Shamil Basayev: A ruthless Chechen warlord who mocked the Kremlin

Agence France Presse — English
July 11, 2006 Tuesday 4:14 PM GMT

MOSCOW, July 11 2006 — Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, who was
reported killed on Monday, masterminded horrific attacks across
Russia and openly mocked the Kremlin by remaining at large for more
than a decade.

Among dozens of other attacks against civilian and military targets,
Basayev, 41, claimed responsibility for the Beslan school hostage
siege in September 2004 in which 362 people were killed, including
186 children.

The bearded guerrilla leader was at the core of the fierce independence
fight in Chechnya in which as many as 100,000 civilians — about 10
percent of the population — are feared to have been killed since
December 1994.

Basayev claimed that the devastation wreaked by Russia’s military
campaigns on the Chechen people, including the death of many of his
own relatives, justified attacks on Russian civilians.

But he was also widely regarded as an exceptional and fearless military
commander whose rag-tag forces inflicted major defeats on the Russian
army in Grozny and the Caucasus mountains.

He became legendary for his ability to escape capture, despite multiple
wounds, including the loss of his right lower leg on a landmine five
years ago, and a 10 million dollar bounty on his head.

But he lost support among ordinary Chechens when he embraced radical
Islam in the late 1990s. Many blamed him for provoking a second
conflict in 1999 after having masterminded the defeat of Russian
troops in a first 1994-1996 war in Chechnya.

As figurehead of the rebels’ extremist wing, Basayev increasingly
abandoned his nationalist credentials for a radical Islamist agenda,
becoming the link between Chechnya and the worldwide Islamic jihad
movement.

Born in 1965, Basayev was raised in Dyshne-Vedeno, a Chechen village
at the heart of territory with a tradition of rebellion against
Moscow. He claimed his ancestors fought alongside Imam Shamil, the
legendary 19th century resistance warrior.

He studied in Moscow and began dealing in imported computers in the
last days of the Soviet Union. Then in August 1991 he joined a group
of Chechens supporting President Boris Yeltsin at the Moscow White
House to resist a communist coup.

In November 1991, Basayev and two others hijacked a Russian plane
from Mineralniye Vody in southern Russia and flew to Turkey to promote
Chechnya’s independence struggle. They were later released by Turkish
authorities.

During the 1990s, Basayev fought against Armenian troops in
Nagorno-Karabakh and against Georgian forces in the breakaway province
of Abkhazia.

In Abkhazia he was widely rumoured to have been supported by Russia’s
military intelligence forces, the GRU, as part of Moscow’s support
for the separatist Abkhaz against the Georgians.

He is also believed to have taken men for training in Afghanistan.

In the first Chechen war Basayev emerged as the most effective field
commander.

At the height of the conflict in 1995 Basayev and a small group of
men took hostage hundreds of people in a hospital in the southwest
Russian town of Budyonnovsk.

The ruthless and utterly unexpected raid forced the Russian government
into suspending military operations in Chechnya and beginning peace
negotiations.

When these broke down, Basayev was the principal commander in the rebel
recapture of Grozny in August 1996 — one of the biggest humiliations
the modern Russian military has faced.

In 1999, he provided the Russian government with an excuse to
re-occupy Chechnya by leading a failed foray into Dagestan, a province
neighbouring Chechnya, to try and provoke an Islamist uprising.

Moscow was repeatedly shamed by Basayev’s ability to move freely
around the Caucasus mountains region for more than a decade.

A network of corrupt Russian officials was reported to have helped
him to swap the caves and forests of the mountains for comfortable
safehouses in Chechnya and far beyond.

"He doesn’t have to run around the mountains," Taus Dzhabrailov,
a top official in the Kremlin-installed Chechen government, told AFP
earlier. "He is driven around comfortably in jeeps. He just pays."

In 2005, Russian journalist Andrei Babitsky filmed an interview with
Basayev aired on US television network ABC in which the warlord issued
threats of new Beslan-style attacks should Russia fail to stop what
he called "genocide" in Chechnya.

Basayev, who lost 11 relatives in a Russian air attack on Vedeno in
1995, mocked his pursuers, saying: "Don’t tell me they’re trying to
find me. I’m trying to find them."

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