CHICAGO -- As gunmen seized a school full of hostages in southern Russia last week, President Vladimir Putin had held a meeting that might have seemed to some like a distraction.

State visits are arranged long in advance, and when King Abdullah II of Jordan arranged a trip to the Kremlin, neither side could have known of the catastrophe that would occur in Beslan.

A group of terrorists reported to be Chechens and Arabs seized a school, wired it with explosives and held over 1,500 people hostage, calling for independence for the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya. The crisis ended with the death of hundreds, many of them children.

Yet the meeting between Putin and Abdullah could not have been more fitting. Jordan is home to some 8,000 Chechens, many of whom have supported the rebels in Chechnya by raising money and even sending fighters to join the rebellion.

In the past, many Western diplomats and journalists have expressed skepticism about Putin's insistence that Chechens were receiving assistance from Arab nations abroad. But in Jordan, the sympathy for the rebels is no secret.

When I visited Jordan in 2001, ethnic Chechens in Amman proudly played for me a fundraising tape that began with the sound of machinegun fire and bombardment.

A narrator stated, "From the burning ruins of Grozny came what may be a final, heartbreaking message from its Chechen defenders, asking Muslims around the world not to forget the ordeal of their brothers in Chechnya, fighting the jihad holy war against Russian oppression. In the words of one combat soldier, he had never seen anything that equals the boundless heroism of the Chechen mujahedin."

A minority in a sea of Arabs, Jordan's Chechens have retained their language and customs for more than a century. Chechens originally came to Jordan from 1895 to 1905, fleeing czarist repression.

Like Jordan's 80,000 Circassians, who began fleeing Russia's southward expansion in 1879, the historically Muslim peoples of the Caucasus found a home among fellow Muslims in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire.

When the first Chechen war broke out in 1994-96, supporters in Jordan brought 70 wounded Chechen guerrillas to Amman for treatment. Younis Ashab, a Quranic judge and an ethnic Chechen born in Jordan, was inspired by the young men.

Ashab, a conservative Muslim who refused to shake my hand when we met ("I haven't shaken a woman's hand in 14 years," he said), visited the fighters and married off his daughter to one of them.

He even moved to Chechnya in 1998. Russian President Boris Yeltsin had washed his hands of the region and withdrawn the army, allowing the republic de facto independence. Arriving in foreign nation, Ashab set himself up as a judge enforcing a medieval Islamic code.

While Ashab remembers this period as idyllic, many have darker memories of Chechnya between the wars. After Russian troops withdrew, the breakaway republic became the Lebanon of the 1990s. Kidnappers snatched children from neighboring Russian regions and sold them back to their families. A slave trade flourished. Armed goons captured and beheaded foreign aid workers -- a crime that Ashab defends.

"It is justified," he said. "The Chechens who killed them believed they were spies."

In 1999, after Chechen guerrillas invaded the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan, a second war broke out that persists to this day.

Human-rights groups have criticized Russia for fighting a brutal war in Chechnya. Moscow, in turn, says it is responding to atrocities inflicted by Chechen terrorists on innocent civilians, ranging from apartment bombings that killed hundreds to seizing a Moscow theater in 2002.

Ashab says his family, too, has suffered brutality. His nephew, a former Chechen guerrilla who gave his name only as Visskhal, was wounded in the head during the first Chechen war, and the young man told me he lost an eye when a Russian soldier beat him with a rifle butt as he lay injured.

Visskhal said he and 30 other rebel prisoners were blindfolded, herded into a mechanic's garage and crammed into the underground repair pit. A concrete slab was placed on top with only a small opening at one end. Russian soldiers used to urinate into the hole. If anyone spoke, he was taken out and tortured. He eventually escaped and fled with his family to Turkey and then Jordan.

During the meeting between Putin and Abdullah, the two leaders discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other matters. But it is also likely that Putin asked Abdullah to restrain support for Chechens in Jordan. Whatever sympathies Abdullah may harbor for his fellow Muslims in Chechnya, he condemned the attack on a Russian school as a criminal and cowardly act.

Revealingly, the Jordanian king took time in his visit to meet with a Muslim leader in Russia: Magomedali Magomedov, president of the Russian republic of Dagestan, which borders Chechnya, according to Jordans Petra news agency.

The two discussed ways to improve relations, and Magomedov made known that he considers Jordan as a moderate state that works hard to create stability in the Middle East and defend Islam, Petra reported. Magomedov, whose region was invaded by Chechens hoping to find support among fellow Muslims, is also unlikely express much sympathy for the Chechen cause.

As for Chechnya, it is hard to see a way out of the terrible war. The chaos there causes both Russians and Chechens to despair, particularly since Russia once already tried withdrawing its troops from the country in 1996, only to be attacked by Chechen invaders.

After the murder of hundreds of schoolchildren last week, Russians are filled with rage and are demanding vengeance. Chechnya is an incubator for terrorism, yet Russian brutality has played a role in that. And depressingly, any settlement seems more distant than ever.