Shamil Basayev's home village of Dyshne-Vedeno stretches for a kilometer or two along a dusty road in the mountainous Vedeno district of Chechnya, 55 km southeast of the capital, Grozny. Cattle and sheep graze around the village, and the local cream is fresh and delicious. If the villagers are right, Russia's most-wanted man is hiding only a few kilometers away. Perhaps in the hamlet of Dargo, about 10 km to the east; or in Ersanoi, just up the road; or even right here in Dyshne-Vedeno itself, within sight of the ruins of his once sumptuous red-brick house, blown up by the Russians in 2000.

The Kremlin says it has launched a massive manhunt for Basayev, the Chechen guerrilla leader who has orchestrated a grisly terror campaign that includes, among other atrocities, hijackings, suicide bombings, the 2002 Moscow theater siege and the seizure last month of a school in Beslan, where the final death toll is expected to reach 500. But here in Dyshne-Vedeno, where the Russians have few friends and a senior army officer describes his troops' main role as "protecting themselves," there's little sign that the search is on.

Basayev's former neighbors, comrades-in-arms and friends say he hides during the day in the thick, impenetrable forests that carpet the mountains. At night he descends into one of the region's many tiny villages, where he recharges the batteries for his computers and satellite phones

404 Not Found

---

nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) and sleeps secure in the knowledge that locals won't betray him, despite Moscow's $10 million reward for information leading to his capture. Asked if she would report Basayev to the Russians if she spotted him, one woman shot back: "Are you out of your mind?" According to Sharip, a Chechen police officer and childhood playmate of Basayev's, "If someone did inform on Shamil, it would be last thing they ever did. The very same person who took the call would phone Basayev straight away. The informant would be a dead man."

Basayev maintains his protective bubble through fear, but also by infiltrating the Russian security services. According to Supyan Taramov, a Moscow-based property developer from Vedeno, Basayev has all the Russian military and intelligence installations in the region under surveillance. "Some of his relatives are in the police here," says Taramov, who once employed Basayev but in 2000 formed a pro-Russian military unit to hunt him down. Taramov claims Basayev's men routinely buy weapons, information and equipment from the Russians — and even get local officials to ferry him around. For their part, Russian élite units seem to have other priorities besides finding Basayev. Human-rights groups allege that this year alone, hundreds of Chechen civilians have been kidnapped and held for ransom, mostly by Russian troops or their Chechen auxiliaries. Many have never been seen again.

The vast majority of Chechens oppose Basayev's murderous tactics, even while they share his goal of independence from Russia. But the fact that Basayev can roam around Vedeno with impunity and seemingly unleash strikes at will in Russia perfectly illustrates how the Chechen conflict has degenerated from a struggle for self-determination into a vicious war of terror in which Russian and Chechen civilians have become the targets. As the traditional 40-day mourning period in Beslan came to an end last week, people across Russia were left worrying where Basayev will strike next.

Basayev, a short, wiry 39-year-old, comes from a land famed for its anti-Russian insurgents. In the 19th century Imam Shamil, with whom Basayev shares a first name, led a decades-long revolt against the Czar. Russian forces finally captured his base in Dargo in 1845, but only after a disastrous campaign in which they lost 3,900 men, three generals and all of their supplies. Today, Vedeno is once again famous for a rebel named Shamil.

No one expected the young Basayev to follow in his namesake's footsteps. Basayev's father was an itinerant construction worker and his mother was a market trader. Their eldest son was "absolutely average," says a former playmate who only wanted to be identified as Ruslan. "He was O.K. at school, held his own at soccer, nothing much," remembers Sharip. Basayev now professes a devout Islamic faith, but he didn't grow up in a religious family. "We never saw [Basayev's father] Salman go to the mosque until the mid-'90s," recalls former neighbor Abdul.

In his teens, Basayev fulfilled his military service as a fireman, spending his ample spare time devouring books on world politics. After leaving the army, he and his younger brother, Shirvani, worked for their father as builders in southern Russia, before Basayev drifted to Moscow with vague plans of studying law. His education didn't last long; he was thrown out of the Institute of Land Management in his first year for poor attendance, says Taramov. At the urging of Basayev's mother, Taramov gave his former schoolmate a job in his computer business. "He was bone idle," says Taramov. "He played computer games all night and then slept until the early afternoon." Nevertheless, Taramov grudgingly kept him on the payroll until late 1991. The only sign of Basayev's political interests, Taramov says, was his fascination with Che Guevara and "anyone else who carried a gun."

In November 1991, Basayev shot to fame when he hijacked a plane in the southern Russian city of Mineralniye Vody and forced it to land in Turkey to draw attention to Chechnya's incipient independence struggle. Basayev released all the passengers unharmed, and the Turks allowed him to return to Chechnya. The Russians were strangely forgiving, too. Instead of arresting him, they gave him military training with an élite covert unit and the next year sent him to Abkhazia, a region of Georgia on the Black Sea, where he fought with a Moscow-backed secessionist movement.

