Ruslan Gelayev
Ruslan (Khamzat) Germanovich Gelayev[1] (Russian: Руслан Германович Гелаев; Chechen: ГелаевгӀер Герман-воъ Руслан, romanized: Gelayevġer German-vö Ruslan) was a prominent commander in the Chechen resistance movement against Russia, in which he played a significant, yet controversial, military and political role in the 1990s and early 2000s. Gelayev was commonly viewed as an abrek and a well-respected, ruthless fighter.[2] His operations spread well beyond the borders of Chechnya and even outside the Russian Federation and into Georgia. He was killed while leading a raid into the Russian Republic of Dagestan in 2004.
Ruslan Gelayev
16 April 1964
Komsomolskoye (Saadi-Kotar), Chechen–Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union
28 February 2004 (aged 39)
Near Bezhta, Republic of Dagestan, North Caucasus
Qoman Siy (1995)
Black Angel
1992–1993 (Abkhazia)
1993–2004 (Chechnya)
Brigadier General (demoted in 2000)
Borz ("Gelayev's spetsnaz")
Sharia Guard
Family[edit]
Gelayev's eldest son, Rustam, was born in 1988 in Omsk, Russia, where his father lived during the 1980s when he was married to a local ethnic Russian woman Larisa Gubkina. After living most of his life outside of Chechnya, in Russia, Rustam moved to Belgium and then to Egypt to study Islam, before allegedly joining the Syrian civil war to fight alongside Syrian rebels (according to the sources sympathetic to the uprising, like Kavkaz Center). Around August 12, 2012, the 24-year-old Rustam Gelayev was reportedly killed by an artillery attack during the Battle of Aleppo. His body was taken to Chechnya, where he was buried on August 17.[26][30][31] Kommersant, however, cited a relative of Gelayev as saying Rustam had been only studying in Syria and was killed on his way to Turkey while fleeing from the war.[32]