Shamil Basayev

They were only allowed to return when the deportation order was lifted by Nikita Khrushchev in 1957.

Shamil Salmanovich Basayev (Салман ВоӀ Шамиль; Salman Voj Şamil; Шамиль Салманович Басаев; 14 January 1965 – 10 July 2006), also known by his kunya "Abu Idris", was a North Caucasian guerilla leader who served as a senior military commander in the breakaway Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.

He held the rank of brigadier general in the Armed Forces of Ichkeria, and was posthumously declared generalissimo.

Shamil Basayev was born in the village of Dyshne-Vedeno, near Vedeno, in south-eastern Chechnya, in 1965 to Chechen parents from the Belghatoy teip.

He was named after Imam Shamil, the third imam of Chechnya and Dagestan and one of the leaders of anti-Russian Chechen-Avar forces in the Caucasian War.

His family is said to have had a long history of involvement in Chechen resistance to foreign occupation, especially Russian rule.

Basayev, an avid football player, graduated from school in Dyshne-Vedeno in 1982, aged 17, and spent the next two years in the Soviet military serving as a firefighter.

For the next four years, he worked at the Aksaiisky state farm in the Volgograd region of southern Russia before moving to Moscow.

He reportedly attempted to enroll in the law school of the Moscow State University but failed, and instead entered the Moscow Engineering Institute of Land Management in 1987.

However, he was expelled for poor grades in 1988.

He subsequently worked as a computer salesman in Moscow, in partnership with a local Chechen businessman, Supyan Taramov.

Ironically, the two men ended up on opposite sides in the Chechen wars, during which Taramov sponsored a pro-Russian Chechen militia (Sobaka magazine's dossier on Basayev reported that Taramov apparently equipped or "outfitted" this group of pro-Russian Chechens; they were also known as "Shamil Hunters").

Basayev had four wives, a Chechen woman who was killed in the 1990s, an Abkhaz woman he met while fighting against Georgia, and a Cossack he was said to have married on Valentine's Day, 2005.

A fourth secret wife, Elina Ersenoyeva, was apparently forced to marry Basayev under threat of her two brothers' lives, and subsequently hid the identity of her husband from her friends and family.

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 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 9 November 1991, and threatened to blow up the aircraft unless the state of emergency was lifted.

He ordered the Budyonnovsk hospital raid in 1995, the Beslan school siege in 2004, and was responsible for numerous attacks on security forces in and around Chechnya.

In May 1995, eleven members of Basayev's family were killed in a Russian air raid including his mother, his two children and a brother and sister.

He also lost his home in the same attack, becoming the first Chechen who took revenge outside Chechen lands, in the Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis.

As a military commander in the separatist armed forces of Chechnya, one of his most notable battles was the separatist recapture of Grozny in 1996, which he personally planned and commanded together with Aslan Maskhadov.

He also masterminded several of the worst terrorist attacks that occurred in Russia.

Starting as a field commander in the Transcaucasus, Basayev led guerrilla campaigns against Russian forces for years, as well as launching mass-hostage takings of civilians, with his goal being the withdrawal of Russian soldiers from Chechnya.

From 1997 to 1998, he also served as the vice-prime minister of the breakaway state in Aslan Maskhadov's government.

He lost a leg in 2000 during the Second Chechen War.

His younger brother, Shirvani Basayev, who fought the Russians alongside him, is now living in exile in Turkey.

He also masterminded the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis and the 2004 Russian aircraft bombings.

ABC News described him as "one of the most-wanted terrorists in the world".

Despite his aura, journalist Tom de Waal described him as "almost unassuming in the flesh", being "of medium height, with a bushy beard and high forehead worthy of a Moscow intellectual, and a quiet voice."

Beginning in 2003, Basayev used the nom de guerre and title of "Emir Abdullah Shamil Abu-Idris".

As Basayev's ruthless reputation gained notoriety, he became well revered among his peers and eventually became the highest ranking Chechen military commander and was considered the undisputed leader of the Chechen insurgency as well as being the overall senior leader of all other Chechen rebel factions.

Basayev was killed in a truck explosion during an arms deal in July 2006.

Forensic evidence suggests that his death was caused when a landmine he was examining exploded, but Russian officials have also claimed that one of the Kamaz trucks used was booby-trapped and detonated to destroy the arms shipment, also killing Basayev.

Following revelations about the marriage, Elina was abducted in November 2006, four months after the death of Basayev, allegedly by the Kadyrovtsy ("pro-Kremlin" Chechen forces).

She has never been found.

In the 14th century an ancestor fought Timur, a great-great-great-grandfather served as Imam Shamil's deputy and died fighting the Czar, while a great-grandfather died fighting the Bolsheviks.

His grandfather fought for the abortive attempt to create a breakaway North Caucasian Emirate after the Russian Revolution.

The Basayevs, along with most of the rest of the Chechen population, had been deported to Kazakhstan during World War II in an act of ethnic cleansing on the orders of the NKVD leader Lavrenti Beria.