But when open war between Russia and Chechnya flared in 1994, Basayev quickly emerged as one of the breakaway republic's top rebel commanders. From early 1995, he worked closely with Khattab, a Saudi-born mujahid who had fought in Afghanistan and claimed a close relationship with Osama bin Laden. "Basayev was in charge, but Khattab brought in the money," says a former senior security officer in the guerrilla organization.

Basayev and his men were "seriously good," says one Russian special-forces officer who fought against them during the first Chechen war. Unusually for the time, they were also high tech. "The first thing we did each night when we pitched camp was to set up our computers and sat phones," says Jamal, a former explosives specialist for Khattab. Basayev, Jamal recalls, liked to read on the Web.

Basayev is coy about possible connections with al-Qaeda now. He has adopted a cell-like structure for his network of fighters, and his men include a sprinkling of foreign mujahedin from the Middle East and Europe. But in a message posted on the Web claiming responsibility for the Beslan siege, he said: "I don't receive money from bin Laden, but I wouldn't say no."

Fellow fighters respect Basayev but few like him. Two former guerrillas interviewed by Time two years ago in Vedeno remembered Basayev as a harsh, mercurial leader. "One moment he could be nice, the next minute he could curse you out, really insult you," recalled Sultan, a Basayev aide. "Then he would come back, see you were offended and say it was a joke. I was never convinced." (About a year ago, Sultan was detained by the Russians and has not been heard from since.) Kazbek, a deeply religious young fighter who joined Basayev for the 1995 siege of a hospital in Budennovsk in the Russian region of Stavropol in which 120 people died, discounted religious fervor as Basayev's prime motivation: "He is a man of war." (Kazbek has also since disappeared.) The Budennovsk hospital siege — and the live televised negotiations with then Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin — confirmed Basayev as a folk hero back home, showing the embattled Chechens how a lowly boy from Vedeno could make even the Russian PM capitulate.

Basayev said that he launched the Budennovsk raid to make Russians feel the real horror of the war that Moscow had unleashed on his people. This has become his leitmotiv, as the string of terrorist attacks he has orchestrated since then prove. In 1999, he and Khattab helped provoke the second Chechen war, when they led a failed invasion of the neighboring republic of Dagestan. Basayev barely survived the resulting Russian offensive on Grozny in early 2000; part of his leg was blown off as he led his men in a retreat across a minefield. Friends and enemies thought this was the end of his military career. Yet a few months after the injury, a courier from Vedeno was amazed to see Basayev drive up to a meeting behind the wheel of an SUV specially adapted to his disability. And he has lost none of his bravado. Last December, he sent a taunting message to the Russian nationalist Motherland movement, which had offered a $500,000 reward for his capture: "Why are you scumbags offering so little?"

Since the retreat from Grozny, Basayev has largely ignored guerrilla warfare in favor of outright terror. The Moscow theater was taken over on his orders in October 2002; 129 hostages died after Russian troops stormed the building. In July 2003, his suicide bombers killed 15 people at a rock concert in a Moscow suburb.

404 Not Found

---

nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) Then came the orgy of violence this summer: two planes and a Moscow subway station were bombed, leaving some 100 dead, even before Beslan erupted in tragedy.

The chaotic Russian response to the Beslan school siege left the impression that the Kremlin was taken by surprise. But Time has learned that the Russian security services were tipped off about a possible raid months earlier. Aslambek Aslakhanov, President Vladimir Putin's adviser for the North Caucasus, told Time that he had been informed of a planned assault "well before August. We were looking at the possibility that they would seize a theater or a cinema. We never thought they would take over a school." Law enforcement sources say élite antiterror units were sent to the region in early August, and were warned to expect the seizure of a large public building. One team was stationed near Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, just 20 km northwest of Beslan. Yet by Basayev's own account, he and some 30 other guerrillas spent 10 days in woods about 20 km north of Beslan rehearsing the attack.

Since his terror spree began, Basayev has lost most of his close friends and relatives. Khattab was poisoned by the Russians in 2002. Basayev's father was killed in a shootout with the Russians two years ago. His brother, Shirvani, has been reported dead by the Russians but is, according to numerous accounts, actually living in exile in Turkey. Life goes on for Basayev, however. He has taken a third wife in the past year or so — Eset, the widow of one of his closest commanders. And he is unmoved by the international uproar at his brutality. His Beslan statement was typically callous: "We find it funny when the whole world, with anger and indignation, calls on us to stop. We ask them, What have you done for us that we should listen to you?"

The tragedy in Beslan drew an angry denunciation from Chechnya's deposed President, Aslan Maskhadov. But Basayev leads a more radical wing of the resistance movement that has largely displaced Maskhadov's men (see Rebels with conflicting causes). And he's unlikely to change his tactics now. With Russian forces more likely to collude with guerrillas than track them down, and Chechens themselves too terrified to turn him in, Basayev is left free to plot the next atrocity. He calls his attacks Operation Boomerang, a metaphor for how he wants to make the carnage in Chechnya felt all the way back in Moscow. After Beslan, people across Russia can only wonder if Basayev's boomerang will circle back on them next.

• PAUL QUINN-JUDGE | Dyshne-Vedeno
• How Chechen rebel Shamil Basayev became Russia's most-wanted — and elusive — terrorist