The death of Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev will likely greatly weaken the current rebel movement in Chechnya, analysts say, but some still warn that Russia's troubles in the Caucasus are not apt to improve.

In an analysis for Reuters, security correspondent Mark Trevelyan reports that some experts feel Mr. Basayev's death on Monday "may hit the Chechen separatist rebels much harder" than Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's death affected the Iraqi insurgency.

"In terms of Zarqawi, the insurgency is carrying on – yes (his death) was significant, but it hinges less on one man," said Magnus Ranstorp, an al Qaeda expert at the Swedish National Defense College.

"I think that Basayev's death is going to be in retrospect more significant than Zarqawi's in terms of its effect on the conflict dynamic...It's more debilitating, more severe for those that rallied behind his banner than with Zarqawi."

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Basayev was one of the most prominent warlords fighting Russian forces in the north Caucasus region. His rebel invasion of Dagestan in 1999 sparked a second Chechen war, and in the years that followed his radical Islamic group claimed responsibility for many terrorist acts in Russia. He is most notorious for having masterminded the Beslan school siege in September 2004 that left over 300 people dead, half of them children.

Martin Sieff, a senior news analyst for UPI, made a similar assessment of the impact of Basayev's death, noting that Al Qaeda in Iraq was never more than a small part of the larger Sunni insurgency, whereas Basayev was the leader of the only active Chechen militant group, and it was already reeling.

...The Chechen rebellion was on its last legs even before Basayev was killed. The civilian government there has been relatively successful in establishing its credibility with the Chechen people and the level of guerrilla activities has steadily dropped to their lowest levels in seven years....

Basayev's forces were the only group still in effective rebellion against Russia in Chechnya. Therefore with his death, it is very likely that their remnants will lose heart and fall apart, or be reduced to ineffectual levels.

However, in a commentary for the Toronto Star, Christopher Swift, a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, writes that Basayev and Mr. Zarqawi were far from fighting a common struggle, as their views of Islam are significantly different in scope. Zarqawi's Islam was "radically cosmopolitan," and "catalyzed burgeoning Arab resentment for unlimited, globalized ends." Basayev's Islam, however, is "inherently communitarian."

[For Basayev's rebels, Islam] defines ethnic and cultural identity. It reinforces notions of Chechen nationhood, animates violent opposition to Moscow's dominance and drives toward political self-determination. Rather than threatening a global conflagration, Basayev's Islam mobilized a discrete population for limited, localized ends....

...These distinctions illuminate critical differences between militant Islam's subnational and transnational variants. Absent a common spiritual idiom, Chechen rebels share more with the Tamil Tigers than they do with Al Qaeda. Basayev was Chechnya's Che Guevara, not Russia's Osama bin Laden.

Nonetheless, Pyotr Romanov, a political commentator for Russian news agency RIA Novosti, called the current Chechen war "over," though he notes that Chechen upheaval has been "like a recurring fever" in Russian history, and that it may happen again without prevention.

In addition to the expected consequences, this war, just as all other Caucasian wars, will have a very long echo. The laws of the historical pendulum and human psychology cannot be broken. Even if the Kremlin pursues a faultless Caucasian policy starting from today, which is a tall order, the echo of the war will still have a negative effect on the situation....

Russia must deal carefully with problems in the Caucasus and initiate smart preventive projects there, or else several generations from now people will have forgotten all about the children of Beslan, but they will remember the destruction of Grozny and glorify Shamil Basayev.

The Associated Press reports that the seeds of future conflict already may have been sown, through heavy-handed Russian tactics, corruption, and the spread of Basayev's tactics to other insurgent groups in the Caucasus.

Although the Kremlin touts the money it's putting into reconstructing the war-shattered Chechen capital, widespread complaints persist of abductions and detentions by police and shadowy security forces. There are also complaints that money intended for displaced people has been siphoned off in corruption or unpaid through inefficiency. These allegations contribute to widespread distrust of Russian authorities that could easily evolve into support for the rebels.

Meanwhile, angry forces in other parts of the Russian North Caucasus have launched their own Chechnya-inspired insurgencies. Dagestan to the east is plagued with almost-daily shootouts and explosions and Ingushetia to the west is nearly as blood-drenched. The violence may have spread too far to be contained, some observers say.

"The destruction of one Basayev will not solve the problem of fighting terrorism in Russia," said Anzor Shakhmurzov, head of the liberal Union of Right Forces party in Kabardino-Balkaria....

The International Herald Tribune called for Moscow to take advantage of Basayev's death and begin peace negotiations with Chechen separatists. To fail to do so would be "a deadly mistake," the editorial says, because "if Russia continues only to hunt down rebels, they will only multiply, spreading the conflict to other parts of the North Caucasus."

Despite the risks of future conflict however, RadioFreeEurope says experts doubt that Russia will change its policies in Chechnya.

Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya has extensively covered the Chechen conflict. She says that the Kremlin will claim Basayev's death is a great victory and will continue with its previous course on Chechnya: "This figure [Basayev] is gone, but it will not change the policy [of the Kremlin.] I think that now or after some time, they will announce that there is completely no one to talk with [in Chechnya], even [they will say] hypothetically, because there is simply no one to talk with and the resistance does not exist."

Nicholas Redman of the Economist Intelligence Unit in London agrees. He doesn't think the Kremlin will start negotiations: "I will be very surprised if that's the case [and the Kremlin starts negotiations.] It wasn't simply Basayev. There hasn't been much indication from the Kremlin up to now of any willingness to negotiate. I don't see that Basayev's death will change anything."

While debate continues about the political impact of Basayev's death, questions also persist about the cause of the explosion that killed him. While all agree that Basayev was killed when an explosives-laden truck blew up next to his car, the AP reports that Russian sources cite alternatively a "targeted missile strike" and an agent with a detonator within the truck as the explosion's source. However, Basayev's rebel group calls his death an accident, as did local police officials who inspected the site.

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Feedback appreciated. E-mail Arthur Bright.