Chechnya’s Mountain Men Say They’ll Vanquish Russia : Caucasus: Moscow may have upper hand in capital, but inland resistance to invaders goes back centuries.

Shirvani Basayev stood up after dinner, donned a flak jacket stuffed with grenades, flares, ammunition and daggers, and excused himself from a full table of house guests still drinking tea. It was 10 p.m., time to get back to the war.

Basayev, a district commander in southeastern Chechnya, had to deliver a supply truck to fighters defending the secessionist republic’s capital, Grozny, against Russian troops. The 38-mile journey winds down icy roads from his farmhouse 8,200 feet up in the Caucasus Mountains.

For six weeks now, Chechens in pickup trucks and beat-up sedans have waged a “commuter war” for their capital. Hundreds of men like Basayev shuttle between Grozny, a Russian fortress built in the 19th Century, and the ancestral Chechen villages where they can rest and replenish their supplies.

With Grozny’s presidential palace in Russian hands since Thursday, however, the rear-guard mountain villages could soon become focal points of a guerrilla war spreading south. It is a struggle that Basayev and other mountain men feel confident they can win.

“The Russians may take the city with their superior number of soldiers,” he said. “But if they dare advance outside Grozny, that’s the end of them. We’re on our land, which feeds and nourishes us. And we have nowhere to retreat.”

In many ways, southern Chechnya and its Muslim people resemble Afghanistan, where a decade-long popular insurgency defeated the Soviet army. The sheer cliffs, narrow gorges and wooded ravines here are suited for guerrilla warfare. The villages are rustic but self-sufficient. And the inhabitants are well armed with hunting guns and Kalashnikov rifles.

Moscow has not made clear how it expects to subdue these fighters, but its first airborne incursion was a disaster. Forty-eight paratroopers descended into the woods near the foothill hamlet of Alkhazurovo on New Year’s Eve in search of a Chechen arms cache; they got lost, surrounded by hunters and captured.

Since then, the Russians have dropped bombs on some villages and threatening leaflets on others. But they have only slowly begun moving ground troops into the farming settlements between Grozny and the mountains.

As unclear as Moscow’s plans for stanching a guerrilla war are, it is equally unclear how thoroughly the Chechen highlanders have organized their resistance. Some villages have assembled self-defense forces; others simply hope their fighters will come home from Grozny to protect them; still others have asked the rebels to stay away and leave them in peace.

The Chechens lack the Stinger antiaircraft missiles and heavy outside financing that helped the Afghan rebels. A few small Chechen training bases have been spotted in the mountains. Chechen commanders are secretive about them.

But an overnight visit to this medieval village of 6,000 people and its 25-year-old military commander offered a glimpse into the stubborn, centuries-old tradition of resistance to invaders that underlies the Chechen drive for independence.

Nestled on a mountain slope among frost-glazed beech trees, Vedeno was the last stronghold of Imam Shamil, a 19th-Century Chechen leader and military strategist.

Moving to conquer the northern Caucasus, czarist troops cut down Chechnya’s forests, built roads to bring artillery into the mountains and blasted Vedeno’s fortress. Shamil surrendered in 1859.

Ruins of the white fortress’s 20-foot-high walls still enclose the center of Vedeno. They are the most visible remnants of a local history shaped by resistance and suffering.

Basayev’s farmhouse is a rebuilt version of a stone structure his ancestors erected in the year 1010. In its defense, one ancestor fought the 14th-Century Central Asian warlord Tamerlane. A great-great-great-grandfather served Shamil as a deputy and died in battle against the czar.

A great-grandfather was killed fighting the Bolshevik army, and his son died when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin deported 800,000 Chechens to Kazakhstan and Siberia in cattle cars in 1944.

When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 and Chechen President Dzhokar M. Dudayev declared independence, the family braced for another war. To train for it, the commander’s older brother, Shamil, raised a 500-member volunteer force to help Abkhazia, another Caucasian mini-state, try to break away from Georgian rule.

“If the Russians come in here and take our home, what’s the point of living?” asked Suleyman, the 61-year-old patriarch of the dozen or so Basayevs gathered in the farmhouse to feast on roast beef and home-grown tomatoes. The electricity, shaky since the war started, went off, but the meal continued by candlelight.

The women of the house, who ate at a separate table, took care of the 8-month-old son of Shamil Basayev, who was fighting in Grozny. The boy kept a firm grip on a plastic toy rifle and, at one point before dinner, fingered his approving uncle’s real Kalashnikov.

“Our people don’t need any special training on how to fight the Russians here,” the commander said. “They learn early what an automatic rifle is. They know the secret paths, the caves.”

Shirvani Basayev is an engaging man with a reddish beard who studies military manuals of many nations. He is also a control freak.

In an army usually marked by informality, his men leap to attention when he enters a room.

During a group interview, he cut them off and finished their sentences. His invitation to dinner, at first declined, turned out to be an order. Anyone visiting Vedeno, including the Russians, must behave, or fight, on his terms.

At least two dozen fighters had come here from Grozny that day to rest up and bury one of their dead, the second fighter from Vedeno killed in this war.

Many of the men were Soviet army veterans who learned guerrilla tactics firsthand from their moujahedeen foes in Afghanistan. Some had additional instruction at the 3-year-old Chechen military academy from veterans of Soviet campaigns in Angola and Abkhazia.

“Until this war, we were training in the garrisons,” said Lt. Kazbek Tepsuyev, who commands the academy’s fighting unit in Grozny. “Now we’re training in the streets.”

The mountains may be next. Basayev said about 10% of Vedeno’s fighting-age volunteers were being sent to Grozny in shifts with three to six days’ rest. Those not mobilized have been told to hang back and be ready when and if the war reaches these snowy peaks.