The Significance of the Death of Shamil Basayev

There are several major terrorist insurgencies raging in this world. In America, we are most familiar with Iraq and Afghanistan, however active battle is also ocurring in the borderland between Pakistan and India called Kashmir, Kyrgistan, China, Somalia, Uzbekistan and the Caucasus, just to name a few.

The battle in the Caucasus has also been one of the media. In 1994, after Russia collapsed and many of its border republics attempted to liberate themselves, Russia determined some were too valuable to lose. So they launched a brutal war in the breakaway republic of Chechnya. Historical perspective is probably important here. Chechnya, Dhagestan, Ingushetia and other republics in the Caucasus have never been willing Russian converts and have literally been fighting for dozens of decades.

So, along comes Russia attempting to recapture Chechnya, and in their infinite wisdom, they determined that mass urban aerial bombardment would be the most effective battle. You can imagine the goodwill that is generated when an imperial power drops enough bombs on a city of 600,000 (Grozny) that they destroy nearly every single building.

While the Chechnyan breakaway was originally a political maneuver, it quickly became a battle for everyones' lives. Enter Shamil Basayev (who took his name from one of the original Islamic warriors fighting Russia in the 1800's, Imam Shamil). He quickly determined that the way to engage the Russians was to make the fighting too painful, classical insurgency.

After the Russians ran out of buildings to bomb and the fighting was continuing, they had to insert ground troops to chase the insurgents up the mountains. The timeframe was ripe for Islamic insurgent operations as the fighting in Bosnia had just halted (temporarily) and al-Qeada was still trying to cut their teeth. So hundreds of Arabs went to fight against Russia in the Caucasus. This led to tens of thousands of deaths and Russia ultimately pulled back from Chechnya.

When Vladamir Putin was "elected" in 1999, he thought it an embarrasment that Russia had withdrawn from Chechnya and stepped up the fighting once again. Basayev also stepped up the fighting, including taking hundreds of hostages in a Russian hospital, taking hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theater (leading to the death of half of them when Russian commandos flooded the theater with some sort of mustard gas chemical weapon), and most recently, the Beslan school hostage crisis, which also lead to the death of hundreds of children and teachers when someone outside the school building decided to storm the booby trapped auditorium.

So, in my opinion, the death of this terrorist is to Russia what the death of al-Zarqawi is to the United States and the people of Iraq. It is also an important lesson on the actions which create terrorist/insurgent leaders. Shamil Basayev, may you also rest in anguish.