Posted today by Prof. Ware (by far my favorite writer on Chechnya) on Peter Lavelle's Russia list.
The Death of Shamil Basaev
Robert Bruce Ware
Event: The long-time de facto leader of the Chechen militant movement, Shamil Basaev, was killed by Russian special forces on July 10, according to the head of the Russian federal security service.
Significance: Basaev was the beating heart of Chechen militancy and the spearhead of Islamist extremism in the North Caucasus, who claimed responsibility for a series of Russia's worst modern terrorist atrocities. He was killed in the neighboring Russian Republic of Ingushetia, where he was said by Russian officials to be plotting a "terrorist attack" that would have detracted from the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg. Basaev's death is a stunning set-back for the North Caucasian Islamist resistance. Yet it will not bring an end to violence in the region, and will likely provoke an attempt at reprisal within the next few months from the thinning ranks of the militants.
Background: Basaev was born in 1965 near the Chechen town of Vedeno, the historic stronghold of his namesake, Imam Shamil, who led the peoples of the North Caucasus in a brutal war against Russian occupation from 1835 to 1859. Basaev served as a firefighter in the Soviet military from 1982 to 1984. Poor grades led to his expulsion from the Moscow Engineering Institute in 1987. He had a lackluster career as a computer salesman in Moscow until 1991, when he supported Boris Yeltsin in his stand against Soviet hardliners. Yet in November of that year he staged the first of his terrorist acts, hijacking an Aeroflot passenger flight in an effort to win support for Chechen independence. In 1992, he fought alongside Russian forces on behalf of ethnic separatists in the Abkhazia region of Georgia. Then there were allegations of his involvement the Chechen mafia in the narcotics trade and numerous train robberies in 1993 and 1994. While these reports are unconfirmed, there is no other explanation for his sudden wealth. He owned mansions in various Chechen towns, along with a fleet of expensive cars, and he partially supported his own militia. In April of 1994, he led a contingent to a militant training camp in Khost, Afghanistan, where he came into contact with the international Islamists who formed Al Qaeda.
Basaev was well-placed to command resistance forces when Russia invaded Chechnya in December 2004. When the fortunes of the resistance were at their lowest in June 1995, Basaev staged a dramatic reversal by taking over 1,000 hostages in a maternity hospital in the Russian town of Budenovsk and forcing concessions from the highest Russian officials. The raid on Budenovsk was the dramatic zenith of Basaev's life, and he spent the rest of it attempting to repeat its triumph with a series of surprise attacks that grew increasingly grotesque in their execution and effects. All of these further attempts at militant daring were unsuccessful for Basaev, and were catastrophic in their consequences for the peoples of Chechnya and the surrounding region.
In August and September of 1999, Basaev led about 2,000 insurgents into the neighboring Russian Republic of Dagestan. The Dagestanis put up a fierce resistance and appealed to Moscow for help. By October, Basaev's adventure had culminated in Russia's second invasion of Chechnya. In February 2000, he lost a foot as he led his forces through a Russian minefield in their retreat from the Chechen capital of Grozny. In October 2002, he claimed responsibility for an attack that took 800 hostages in a Moscow theater and resulted in over 100 deaths. Throughout 2003, Basaev organized a string of suicide bombings throughout Russia, many involving female martyrs. In May 2004, he claimed responsibility for an explosion that killed Chechnya's loyalist president, Akhmed Kadyrov. The following August 2004, he claimed responsibility for deadly explosions in two Russian passenger aircraft and a Moscow metro station. That September he organized an attack on a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, that brutalized more than a thousand innocents, and let to the death of more than 330 civilians- over half of them children. For this he was condemned by Muslims throughout the world including many of his own supporters. In the final analysis, Shamil Basaev was a monstrous narcissist whose compulsive quest for personal glory brought death and destruction to all around him, and ultimately to himself. On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Basaev's death was a "just retaliation" for all of the bloodshed that he had caused, and for the blood of Beslan in particular. Even in Chechnya, he had come to be widely despised.
Heavy Blow: Basaev's death comes barely three weeks after that of the president of the Chechen separatists, Abdul-Khalim Sadullayev, who was killed in a similar operation on June 17 (see Russia: Death of a rebel leader may lead to new attacks-- June 19, 2006). Sadullayev's predecessor, Aslan Maskhadov, died under similar circumstances in March 2005. Together these three losses have severely undermined North Caucasian militancy. They point to the steady improvement of Russian intelligence in the region over the last three years, as more and more of the militants and their supporters have defected to the loyalist side. This trend of defection has resulted from the steep decline in popular support for the militants during the same period, which has, in turn, been encouraged by the gradual stabilization of Chechnya and the consolidation of power by the Chechen administration loyal to Moscow. Defections have also resulted from the dramatic decline in Islamist funding since 2001. The decline in funds is partly the result of international interdiction efforts led by the United States, and partly the result of a shift in jihadist efforts away from the Caucasus southward toward Iraq and other areas of the Persian Gulf.
