Ibn al-Khattab

Samir Saleh Abdullah al-Suwailim (سامر صالح عبد الله السويلم; 14 April 1963/1969 – 20 March 2002), commonly known as Ibn al-Khattab or as Emir Khattab, was a Saudi pan-Islamic jihadist.

Though he fought in many conflicts, he is best known for his involvement in the First Chechen War and the Second Chechen War, which he participated in after moving to Chechnya at the invitation of the Akhmadov brothers.

The origins and real identity of Khattab remained a mystery to most until after his death, when his brother gave an interview to the press.

Khattab's background is a topic of debate, with some sources placing his year of birth as 1963 in Jordan as well as his birth name being Habib Abd al-Rahman Ibn al-Khattab, to a family of Jordanian-Circassian origin.

Another claim says Khattab was born in 1969 as Samir bin Salah al-Suwailim in Arar, Saudi Arabia, to a Bedouin father of the Arab Suwaylim tribe, also found in Jordan, and a mother of Syrian Turkmen descent.

Regardless of the claims, Khattab self-identified as an Arab and later identified with both Saudi Arabia and Jordan as his countries.

He was described as a brilliant student, scoring 94 percent in the secondary school examination, and initially wanted to continue his higher studies in the United States, even if he was already fond of Islamic periodicals and tapes as opposed to his siblings, to the extent they renamed him after the second caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab.

He would retain the title during his militant activities, which began in 1987, by joining the Afghan Arabs against the Afghan Government Forces and the Soviet Army.

At the age of 17, Khattab left Saudi Arabia to participate in the fight against forces of the Republic of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union during the Soviet–Afghan War and the following Afghan Civil War.

During this time, he lost the majority of his right hand after an accident with IEDs.

He never visited the hospital, and he healed it by himself using honey, as per the Prophetic medicine.

He would participate in the botched Battle of Jalalabad in 1989.

Khattab, while the leader of Islamic International Brigade, publicly admitted that he spent the period between 1989 and 1994 in Afghanistan and that he had met Osama bin Laden.

Armenian sources claim that in 1992 he was one of many Chechen volunteers who aided Azerbaijan in the embattled region of Nagorno-Karabakh, where he allegedly met Shamil Basayev.

However, the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense denied any involvement by Khattab in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War.

From 1993 to 1995, Khattab left to fight alongside Islamic opposition in the Tajikistan Civil War.

In March 1994, Khattab arrived in Afghanistan and toured fighter training camps in Khost province.

He returned to Afghanistan with the first group of Chechen militants in May 1994.

Khattab underwent training in Afghanistan and had close connections with al-Qaeda.

Several hundred Chechens eventually trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.

Before leaving for Tajikistan in 1994, al-Khattab gave Abdulkareem Khadr a pet rabbit of his own, which was promptly named Khattab.

In an interview, Khattab once mentioned he had also been involved in the Bosnian War.

According to Khattab's brother, he first heard about the Chechen conflict on an Afghan television channel in 1995; that same year, he entered Chechnya, posing as a television reporter.

His first action was the October 1995 ambush of a Russian convoy which killed 47 soldiers.

He was credited as being a pioneer in producing video footage of Chechen rebel combat operations in order to aid fundraising efforts as well as international recruitment, and he himself achieved notoriety in 1996 when he himself filmed an ambush he led against a Russian armored column in Shatoy.

Not long after his arrival he married an ethnic Lak woman from Dagestan, the sister of Nadyr Khachiliev, an Islamist and leader of the Union of the Muslims of Russia, which has been seen as a way to already internationalize the Chechen struggle.

During the First Chechen War, Khattab participated in fighting Russian federal forces and acted as an intermediary financier between foreign Muslim funding sources and the local fighters.

To help secure funding and spread the message of resistance, he was frequently accompanied by at least one cameraman.

His units were credited with several devastating ambushes on Russian columns in the Chechen mountains.

Khattab gained early fame and a great notoriety in Russia for his April 1996 ambush of a large armored column in a narrow gorge of Yaryshmardy, near Shatoy, which killed up to 100 soldiers and destroyed some two or three dozen vehicles.

In another ambush, near Vedeno, at least 28 Russian troops were killed.

In 1996 on the order from Aslan Maskhadov President of Chechnya, Khattab was appointed as the Chief of Military Training Center of the Central Front of the ChRI Armed Forces.

In the course of the war, Shamil Basayev became his closest ally and personal friend.

He was also associated with Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, who gave Khattab two of the highest Chechen military awards, the Order of Honor and the Brave Warrior medal, and promoted him to the rank of general in 1997.

A senior Chechen commander by the name of Izmailov told press how Khattab urged restraint, citing the Quran, when at the end of the war the Chechens wanted to shoot those they considered traitors.

After the conclusion of the war, Khattab, by then wanted by Interpol on Russia's request, became a prominent warlord and commanded the Chechen Mujahideen, his own private army with a group of Arabs, Turks, Chechens, Kurds, and other foreign fighters who had come to participate in the war.

His death in 2002 had followed his exposure to a poisoned letter, which had been delivered to him by a courier who was secretly affiliated with the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.

According to American scholar Muhammad al-Ubaydi, who specializes in the study of militant Islam, Khattab's continued relevance is due to the fact that he was the internationalist Salafi jihadist par excellence: he was born in Saudi Arabia, but had taken part in conflicts in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan (allegedly), Tajikistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dagestan, and Chechnya; and in addition to his native Arabic, he was able to speak Pashto, Persian, Russian, English, and Kurdish.

Added to this was his charismatic approach towards attracting non-Arabs to fight for his cause as well as his status as a pioneer of using modern media to promote jihad, particularly by way of publishing videos for propaganda purposes.

The fragment of this interview in which he makes this statement can be found in the 2004 BBC documentary The Smell of Paradise, though he did not specify his exact role or the duration of his presence there.