Shooting victim a man with enemies

Gregor McClenaghan in Dubai and Carl Schreck in Moscow

• Last Updated: March 31. 2009 1:17PM UAE / March 31. 2009 9:17AM GMT

The Chechen former military commander assassinated in Dubai on Saturday was not a man without enemies.

Sulim Yamadayev was deeply entrenched in the complicated loyalties and violent feuds that have characterised the Kremlin’s turbulent and bloody pacification of Russia’s volatile Muslim republic of Chechnya.

Having studied business in Moscow and military tactics in Afghanistan, Yamadayev, together with his brothers, Ruslan and Dzhabrail, fought with Chechen rebels against Russian forces in the bloody 1994-96 war that ended with de facto independence from Moscow for the rebel government.

However, when Vladimir Putin, then the Russian prime minister, sent federal troops to retake Chechnya in 1999, the entire Yamadayev clan switched sides and were subsequently rewarded by the Kremlin.

Yamadayev led the elite special forces Vostok battalion following his brother Dzhabrail’s death in a car bombing in 2003. The unit gained an unsavoury reputation for involvement in criminal cases of extortion and murder, and was alleged to have committed war crimes, including the murders of civilians, rape, torture, and severing the heads of their victims.

Following the appointment of the former boxer and militia leader Ramzan Kadyrov as president of Chechnya in 2007, Yamadayev’s unit, which according to the Moscow Times answered directly to the Russian defence ministry’s main intelligence directorate, continued to be the only militia operating outside Kadyrov’s control, and the two men became bitter rivals.

Tensions between the two clans came to a head in April 2008, when Vostok battalion vehicles refused to yield to Kadyrov’s motorcade, leading to a gun battle that reportedly left two people dead.

The road standoff marked a turning point in the feud, as Kadyrov publicly began accusing the Yamadayevs of crimes including kidnap and murder, and Chechen prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Sulim Yamadayev.

However, there was no attempt to arrest Yamadayev, despite the fact that Russian authorities clearly knew where he was.

In August last year, Russian and international media reported that Yamadayev and his men had fought on behalf of the Russians during the week-long conflict with Georgia over the breakaway Georgian republic of South Ossetia. He was relieved of his command soon after the clashes.

In September, Ruslan Yamadayev, who had become a member of the Russian parliament after the war, serving in the party of Mr Putin, was assassinated near the central government headquarters in Moscow in an audacious drive-by shooting.

Rumours immediately spread that Kadyrov might have been behind the killing, although Russian officials and Kadyrov himself were quick to deny those suggestions. To date nobody has been arrested for the murder.

Yamadayev is the latest in a series of Chechen exiles to have been murdered in recent months.

Last month, the former deputy mayor of Grozny, Gilani Shepiyev, was shot outside his Moscow apartment, while in January, Umar Israilov, who had been Ramzan Kadyrov’s bodyguard before falling out with the Chechen president and accusing him of kidnapping and torture, was shot dead in Vienna, where he had been granted political asylum.

In December last year, Islam Dzhanibekov, a former Chechen rebel, was killed in Istanbul, where he had been living for the past six years. He was the third Chechen in six months to have been murdered in Turkey.

Members of the Chechen community have little doubt who they think is behind the killings, according to Yavuz Selim Kurt, who runs the Economic and Social Research Centre think-tank based in Istanbul.

“They suspect Kadyrov is responsible for all these assassinations, with the co-operation of the Russian intelligence services,” he said.

“People are very worried. There are more than 20,000 Chechen refugees in Turkey, and they fear for their safety.”

However, there may be signs that the previously close relationship between Kadyrov and the Kremlin is starting to fray. Earlier this month, the Moscow Times reported that Putin and his former protégé had “traded thinly veiled barbs” over whose responsibility it was to pay for the rebuilding of Chechnya, which is impoverished after more than a decade and a half of war.

gccclenaghan@thenational.ae

cschreck@thenational.ae