in prayers for the holy month.

"Ramadan is a month of victory," he told the small congregation of 16 people, 11 of whom were in uniform, including one woman.

The mosque has numerous boarded-up broken windows and walls pitted by shrapnel. A rocket exploded nearby two days earlier.

Among the worshippers was Said Ismagilov, formerly one of Ukraine's Muslim spiritual leaders.

When the war began, he quit. He now works as an ambulance driver with volunteer paramedics, evacuating wounded soldiers from the front line.

Sandy-haired and bespectacled, 44-year-old Ismagilov is a Tatar, member of a Muslim ethnic group.

He wore a sleeve patch from his ASAP Rescue battalion and showed his ambulance parked outside, with taped-over dents caused by shrapnel.

'Allah's protection'

Ismagilov said he feels "Allah's will and protection" amid the danger.

"There were times when my ambulance got riddled with shrapnel. Thank God, I wasn't injured."

When the war broke out in February 2022, Ismagilov had been serving as mufti of Ukraine's Umma religious administration for 13 years.

But the mosque where he served emptied, as many evacuated the area.

"I realised I was useless," he said, so he opted to "stand up and defend my motherland".

"Now I evacuate wounded people."

Last year he spent Ramadan in Lysychansk, a city that saw extremely heavy shelling before the Ukrainian military eventually withdrew.

Despite his wartime job, Ismagilov said he can still observe the Ramadan fasting rules.

"I'd got used to spending Ramadan at war, so this year was nothing new to me," he said.

"I have all I need for fasting according to all Muslim traditions."

"I'm not in the trench now. I spend most of my daytime driving or at the stabilisation point," a building where paramedics take wounded for initial medical care, he said.

He also tries to fit in a couple of hours praying at night, he said.

Hard to be a Muslim in the trenches

"I'm absolutely sure that many Muslim fighters taking part in combat would like to fast ... because in this case they feel even better with Allah's help," the Mufti Suleymanov said.

Dressed in long robes and a white hat, he was elected mufti last November, replacing Ismagilov.

A soldier standing outside the mosque said he was fasting, adding that most Muslim soldiers do, unless they are on combat missions.

"When you are going right to the very front line, it's permitted not to fast. If it's not hot and you're not tormented by thirst, then you can fast," he said.

"It's hard for those Muslims who have to stay in the trenches. They are cold, and there is a lot of water in the trenches as it often rains ... It's hard to be a Muslim there," Ismagilov said.

He said he did not know how he would celebrate the end of Ramadan, Eid ul Fitr, later this month.

"You are lucky if you can visit a mosque now, and you never know how many people will come, or if they will come," he said.

"If there is heavy shelling, we will probably gather in a basement to pray there."

Fighting a common enemy

Muslims make up only about 1% of Ukraine's 44 million citizens, as the country is predominantly Orthodox Christian. However, a large number of Ukrainian Muslims have joined the war following Russia's invasion.

The majority of them are Crimean Tatars, who have suffered collective trauma twice from Moscow's depredations: first in 1944, when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin deported them to Central Asia; and second in 2014, when Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally seized Crimea from Ukraine.

Since the start of the war, tens of thousands of Muslims have either taken up arms to defend Ukraine or assisted in war efforts in other ways, France 24 reported.

While most Muslims fighting are Ukrainian, many are from the Caucasus, and from Chechnya in particular. Together with the Ukrainians, they are not only defending Ukraine and its values but fighting a common enemy: Russia, the report said.

Many Chechens have opposed Moscow since it crushed their struggle for independence from Russia in the 1990s.

Ismagilov grew up in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine.

Intrigued by his family's Muslim heritage -- which his parents knew little about -- he studied theology at an Islamic university in Moscow and later became an imam in Donetsk.

While he grew up in a largely Russian-speaking region, he now prefers to speak Ukrainian.

"I think it's disgusting when Russian Muslims support the war," he said.

Russia treats its ethnic minorities, many of them Muslims, as "people of low quality" and "uses them as cannon fodder" in the war, he said.

"It's no secret that most of the dead enemy soldiers are ethnically from Buryatia, Tuva, Dagestan, Tatarstan, Chechnya," he said, naming Russian regions with large numbers of Muslims and Buddhists.