SHAMIL BASAYEV: DEATH OF A TERRORIST
by Michael Radu

July 14, 2006

Michael Radu is a Senior Fellow of the FPRI and co-chairman
of its Center on Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Homeland
Security. He is the author of Dilemmas of Democracy and
Dictatorship (Transaction, 2006). An earlier version of this
essay,  which is available online at http://www.fpri.org,  was
published by Front Page Magazine.

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On July 11, the Chechen website KavkazCenter.org reported
that the previous day Shamil Basayev had been “martyred” by
the Russians.  While Basayev portrayed himself as a Chechen
nationalist hero,  now the focus was Islamist: the report
used his Islamic name,  saying that “Abdallah Shamil Abu-
Idris became a Shaheed [martyr] insha Allah.” Basayev was in
many ways a perfect example of the power and spread of
Islamist ideology and terrorism,  and their ability to
increasingly subsume   causes which otherwise,  at least
initially, have nothing to do with it.

Endowed with good military skills, absolutely ruthless and
adept at manipulating the Chechens’ traditional clan and
ethnic solidarity for his own purposes, Basayev managed to
radically change the world’s perception of the Chechen
cause, from that of a small nation resisting victimization
by Russian imperialism into another outpost of the global
jihad. In the process,  he also significantly modified the
very nature of Islam in Chechnya and Northern Caucasus, from
a traditional mix of syncretism and Sufism into one strongly
influenced by Wahhabism and Salafism—especially among the
youth. With Wahhabism came expansionism.

In 1999 Basayev, together with Samir ibn al-Suwaylim, a.k.a.
Khatab, a Saudi Afghan war veteran who headed an Al Qaeda
contingent known as the al-Ansar Mujahidin (after the
original Medinan supporters of Mohammed) and a clone of Bin
Laden (wealthy,  fanatical, committed),  led an attack on
neighboring Dagestan,  in the Russian Federation.  This
started the second Chechen war,  ended Chechen de facto
independence, and ultimately the tragic division of the
Chechen people.  Considering that at the time Chechnya was
practically independent, the attack amounted to a unilateral
declaration of war against Russia, with all that followed: a
new Russian invasion, the rise of Vladimir Putin in Moscow,
and the changing image of the Chechens’ war from a David
opposing Russia’s   Goliath to just another outpost of
Islamist terrorism.

Who was Basayev, and why did he represent such a threat to
Russia? What made him a hero for so many, inside and outside
Chechnya?

Shamil Basayev—his first name,  a common one in Chechnya,
was that of the national hero, Imam Shamil, a Dagestani Avar
who led a protracted resistance against Russia in the 19th
century—was born in 1965 in the village of Dyshne-Vedeno.
As a young man he was more adept at playing soccer than at
studying.  Failing   to gain   admission to Moscow State
University, he instead entered the Moscow Institute of Land-
Use Engineering, from which he was expelled in 1988 for poor
grades. Afterwards he tried his hand at trade, only to sink
deeply into debt. He took refuge in the study of Islam,
which suggests that his later extreme radicalization went
further than sheer opportunism,  although it was that as
well. Widely described as personally charming and always
ready with a joke,  he found his vocation in the confusing
period of Soviet collapse and the beginning of Chechnya’s
conflict with Russia that paralleled it.

In August 1991, during the failed coup that signaled the end
of the Soviet Union,  he claimed to have been in Moscow,
cheering Boris Yeltsin, convinced,  he later said, that a
communist victory would have been the end of Chechen chances
for independence.  Then he joined the independence struggle,
from the beginning specializing in what would become his
favorite method: terrorism. In September 1991 he hijacked an
Aeroflot domestic flight to Ankara—a first in post-Soviet
Russia, and negotiated an exchange of the 170 passengers for
his safe return to Chechnya. Thus from the start, terrorism
came first,  under the auspices of nationalism, and Islam
second, a default position for whatever criminal activity
with political purposes happens to be convenient.

All of that made him an influential person in the chaotic
Chechnya of the early 1990s, so much that in December 1997,
Aslan Maskhadov,  the then   elected president   of the
“republic,” appointed Basayev, the second runner in that
presidential election,  as prime minister, placing him in
charge of cabinet meetings, agriculture, and the economy. It
was a chance, completely missed by the Chechen people, to
create a state, rather than what they did create: a black
hole of criminality and chaos, with Basayev playing a major
role. Indeed,  he proved to be far more interested in power
than democracy or administration.  He quit after only a few
months to set up a “Majlis-Ul Shura” (People’s Council),
inexplicably given an Arabic,  not Chechen,  name.  This
amounted to a group of warlords, some foreign, with a global
Islamist, rather than nationalist, agenda.

