>From the viewpoint of the Russian public, incidentally, this is like killing
Bin Laden.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal
The Independent (UK) 1 May 2002 Obituary: Khattab Chechen warlord BY TOM DE WAAL
THE SAUDI-BORN fighter who came to be known by the name "Khattab" was the most feared Islamist warrior from Russia's conflict in Chechnya.
Ibn al-Khattab self-consciously cultivated a terrifying image. He had thick black Medusa-like locks which snaked down to his shoulders, and large black eyes. Khattab was his nom de guerre and he also liked to be called "Emir". It was part of a bloody career which had as much to do with propaganda for international militant Islam as with the fight itself.
Khattab was born in northern Saudi Arabia in 1970 into a wealthy family. His
real name is disputed, although Jordanian sources have identified him as Habib Abdel Rahman Khatab and his family as Bedu. According to his Chechen biographers, his parents wanted to send him to college in the United States - he did speak English - but instead, in 1987, he followed the example of other Saudis and went to join the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
It seems likely that Khattab met his fellow Saudi Osama bin Laden, although the evidence of their relationship is only circumstantial. Khattab became one of the most prominent Arab mujahedin fighters in the war. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, he stayed in the country. In 1993 he moved across the border into Tajikistan to join the Islamist forces fighting
a civil war with the Russian-backed government there.
In March 1995, three months after the war in Chechnya began, Khattab moved there, taking with him a small group of Arab fighters. In April 1996 he played a leading role in a devastating ambush against a Russian armoured column high in the mountains near the village of Yaryshmardy. A grisly video
of the aftermath of the ambush, with Khattab walking triumphantly down a line of blackened Russian corpses, was soon available for sale in Grozny market, but it was probably made with the funds of a Saudi target audience in mind.
When Moscow agreed to withdraw its forces from Chechnya later that year, Khattab cultivated new links with a burgeoning Islamist movement in the neighbouring autonomous republic of Dagestan. His main friend and protector became the field commander Shamil Basayev, who had by then become Russia's "enemy Number One".
In the summer of 1999 Basayev and Khattab launched a joint raid from Chechnya into three villages in the mountains of Dagestan. They met with unexpectedly
strong resistance from both local people and the Russian military, which was
seeking an excuse to reinvade Chechnya. Khattab and Basayev had apparently overestimated their support. In fact Khattab's fundamentalist brand of Islam, known as Wahhabism, was very unpopular in both Chechnya and Dagestan, where Sufi Islam, grafted on to local traditions, has been the central faith for two centuries.
At the end of 1999, most Chechen refugees, fleeing Russia's second military campaign in Chechnya, cursed Basayev and his Arab ally, even as they retained some respect for Chechnya's elected rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov. For his part, Maskhadov never fully dissociated himself from Khattab, thus making negotiations with him more difficult.
If a Chechen version is to believed, Khattab's death was more revenge tragedy than jihad. The rebel-run website www.kavkaz.org says that the Russian security services sent Khattab a letter which was drenched in poison, and that he died on 19 March. Whatever the case, the Russians recently captured a video showing Khattab dead and thus news of his death reached the outside world.
Ibn al-Khattab (Khattab), guerrilla leader: born 1970; married (two children); died c19 March 2002.