Topic: Akhmad Kadyrov

Akhmad Abdulkhamidovich Kadyrov (Russian: Ахмат Абдулхамидович Кадыров) (August 23, 1951 – May 9, 2004) also spelled Akhmat was the Chief Mufti of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in the 1990s during and after the First Chechen War. At the outbreak of the Second Chechen War he switched sides, offering his service to the Russian government, and later became the President of the Chechen Republic from October 5, 2003, acting as head of administration since July 2000.

In May 2004 he was assassinated in Grozny by a bomb blast during a World War II memorial victory parade. His son, Ramzan Kadyrov, who led his father's militia, became one of his successors in March 2007 as the President of the Chechen Republic.

Akhmad (or Akhmat) Abdulkhamidovich Kadyrov was born in Karaganda in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, to a Chechen family that had been expelled from Chechnya during the Stalinist repressions. In April 1957 his family returned to Shalinsky District of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR. He studied in Bukhara and at Tashkent Islamic University in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In the early 1990s he returned to Chechnya and founded the Islam Institute in the village of Kurchaloy.