Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev has joined the rebel government. The last moderate Chechen rebel leader, Aslan Maskhadov, was killed earlier this year. Now the official rebel "government" is dominated by radicals. Most of the more moderate rebels have quit fighting and joined the pro-Russian Chechen government. But the Islamic radicals that triggered the 1991 Russian invasion (by invading neighboring areas and trying to create a regional Islamic dictatorship), have largely kept on fighting. The Russians, and their Chechen allies, have concluded that they will have to find and kill or capture all of the Islamic radicals.
