Ruslan Gelayev

Ruslan Gelayev was born in 1964 in the village of Komsomolskoye (Saadi-Kotar) near Urus-Martan, 10 years after his parents had returned from the Stalinist deportation of Chechens into Central Asia.

He was from Chechen Highland teip Gukhoy.

Gelayev lived for several years outside Chechnya in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, held various jobs and, at one point, served in the Soviet Army.

Soviet-Afghan war

In 1979-1980, Gelayev took part in the Soviet-Afghan war.

He led his Spetsnaz battalion in special operations against Afghan mujahideen, before changing sides with Chechens in the 90's.

Ruslan (Khamzat) Germanovich Gelayev (Руслан Германович Гелаев; ГелаевгӀер Герман-воъ Руслан) was a prominent commander in the Chechen resistance movement against Russia, in which he played a significant, yet controversial, military and political role in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Gelayev was commonly viewed as an abrek and a well-respected, ruthless fighter.

His operations spread well beyond the borders of Chechnya and even outside the Russian Federation and into Georgia.

In 1992–1993, Gelayev took part in the Georgian–Abkhazian conflict as a volunteer in the Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus militia fighting for the Abkhaz separatist side against Georgia, serving under Shamil Basayev.

Together with the Chechen Battalion, Gelayev took part in the Battle of Gagra, which marked a turning point in the War in Abkhazia.

After his return to Chechnya, he joined the forces of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria's president, Dzhokhar Dudayev, taking command of the special forces regiment Borz (Борз, "Wolf" in Chechen) made up of veterans of the Abkhaz conflict.

During the subsequent war with Russia, Timur Mutsurayev wrote a song dedicated to the unit, "Gelayev's Spetsnaz!"

(Гелаевский спецназ!), which became popular in Chechnya.

In 1993–1994, the unit took part in combat actions against the anti-Dudayev Chechen opposition forces of Ruslan Labazanov and Beslan Gantamirov who were later being aided by Russian covert operations operatives and mercenaries recruited by the Russian secret service FSK from the ranks of the Russian Army.

Gelayev fought against the Russian federal forces in the First Chechen War of 1994–1996, notably as a major commander in the 1994-1995 defense of Chechnya's capital Grozny, for which he became one of the first to be awarded the Chechnya's highest medal Kioman Syi (Honor of the Nation).

In early 1995, he became the commander of the South-Western Front for the separatist forces, tasked with defense of the Argun Gorge area.

The Russians nicknamed him the "Black Angel" (Чёрный ангел), after his radio communications call sign, "Angel".

Following the fall of Grozny and the Russian push into the highlands, Gelayev personally led the defense of the mountain village of Shatoy, where he was wounded several times.

Mumadi Saidayev then took over the command of the front.

During this battle, on May 27, 1995, Gelayev announced that if the aerial bombing of the village continued, a number of captive Russian military aviation officers would be killed every day and, according to the Russian human rights group Memorial, eight Russian POWs were executed as Gelayev carried out this threat.

The later President of Ichkeria (and still later the self-proclaimed leader of the Caucasus Emirate) Dokka Umarov initially served under his command, together with Akhmed Zakayev, before they left it to form their own units.

On April 16, 1996, Gelayev and the Arab commander Ibn al-Khattab wrecked a large column of Russian armored vehicles in the famous Shatoy ambush, killing scores - or possibly hundreds - of federal soldiers, almost all of them within the first 15 minutes of the attack, with minimal losses on their own side.

Previously, on March 6, 1996, Gelayev had led a surprise raid on Grozny, seizing large parts of the city for two days and inflicting serious losses on federal forces, before leaving with more than 100 civilian hostages.

This was seen as a rehearsal before the recapture of the city in the Battle of Grozny (August 1996), in an operation led by Basayev in which Gelayev also participated, and that ended the war.

After the war, Gelayev became a deputy prime minister under the new Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov in April 1997.

He went on a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and took the name Hamzat.

The following year, in January 1998, he was appointed the defence minister of Chechnya, a largely honorific post which he held until he was replaced by Magomed Khambiyev in July 1999.

Gelayev became the first deputy defense minister in charge of security forces, including personal command of the Sharia Guard.

Gelayev, however, maintained links with both Maskhadov and his rivals, in particular with Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev and Salman Raduyev.

At the start of the Second Chechen War in late 1999, Gelayev commanded a force of some 1,500 fighters in the siege of Grozny, charged with defense of the south-western sector of the city.

However, he and most of his men left the city without orders in January 2000, which left it open to attack.

Following Gelayev's unauthorized withdrawal from Grozny, Maskhadov demoted him from the rank of brigadier general to a private and stripped him of all military decorations.

In February–March 2000, Gelayev's forces took heavy losses as they withdrew from Grozny to the mountains of southern Chechnya, where they discovered that their mountain bases had been destroyed by Russian aircraft, leaving them starving, freezing, and low on ammunition.

At that point, the notorious Chechen warlord Arbi Barayev contacted Gelayev, promising him aid and transportation to a safe area.

When Gelayev's forces arrived at the specified meeting place, where buses were supposed to be waiting to evacuate their wounded, they were ambushed by a large number of Russian troops.

They retreated to Gelayev's native village of Komsomolskoye (Saadi-Kotar).

There, around a thousand or more rebels were trapped and the village was pounded for weeks by the federal forces in the Battle of Komsomolskoye, one of the bloodiest battles of the war, ending with hundreds of Chechen fighters and civilians dead, along with more than 50 government troops (according to Russian figures).

Gelayev escaped, but with only a fraction of his men, and many of demoralized survivors decided to give up the fight.

He was killed while leading a raid into the Russian Republic of Dagestan in 2004.