Ibn al-Khattab
Saudi Arabian militant (1969-2002)
Samir Salih Abdullah al-Suwaylim (14 April 1969 – 19 March 2002), commonly known as Ibn al-Khattab, was a Saudi-born pan-Islamist militant. He is best known for his involvement in the First and 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. His death in 2002 had followed his exposure to a poisoned letter, which had been delivered to him by a personal courier who was secretly recruited by the Federal Security Service (FSB) of the Russian Federation.
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. Compounding this was his approach towards attracting non-Arab Muslims to fight for his cause and his pioneering use of modern media dissemination techniques to promote jihad, particularly by way of publishing military videos for propaganda purposes.
Early life and education
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.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ibn al-Khattab” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.