Warlord Leaves a Trail of Blood

Shamil Basayev claimed that he joined thousands of people alongside Boris Yeltsin in August 1991 to defend the Russian parliament from a hard-line Communist coup. But for the Chechen warlord, whose death was announced by security forces Monday, his solidarity with Yeltsin had little to do with supporting a nascent Russian democracy.

"I knew that if the State Committee for a State of Emergency was victorious, there would be no chance for independence in Chechnya," Basayev told Moskovskaya Pravda in 1996.

Indeed, less than three months after the unsuccessful coup, Basayev was one of several armed Chechen rebels who hijacked an Aeroflot flight originating in Mineralniye Vody with more than 170 people on board and forced the pilots to fly to Ankara, Turkey, to protest Yeltsin's state-of-emergency declaration for Checheno-Ingushetia. In doing this, Basayev committed his first terrorist attack -- the first such attack in post-Soviet Russia.

The hijackers negotiated their return to Chechnya in exchange for the safe return of the passengers, earning Basayev recognition among Chechen nationalists and marking the beginning of the bloody career of Russia's most elusive and ambitious terrorist.

Born in 1965 in the village of Dyshne-Vedeno, Basayev, a skilled soccer player who would eventually lose a leg by stepping on a mine in 2000, was denied admission into Moscow State University in the late 1980s. He eventually enrolled at the Moscow Institute of Land-Use Engineering. He returned to Chechnya after being expelled from the institute in 1988.

Basayev, who claimed his idols included Che Guevara and Franklin Roosevelt, commanded a ragtag army called the Confederation of the Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus during fighting in the Georgian region of Abkhazia in the early 1990s. The army was part of an organization established in 1991 that aimed to unite the diverse ethnic groups of the North and South Caucasus regions. Basayev was later named a deputy Abkhaz defense minister.

In December 1994, Yeltsin authorized the Russian government to use force in the breakaway republic of Chechnya, telling his Cabinet to employ "all means at the state's disposal" against illegal armed groups there.

Three weeks after Yeltsin's declaration, Basayev, speaking in the basement bunker of the presidential palace in Grozny, was contemptuous of the Russian assault.

"The Russian columns come into the city and are destroyed one after another," Basayev told a Moscow Times reporter at the time. "The Russians said they would take the city, so they cannot retreat and they keep throwing troops in to be destroyed. Why don't they respect the lives of their men? Why don't they clean up their corpses? I don't understand the logic of their actions. Their men are completely disoriented."

Six months after that interview, Basayev became Russia's most-wanted man. In June 1995, Basayev organized the attack on the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk, in which separatist fighters seized the local hospital and took more than 1,500 people hostage. More than 100 civilians died in the stand-off. Basayev once again managed to escape.

This audacious attack further enhanced Basayev's reputation among the Chechen separatists. In December 1997, Aslan Maskhadov, the president of the breakaway republic, appointed Basayev as deputy prime minister, placing him in charge of Cabinet meetings, agriculture and the economy. Basayev quit the government after a few months.

During the de facto independence period, Basayev -- unhappy with losing the presidential race to Maskhadov -- turned to radical Islamists, including those who came to Chechnya from abroad, and organized the so-called Majlis-Ul Shura ("People's Council" in Arabic), which amounted to a group of warlords. The Majlis-Ul Shura, headed by Basayev, soon came to rival the Maskhadov government.

In August 1999, Basayev and fellow warlord Khattab led an assault on neighboring Dagestan that prompted then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to send troops back into Chechnya, marking the beginning of the second Chechen war.

After the incursion into Dagestan, Basayev repeatedly threatened to attack Russian cities and strategic facilities, including nuclear power plants. Among the attacks he has claimed responsibility for in Moscow are the Dubrovka theater siege in October 2002, which left 129 dead, and the Moscow metro bombing in February 2004.

In March 2004, Basayev threatened to stage chemical attacks across Russia in retaliation the killing of former rebel leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in Qatar and abuses committed against Chechen civilians. "We will bomb, blow up, poison, burn down, and stage gas explosions and fires whenever possible on the territory of [Russia]," Basayev said in a statement posted on the rebel web site Kavkaz Center. "Combat chemical agents, toxins and different poisons are being used against us. Therefore we reserve the right to use chemical and poisonous substances this year."

Basayev offered in his statement to suspend attacks against civilians if federal troops in Chechnya stopped abusing the local population, but in September of that year he organized his most notorious terrorist operation, the 2004 Beslan school raid in which 331 were killed, more than half of them children.

In a controversial interview aired in the United States on ABC television, Basayev described himself as "a bad guy, a bandit, a terrorist." He consistently described attacks on Russian civilians as justifiable because of Russian atrocities in Chechnya. Last month, a video was posted on Kavkaz Center showing Basayev and fellow warlord Doku Umarov discussing the assassination of pro-Moscow Chechen leaders. Basayev told Umarov that he was willing to pay $50,000 to assassinate Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, and that he had paid $50,000 to assassinate Kadyrov's father, the late Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, in 2004.