Ibn al-Khattab
Samir Saleh Abdullah al-Suwailim (Arabic: سامر صالح عبد الله السويلم; 14 April 1969 – 20 March 2002),[1] commonly known as Ibn al-Khattab or Emir Khattab, was a Saudi Arabian pan-Islamist militant.According to American scholar Muhammad al-Ubaydi who specializes in the study of militant Islam, his continued relevance is due to the fact that he was the internationalist Salafi jihadist fighter par excellence: he was born in Saudi Arabia and had taken part in conflicts in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chechnya, Dagestan, and Tajikistan, and who in addition to his native Arabic was able to communicate in English, Kurdish, Pashto, Persian, and Russian.[5][6] 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.[7] 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 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.[19] 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.On 22 December 1997, over a year after the signing of the Khasav-Yurt treaty and the end of the first war in Chechnya, the mujahideen and a group of Dagestani rebels raided the base of the 136th Armoured Brigade of the 58th Division of the Russian Army in Buinaksk, Dagestan.Among them are Johns Hopkins University scholar David Satter,[29] historians Yuri Felshtinsky,[30] Amy Knight[31][32] and Karen Dawisha,[33] and former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko who was believed to be poisoned by Russian agents in London.[41] He was falsely reported dead when Omar Mohammed Ali Al-Rammah, a Yemeni prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, faced the allegations that he witnessed Khattab being killed in an ambush in Duisi, a village in the Pankisi Gorge of Georgia on 28 April 2002.According to Fawaz Gerges who cited Saif al-Adel and Abu Walid al Masri's diaries, Ibn al-Khattab and Osama bin Laden operated separate groups, as they defined the enemy differently, but tried to pull each other to their own battle plans.