Posted on 12/10/2003 3:02:18 PM PST by veronica
MOSCOW — After every suicide attack in Russia — and they are increasingly commonplace — his name is whispered by a nervous public. ''Was it Shamil?'' someone always asks. The answer, more often than not, is yes.
Little known in the West, Shamil Basayev is a household name in Russia, where he is often compared to another terror mastermind, Osama bin Laden. Like the al-Qaeda leader, Mr. Basayev is a charismatic figure with a deadly interpretation of Islam, who has managed to both avoid capture and strike fear into the residents of a major world capital.
"They are both charismatic, eloquent, pseudo-Islamists," said Sergei Arutyunov, head of the department of Caucasian studies at Moscow's Russian Academy of Sciences.
A top commander of the ragtag Chechen rebel army that won a shocking victory over Russia in a mid-1990s war of independence, in the current conflict Mr. Basayev has emerged as the general in a very different campaign to force the Russian army to once more leave Chechnya.
Suicide bombings, many of them carried out by specially recruited war widows who feel they have nothing left to lose, have become the tactic of choice for Mr. Basayev and his followers.
With the Chechen resistance now largely scattered in the Caucasus mountains, no longer able to confront the Russian army in set-piece battles, the widows represent one of the few effective forces he has left.
"We are using the weapon that we can use, considering our capabilities," he said on an audiotape given to the Kavkaz Center website, which has become Mr. Basayev's primary means of communicating his message to the outside world. "And I swear to God, if Russians or Americans will give us cruise missiles or intercontinental ballistic missiles, then we will not be using suicide attackers or Kamaz trucks loaded with explosives."
The 38-year-old Mr. Basayev, a bearish man who is balding on top but sports a bushy black beard, was recently described as the last Chechen rebel leader still fighting federal forces.
He's believed to be hiding near his home village of Vedeno, limping from safe house to safe house, having lost his foot in a land-mine blast three years ago.
"We want to liquidate him, pure and simple, to end this grinding war," said Ramadan Kadyrov, son of Chechnya's pro-Kremlin administrator. He has put a $5-million (U.S.) bounty on Mr. Basayev's head, but the wily warrior has managed to evade Russian commandos.
Mr. Basayev's background reveals that he fights nastiest when cornered. A former computer salesman and Soviet army fireman, he quickly emerged as one of the resistance movement's most skilled commanders in the first Chechen war. With limited resources, he defended Grozny for three months against superior Russian forces, and later led a surprise attack that retook the capital for rebel forces in 1996.
He's best remembered for taking the war to Russia, leading a daring raid on the southern town of Budyonnovsk in 1995. With 150 fighters, he rounded up 1,200 hostages and took them to the town's hospital. After executing several of the detainees and repelling two Russian attempts to storm the building, he got what he wanted: direct negotiations with prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin about ending the war.
Associates say that around that time, Mr. Basayev met the Arab fighter Khattab and underwent a metamorphosis from someone who fought for an independent Chechnya into a radical Islamist who fought to build a caliphate in Caucasus.
Mr. Basayev has said that he made three trips to al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and returned a changed man. After the first Chechen war, he set about building a similar training camp in the hills of Dagestan, another largely Muslim republic in the south of Russia, and declared that the region would follow sharia law.
In 1999, he led a group of fighters who invaded Dagestan, one of a series of events that prompted Mr. Putin to order Russian troops back into Chechnya.
Since then, Mr. Basayev has again narrowed his cause to the one he's been fighting for since 1991: getting the Russian army to leave his homeland. He's bragged that he personally pressed the detonator on a truck bomb that destroyed the administration building in Grozny last December, killing 78 people, and more recently threatened a new series of attacks across Russia to coincide with the election season and the New Year's holiday.
"God willing, sooner or later, like it or not, the Russian people and leadership will have to end this bloody slaughter," he told Kavkaz Center after the end of last year's Chechen theatre siege in Moscow. "They will have to stop this war, agree to peace and get off our land."
The good news is the 86 Saudies left would be friendly and very wealthy.
The Alfa Spetsnaz group tried to assault the hospital, and he and his boys slaughtered them. Initially he seemed to be a real Chechen nationalist , but gradually fell under the influence of a guy named Khattabi (first name escapes me just now) who was from the Gulf and on the Wahabbist payroll. Khattabi has since met his fate at the hands of the Russians (good job, comrades!) and Shamil has lost a leg in combat. But he keeps on ticking. Too bad how these things sometimes work out, but the Russians definitely need to nail him now.
...hope everyone notice how you not even try to dispute facts of history but throw out pointless propaganda rants.
And as for disputing facts, you can't that why you not bother.
By the way, been busy sueing Websters and Britanica not include Armenian butchering in encyclopedias, lately?
And they pay me to keep up on these things. I LOVE THIS JOB!
Associates say that around that time, Mr. Basayev met the Arab fighter Khattab and underwent a metamorphosis from someone who fought for an independent Chechnya into a radical Islamist who fought to build a caliphate in Caucasus.
"Arab fighter Khattab" AKA Bad Saudi Ambassador, Fieldmarshall Khattab.
"build a caliphate" AKA secure Caspian oil routes.
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