Russia's Most Wanted

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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.