Carrying on from the other thread, this article shows just one of the reasons why Shamil Basayev is so respected.
At Chechnya's worst hour - when the whole nation was going through a slow genocide, it was Shamil Basayev who retook Grozny from the Russians and crushed the Russian military in Chechnya.
This operation ended the war thereby saving hundreds of thousands of women and children.
A great man...
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The word was on the streets by the beginning of the
month. The market in the center of this Russian-occupied and nearly
razed city had never been busier. Truckloads of bread sold out
every hour. Cucumbers, garlic and tomatoes, the staples of summer
life here, were moving by the crate.
''They told us,'' said Tamara Pipkin, 42, who somehow survived
under the nearly endless siege conditions in Grozny in the last
two years. ''The fighters said they were coming in on the 6th.
They told us to get food and water and go into the basements.
They said they were taking the city back.''
And they did. Before dawn on Aug. 6, 1,500 Chechen separatists
led by Shamil Basayev, their most aggressive and successful field
commander, embarked on the Second Battle of Grozny.
They moved in from three directions: east, west and south.
Before the battle was over this week, the Russian Army and Interior
Ministry -- with nearly 30,000 soldiers stationed in this devastated
republic in southern Russia -- had been routed, driven completely
from the secessionist capital they captured at enormous human
cost in January 1995.
The defeat at first seems impossible to comprehend. The Russian
Air Force nearly leveled Grozny last year and has since reduced
much of the rest of Chechnya to ashes, killing tens of thousands
of civilians, humans rights groups estimate. The Russians have
at least 10 times the soldiers in Chechnya, and many times the
wealth, of their opponents.
But as Aleksandr I. Lebed, the national security adviser now
in charge of the Russian war effort, pointed out at two news conferences
this week, the leaders of the Russian forces in Chechnya are corrupt,
the soldiers are poorly trained, rarely paid and badly equipped,
and consequently they have no will to win.
The Chechens, on the other hand, are pursuing a centuries-old
vow to drive the occupiers from their land, which is one of the
many republics that make up the Russian Federation.
They long ago decided that it would take drastic action to
make Russia realize that its war here has largely been futile.
And so, silently, they began to plan.
In March, in what Mr. Basayev described as a ''dress rehearsal''
devised by their late leader, Gen. Dzhokhar M. Dudayev, the rebels
rolled into Grozny on a train, killed scores of Russian soldiers,
burned much of the city and then withdrew to the mountains.
Relying on a vast horde of weapons, most of which were captured,
bought or stolen from the enemy, the separatists agreed at a meeting
on July 25 that this time they would finish the job.
''We had to come to Grozny because this is where we can kill
the most Russians,'' Mr. Basayev said this week in a sometimes
chilling interview in his command post in the center of the city.
''We had to make them understand that we will never give our country
away.''
At Chechnya's worst hour - when the whole nation was going through a slow genocide, it was Shamil Basayev who retook Grozny from the Russians and crushed the Russian military in Chechnya.
This operation ended the war thereby saving hundreds of thousands of women and children.
A great man...
--------------------------------------------------------------------
The word was on the streets by the beginning of the
month. The market in the center of this Russian-occupied and nearly
razed city had never been busier. Truckloads of bread sold out
every hour. Cucumbers, garlic and tomatoes, the staples of summer
life here, were moving by the crate.
''They told us,'' said Tamara Pipkin, 42, who somehow survived
under the nearly endless siege conditions in Grozny in the last
two years. ''The fighters said they were coming in on the 6th.
They told us to get food and water and go into the basements.
They said they were taking the city back.''
And they did. Before dawn on Aug. 6, 1,500 Chechen separatists
led by Shamil Basayev, their most aggressive and successful field
commander, embarked on the Second Battle of Grozny.
They moved in from three directions: east, west and south.
Before the battle was over this week, the Russian Army and Interior
Ministry -- with nearly 30,000 soldiers stationed in this devastated
republic in southern Russia -- had been routed, driven completely
from the secessionist capital they captured at enormous human
cost in January 1995.
The defeat at first seems impossible to comprehend. The Russian
Air Force nearly leveled Grozny last year and has since reduced
much of the rest of Chechnya to ashes, killing tens of thousands
of civilians, humans rights groups estimate. The Russians have
at least 10 times the soldiers in Chechnya, and many times the
wealth, of their opponents.
But as Aleksandr I. Lebed, the national security adviser now
in charge of the Russian war effort, pointed out at two news conferences
this week, the leaders of the Russian forces in Chechnya are corrupt,
the soldiers are poorly trained, rarely paid and badly equipped,
and consequently they have no will to win.
The Chechens, on the other hand, are pursuing a centuries-old
vow to drive the occupiers from their land, which is one of the
many republics that make up the Russian Federation.
They long ago decided that it would take drastic action to
make Russia realize that its war here has largely been futile.
And so, silently, they began to plan.
In March, in what Mr. Basayev described as a ''dress rehearsal''
devised by their late leader, Gen. Dzhokhar M. Dudayev, the rebels
rolled into Grozny on a train, killed scores of Russian soldiers,
burned much of the city and then withdrew to the mountains.
Relying on a vast horde of weapons, most of which were captured,
bought or stolen from the enemy, the separatists agreed at a meeting
on July 25 that this time they would finish the job.
''We had to come to Grozny because this is where we can kill
the most Russians,'' Mr. Basayev said this week in a sometimes
chilling interview in his command post in the center of the city.
''We had to make them understand that we will never give our country
away.''
) bro what incident in that timeframe prevented it from materializing?