To the extent Basayev had a coherent ideology, it combined
every figure with which his limited education had acquainted
him, from Che Guevara to FDR,  with a typical,  visceral
Chechen hatred of Russia.  This did not prevent him from
participating as a commander,  alongside and supported by
Moscow, in the Confederation of the Mountain Peoples of the
Caucasus, which in the early 1990s defeated the decaying
Christian Georgian regime and created the still extant (and
totally controlled by Russia)  “independent” Abkhazia. This
episode already presaged two of Basayev’s major tactics and
strategies, which led to both his fame and his doom:
tactically, his willingness to forge alliance with any
Muslim (or even non-Muslim)  in support of the goal of
expanding the Chechen struggle to a Caucasus-wide one, in
the   name   of   Islam   and   anti-Russian   hatred;  and
strategically, fomenting a regional, pan-Caucasian rebellion
against Russian rule.

Thus, the Abkhaz of Georgia are nominally Muslim (albeit
they are first and foremost pro-Russian), and Basayev fought
alongside them against Christian Georgians, even if it meant
accepting Russian help; the Confederation did not go far,
but Basayev, with the help of his Islamic-world supporters—
volunteers, commanders and funds—did develop a regional
strategy in recent years.  That,  more than his direct
responsibility for   a number   of spectacular terrorist
attacks, made him a major threat to Moscow.

Indeed, even before instigating the second Chechen war in
1999, Basayev and his outside jihadist associates sought to
transform what started as a Chechen war of independence into
an Islamic war of Northern Caucasian secession from Russia,
a conflict   encompassing the   entire chain   of small,
impoverished,  and ethnically mixed autonomous republics
between the Black and Caspian seas:  Adygeya,  Karachay-
Cherkessia, Kabardino Balkaria, North Ossetia, Ingushetia,
Chechnya, and Dagestan. Orthodox Ossetia aside, all of these
have Muslim   majorities or   significant and   nominally
autonomous minorities,  often sharply divided along ethnic
lines. Basayev and his Wahhabi sponsors and colleagues
followed up on their fateful aggression against Dagestan in
1999, with attacks throughout the region: in North Ossetia,
including the infamous Beslan school takeover of September
2004 (over 300 dead,  mostly children); a brief takeover of
Nazran, Ingushetia’s capital, in June 2004; and attacks in
Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino Balkaria, in October 2005.

How far Basayev succeeded in implementing his regional
Islamist/jihadist strategy   in arguable.  His group did
attract, radicalize or re-Islamize significant numbers of
members and supporters without whom his raids throughout
North Caucasus would have been impossible and forced Russia
to impose repeated leadership changes in those areas and to
increase its military presence throughout at enormously
growing costs. It has to be admitted that Basayev, more than
anyone else,  put Chechnya on the Islamist global map and
attracted the repeated attention of Osama bin Laden and his
group.

Thus was Khatab attracted to Chechnya, and other Arabs also
played an important leadership role. Hundreds and perhaps
thousands of   Europe-based Muslims   found   Chechnya   a
conveniently close area to engage in jihad. As one case in
point, Xavier Djaffo, a.k.a. Massoud al-Benin, born in 1971
in Bordeaux to a French father and Beninois mother, a high-
school buddy of Zacarias Moussaoui, converted to Islam in
London in   1993 under the latter’s influence and was
“martyred” by the Russians in April 2000 in Grozny. It was
part of a standard pattern, to be repeated in Kashmir,
Mindanao,  Bosnia,  Kosovo,  Iraq,  Somalia,  increasingly
Palestine and Europe. One may call this the globalization of
Islamism, or the umma on the offensive.

