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.
| I thought it was "of course." |
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.
| Nothing "pseudo" about them. They're the epitome of Islamism... |
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.
| That Russian army of the early to mid-1990s was a demoralized, down-sized, and disrespected offshoot of the Soviet army. With the center paralyzed by the transition from Gorbachev to Yeltsin, the commanders at the military district level sat and watched as the locals waltzed into their compounds, beat up their conscripts, and drove off with virtually all the military equipment they wanted. One after the other, the local warlords — Dudaev among them — set up shop on their own. Some commanders held back the bad guys, while others watched and did nothing. A very few of them took a 9mm pill, rather than watch it happen... |
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.
| The Russers have had ten years to reconstitute their army, and Putin is working on actually improving it by instituting a professional force. The U.S. Army made a startling turn-around between 1975 and 1983 — an exactly equivalent time span; the Russers haven't been quite as determined to rebuild, but they haven't stood still. They are still plagued by corruption and crummy intel, but the Chechens aren't able to toss them out again, and probably won't be. The Rossiiskaya Armiya will be getting stronger, while the rebels attrit... |
"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."
| Being a true Islamist, of course, they have no capability whatsoever of actually producing any technology more sophisiticated than the sharp stick on their own... |
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.
| The others being worm food or secure in places like Pankisi and unable to come out... |
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.
| That did a lot of good, didn't it? It's hard to retain that lesson about negotiating with bad guys, though the Russers seem to have done so — witness the Moscow theater episode. |
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."
| Either that, or they'll kill Shamil, kill Maskhadov, chase al-Walid back to Arabia, where he came from, and reintegrate the Caucasus. The best way to do that would be to disperse the Chechens in units of no more than family size to other parts of Russia, none closer to the Caucasus than Novosibirsk. |
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