Shamil Basayev - Basayev's Early Militant Activities

Basayev's Early Militant Activities

When some hardline members of Soviet government attempted to stage a coup d'état in August 1991, Basayev allegedly joined supporters of Russian President Boris Yeltsin on the barricades around the Russian White House in central Moscow, armed with hand grenades.

A few months later, in November 1991, the Chechen nationalist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev unilaterally declared independence from the newly-formed Russian Federation. In response, Yeltsin announced a state of emergency and dispatched troops to the border of Chechnya. It was then that Basayev began his long and notorious career as an insurgent — seeking to draw international attention to the crisis. Basayev, Lom-Ali Chachayev, and the group's leader, Said-Ali Satuyev, a former airline pilot suffering from schizophrenia, hijacked an Aeroflot Tu-154 plane, en route from Mineralnye Vody in Russia to Ankara on November 9, 1991, and threatened to blow up the aircraft unless the state of emergency was lifted. The hijacking was resolved peacefully in Turkey, with the plane and passengers being allowed to return safely and the hijackers given safe passage back to Chechnya.

Basayev and several hundred other Chechens have been accused of training in Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Rohan Gunaratna, has made allegations that Basayev, along other leading militants such as Ibn Al-Khattab and Walid have all had close relations with Osama bin Laden, and they have, in turn, set up terrorist camps in Chechnya. Rohan has still yet failed to put forward any concrete evidence in support of these claims, and has been in the past questioned over his linking multiple persons to Al-Qaeda without having any real expertise in the topic.