Basayev openly admitted that he was a terrorist, with the
caveat that so were the Russians (indeed, he lost most of
his family   to Russian   brutality   and   indiscriminate
reprisals)  and proved it from the start.  His general
intention—misguided, as it turned out—was to impress on
the Russian people the cost of the war in Chechnya by
atrocities in Russia proper and thus have them press the
government to stop it.  Nothing new in this: Bin Laden and
his imitators in North Africa or Bali, Europe and New York,
all pursued the same idea. The problem was—and Basayev, a
former Soviet citizen partially educated in then USSR,
should have known better—that unlike many Europeans (and
Americans) in the wake of the terrorist attacks starting
with 9/11,  the overwhelming majority of Russians,  both
elites and the man in the street, did not become distracted
by endless analyses of their own historical mistakes or
guilt but instead demanded revenge and supported Putin, who
promised it.

The complete list of Basayev’s terrorism outside and within
Chechnya is long, including the June 1995 hostage taking in
Budyonnovsk’s hospital (1,000 hostages, 100 fatalities), the
1999 bombings of Moscow apartments (300 dead), the Moscow
theater hostage-taking in October 2002 (129 hostages killed
in a   combination of   Chechen terrorism   and   Russian
incompetence), the quasi-simultaneous suicide bombings of
two domestic civilian flights in August 2004 (90 dead), as
well as various other suicide bombings inside Russia and
assassinations (such as that of Akhmad Kadyrov, formerly the
mufti of Chechnya and a Wahhabi enemy, father of present
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov),  and especially the mass
murder in Beslan in 2004. This not only gave the Chechen
cause dubious moral validity in Europe and the United
States, but gave Putin popular legitimacy and support to
pursue a bloody policy of scorched earth in Chechnya.

Notwithstanding Chechen   pro-independence propaganda and
European emotional sympathies,  it appears that Moscow’s
intelligence has deeply penetrated a declining Chechen armed
opposition, whose supporters were tired out by Basayev’s
murderous and divisive campaign against non-Wahhabi Chechen
leaders such as Ramzan Kadyrov and the general feeling of
defeat. That explains the recent chain of Russian successes
in eliminating one Chechen resistance leader after another:
the official   one,  elected   president in   1996,  Aslan
Maskhadov, in 2005, after his would-be successor Zemlij n
Yandarbiev was murdered in Qatar in 2004; their supposed
successor Abdul-Halim Saidulayev last June, and now Basayev
himself—not to mention foreign jihadists, such as Khatab,
taken care by the Russians in March 2002.

What effect will Basayev’s death have on the Chechen
independence cause,  and are there any lessons to be learned
from his career and methods?  Within Chechnya and his
intended   pan-(Northern)  Caucasian,  regional   Islamist
awakening, Basayev’s death means the loss of a symbol, a
recruitment tool,  and an incipient idea.  In Chechnya,  it
appears that the now authoritarian leader,  Prime Minister
Kadyrov, himself a product of both Chechen traditional clan
revenge (his father’s death)  and Sufi Islamic customs (as
opposed to imported Wahhabism)  could be the symbol of a
return to normalcy for the exhausted population.  Second,
many Russian and outside observers believe that Basayev’s
death,  given his extraordinary symbolic importance and
unique tactical and strategic talents, means an acceleration
of the decline in Chechnya’s ability and willingness to
fight. After all, with so many leaders killed,  there are
physical limits to how far a people of less than 1 million
can fight the 140 million strong Russia, especially with
Russia’s resources now harnessed by a strong leader, as they
were not in 1999. If so, Basayev’s death means that Islamism
in general,  and micro-nationalism combined with it in
particular, could indeed be defeated.  The common wisdom
notions that “there is no military solution”  to such
problems is clearly challenged—perhaps a lesson to the
Israelis and others.

When President Bush congratulated Putin on Basayev’s death,
he only made a partial point—one missed by many in Moscow:
America and Russia do cooperate on Islamist terrorism, but
that does not mean they are allies, friends, or engaged in a
common global struggle. The very fact that a Basayev,  a
self-defined terrorist,  attracted so many Europe-based (or
born) Muslims,  as well as Saudi/Gulf and Jordanian (among
others) helpers and volunteers, also suggests that any local
cause could easily be hijacked by global jihadism, whether
in Grozny,  New York,  London, or Kashmir. For we are in a
global war.  More than anything,  through his spectacular
terror actions,  Basayev left behind the fact that one
individual can transform a small Muslim nation’s legitimate
fight for freedom into part and parcel of the totalitarian,
global Islamist war against civilization, at the price of
destroying his own people and its dreams.

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