“I will leave Chechnya and never come back,” said Shamaiev.

By Damir Ahmed, IOL Correspondent

MOSCOW , May 28, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – The pro-Moscow mufti of Chechnya has resigned, protesting appalling security and social conditions in the Caucasus republic.

“After years in office, I decided to resign because of the bad security and social conditions in this country which move from worse to worst,” Akhmad Khadzhi Shamaiev said in a press statement published Saturday, May 28, 2005 by the  business daily Kommersant.

“Life in Chechnya has become unbearable. As a mufti I have seen the people suffer backbreaking problems,” he wrote.

Shamaiev, 55, was appointed mufti by the pro-Moscow Chechen administration in 2000 after his predecessor Ahmad Kadyrov was named president.

Kadyrov was killed in an explosion in central Grozny last May claimed by Chechen fighters, who have been locked in a bloody struggle with Russian forces.

Never Again

The resigned mufti said he has lost a great deal because of his post.

Shamaiev’a son and daughter were both killed in 2003 and 2004 respectively.

He announced that he would leave Chechnya “and never come back.”

The Chechen presidency, for its part, said Shamaiev was resigning because of “bad health conditions.”

The resignation is likely to lose Moscow one of its key allies in Chechnya .

The small mountainous Caucasus republic has been ravaged by conflict since 1994, with just three years of relative peace after the first Russian invasion of the region ended in August 1996 and the second began in October 1999.

It was on December 11, 1994 that former Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered Russian troops into Chechnya to subdue an increasingly powerful separatist movement.

After two years of horrific fighting, Russian troops pulled out in 1996.

In 1999, then-prime minister Vladimir Putin pushed some 80,000 Russian troops into Chechnya in what Moscow called a lightning-strike “anti-terror operation” but which has since degenerated into a grinding war with Chechen fighters.

At least 100,000 Chechen civilians and 10,000 Russian troops are estimated to have been killed in both invasions, but human rights groups have said the real numbers could be much higher.

Thousands of refugees from war-torn Chechnya live in battered tent camps  in neighboring Ingushetia and refuse to return home because of continuing insecurity.