Shamil Basayev is not well know in this country, although the extent of his crimes has made him as despised and hated in Russia as Osama bin Laden is here in America. Ever since his 1991 debut–the hijacking of a passenger plane from Mineralnye Vody to Turkey and then on to the Chechen capital of Grozny–his name has become synonymous with terrorism throughout the entire Russian Federation. In 1995, during the height of the First Chechen War, he and an estimated 130 followers held more than 2,000 people hostage at a hospital in Budennovsk–an act that foreshadowed the horrific slaughter of 186 schoolchildren by his followers in Beslan in 2004.

The cause of Chechen independence is one that many Western pundits and policy-makers have embraced, and it was only made more palatable by the ruthlessness and brutality with which the Russian military responded. Yet Basayev and his followers did nothing but undermine the movement. His organization’s ties to international terrorism, including al Qaeda, transformed what was once a nationalist independence movement into an active threat to the United States and its allies. It is within this context that one should view one of his final public statements, posted on the rebel website Kavkaz Center, in which he praised the “Iraqi Mujahideen” in reference to the al Qaeda-linked Mujahideen Shura Council’s recent kidnapping and murder of four Russian diplomats in Baghdad.