Sulim Yamadayev

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Sulim Yamadayev with two of his militia members

Sulim Yamadayev (b. 1973) is a former Chechen rebel commander from the First Chechen War who switched sides together with his brothers Dzhabrail Yamadayev and Ruslan Yamadayev in 1999 during the outbreak of the Second Chechen War. He became the leader of the GRU Spetsnaz Special Battalion East (Vostok) of the pro-Moscow forces in Chechnya after his brother Dzhabrail, who previously led the battalion, was assassinated. He is in command of the biggest militia outside the control of the current Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov.^[1]

1 Biography
2 Allegations of crimes
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Biography

Yamadayev studied business in Moscow before returning to Chechnya. He once said that his dream was to become a fighter and that during a time he decided to go to Afghanistan to train. Yamadayev's political interests are tightly tied those of his teip (clan) Benoi, which has long-standing claims to the town of Gudermes. Under the Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov, he served as a field commander and commanded a Special Forces detachment which routed a radical Islamic militia (Wahhabites) at Gudermes in 1998.^[2]

During the Second Chechen War, he became the leader of the GRU Spetsnaz Special Battalion East (Vostok) of the pro-Moscow forces in Chechnya, succeeding his brother Dzhabrail Yamadayev who was killed in a car blast in 2003. Together with his paramilitary soldiers known within Chechnya as Yamadayevtsy, which are alleged to be unruly and prone to mix warfare with crime, Yamadayev often conflicts with Ramzan Kadyrov and Said-Magomed Kakiyev over who controls overall military authority in Chechnya. On April 14, 2008, the forces loyal to Yamadayev and Kadyrov engaged in one of the biggest battles between rival Chechen factions. The clash occurred when convoys from each group ran into each other in Gudermes and resulted in around 18 dead.^[1]

[edit] Allegations of crimes

There are reports that Yanadayev was involved in extortion of money from the meatprocessing factory Samson in Saint Petersburg. ^[3] In the last article published in her lifetime, Anna Politkovskaya claimed that according to data of the prosecutor’s office, Yamadayev's "band" also engaged in kidnapping before the legalisation. ^[4] The Yamadayevtsi are also accused of severing the heads of their dead victims, and sexually abusing, torturing and executing prisoners.
In June 2005 his battalion carried out the Borozdinovskaya operation which was a cleansing raid that resulted in the murder of a 77-year old man and the disappearance of eleven civilians. Only one of the commanders was given a three year suspended sentence.^[5]^[6] Yamadayev, commander of the Vostok battalion at that time, has admitted his servicemen's guilt, but said that the operation had been conducted without his knowledge.^[7]
In 2007 a Russian photographer by the name of Dima Beliakov followed Sulim Yamadayev and his Vostok battalion on a mission in Chechnya's Vedeno district. His pictures revealed harsh interrogation methods of suspects and relatives of suspects using mock executions.^[8]