Guerrilla! Ibn-al-Khattab’s jihad and the Humiliation of the Russian Army

Guerrilla wars are hard to fight under any circumstances—guerrillas are typically outgunned and outnumbered in any one battlefield, and must deal with constant shortages in supply, medical equipment, and ammunition. Some of the few advantages to being a guerrilla are that at least you can blend in with the local population to hide when you are not fighting, and usually that population and its culture far outnumber your enemy’s army. How do you manage, then, when you don't even have those advantages—when religious faith has brought you to fight on behalf of an oppressed people with whom you have little ethnic or cultural relation? Such was the mission of the greatest guerrilla commander of our generation, known as Ibn-al-Khattab, and his successes in the tiny republic of Chechnya (against the full might of the Russian Army)are worth recounting.