Militant Coordination: Yet even with this decline in funding, the deaths of these three militant leaders will not bring an end to violence and extremism in the region. Despite the frequent claims of an expansive, regional militant organization that were made by Basaev, Sadullayev, and Maskhadov, the militant forces are loosely coordinated.
Within each of the Muslim republics of the North Caucasus, the militants are scattered among semi-autonomous cells that are often responsible for much of their own funding. The cells in each republic answer informally to local militant leaders, who are capable of occasionally coordinating larger attacks that draw militants from multiple republics. Their capacity for these larger attacks was dramatically illustrated in Nazran, Ingushetia (June 2004), and in Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria (October 2005). In each of these cases, a nucleus of experienced fighters from neighboring republics was joined by a number of less experienced locals.
Thus, ironically, the deaths of these three leaders will not bring an end to militant violence because their own organizational significance was always less than they claimed for themselves. Were the militant organization really as strong as these leaders claimed, then their deaths would now be devastating to the militant cause. The fact that it was always more decentralized than they themselves acknowledged means that it will now be able to endure, although with some significant changes.
Local leaders: Militancy and extremism have always been strongest in the three eastern-most republics of the North Caucasus: Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia. Militant organization in these three republics will not be severely affected by these three deaths. Fighters in Dagestan have long been led by Rappani Khallilov, and are likely to show no change whatsoever in their weekly attacks upon local authorities. In Chechnya, Doku Umarov succeeded Sadullayev as president of the separatist forces. Umarov is an experienced fighter and sometimes-rival of Basaev whose position will now be further strengthened, for he now inherits the mantel of Basaev along with that of Sadullayev. However, he lacks Basaev's flair for daring surprise attacks, dramatic rhetoric, and international publicity.
More importantly, Umarov lacks the charismatic personal aura that enabled Basaev to effectively coordinate with militant cells in the western-most republics of the North Caucasus: Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachayvo-Cherkessia. Basaev's death may have its greatest short-term impact in these republics, where militancy and extremism have traditionally been weaker.
Moreover, given the trend toward increased defection and informing that has led to improved Russian intelligence, it is not likely that Umarov has more than a year to live. Unless he is quickly able to consolidate his own regional authority and to groom an effective successor, Umarov's likely death would be at least a temporary end to militant coordination across the region.
Economy and Politics: Yet even Umarov's death would not bring an end to Islamist extremism and violence in the North Caucasus. These are not sustained from the top by effective militant leadership, but rather from the bottom by the problems that chronically confront the people of the region. These chronic problems include political inefficacy, official corruption, police brutality, economic collapse, infrastructural decay, deteriorating education, infectious disease (tuberculosis, HIV), organized crime, and a thriving narco-business that feeds on the despair resulting from all of these problems.
The same problems feed political alienation and extremism. In highland villages across the region, the local mosque is the only effective source of social organization. Local Muslim leaders find themselves in positions of political opposition due to the desperation of their followers. The result is an entropic Islamist extremism that sprouts independently in hundreds of isolated villages. These young Islamists are primarily concerned about the local problems. They are not primarily motivated by the expansionist Islamist rhetoric of would-be regional leaders such as Basaev and Sadullayev. Yet these locals have always been ready to join with anyone from the outside who is capable of challenging local authorities.
Coming Attack: The fact that Basaev's death follows so closely upon Sadullayev's means that there is a high probability of a major militant reprisal in the next few months. Umarov and Khallilov are now under pressure to demonstrate that they retain this capability. It is unlikely that such an attack would directly target civilians, despite Russian claims that the Basaev and Sadullayev were plotting a terrorist attack. Umarov and Sadullayev had both vowed that there would be no attacks upon civilians, and, at least for the past four years, Khallilov has targeted only officials. Even Basaev appeared to be chastened by the international outcry against the Beslan attack. Rather the nest attack will probably target government officials or infrastructure. It is likely that the attack would occur in Ingushetia, as Russian officials have claimed, where the weakest of all local administrations has relied upon brutal tactics for law enforcement. By contrast with Ingushetia, the new president of Dagestan is highly popular, and the loyalist forces in Chechnya are well-prepared to repel an attack. Thus government officials and infrastructure in Ingushetia are the most likely regional targets.
Conclusion: The death of Shamil Basaev is a severe blow the militant cause in the North Caucasus. Yet while his demise is necessary for the stabilization of this region, it is far from sufficient. The North Caucasus will not be fully stabilized until its chronic economic and political problems show tangible sings of improvement.
Lyubo, bratsy, lyubo, lyubo, bratsy, zhit!
ËÞÁÎ, ÁÐÀÒÖÛ, ËÞÁÎ, ËÞÁÎ, ÁÐÀÒÖÛ, ÆÈÒÜ!
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com