Factbox: Umarov and the Caucasus rebellion

(Reuters) - Doku Umarov, one of the last remaining original leaders of the Chechen rebellion that began in the early 1990s, claimed responsibility for an attack on the Moscow metro system that killed 39 people.

Umarov, Russia's most wanted rebel leader, said further attacks on the Russian heartland would follow.

-- Umarov has adopted the title "Emir of the Caucasus Emirate," claiming authority for his rebel group over Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Ossetia, the Nogay steppe and the combined areas of Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia in the northern Caucasus mountains. The region has a long history of ethnic and clan feuding, as well as rebellion against Russian rule from the late 18th century.

-- Umarov rose to prominence as the Chechen rebellion, which began essentially as an ethnic nationalist uprising, assumed a more strongly Islamist character with the second war launched in 1999.

-- Russia considers Umarov a terrorist and its forces have hunted him for years.

GOALS

-- Umarov has declared the goals of the Caucasus jihadis to be twofold: first, to expel non-Muslims and implement sharia law, second to expand the jihad beyond the Caucasus -- a danger that would clearly trouble Moscow. Russia has large Muslim populations in the petrochemicals area of Bashkortostan and the oil-producing region of Tatarstan.

METHODS

-- Rebel websites say Umarov leads small units of 10 to 12 men each operating in the Chechen mountains and waging guerrilla warfare against Russian special forces.

-- Umarov vowed last month to take the war to Russian cities and hit economic targets, which could include oil pipelines.

"Blood will no longer be limited to our (Caucasus) cities and towns. The war is coming to their cities," he said in an interview on the unofficial Islamist website www.kavkazcenter.com.

-- Umarov's group has claimed responsibility for bombing a train between Moscow and St Petersburg that killed 26 people last November, and a suicide bomb attack in June which left the leader of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, fighting for his life.

It also claimed responsibility for a Siberian dam disaster that killed 75 in August. Russian authorities blamed it on a technical failure.

ORIGINS

-- Umarov was born in April 1964 in the village of Kharsenoi in southern Chechnya, graduating from the construction faculty of the Oil Institute in Grozny. He fought in both Chechen wars in the 1990s against Russian security forces.

* HISTORICAL BACKGROUND:

-- The rebellion by Chechens inhabiting the northern slopes of the Caucasus mountains began in the 1990s as a largely ethnic nationalist movement, fired by a sense of injustice over the transportation of Chechens to Central Asia, with enormous loss of life, by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the 1940s.

-- Russian leaders declared victory in their battle with the Chechen separatists who fought two wars with Moscow. While violence subsided in Chechnya, it spread and intensified in neighboring Dagestan and Ingushetia, where clan rivalries overlap with criminal gangs and Islamist militancy.

-- Russian and pro-Moscow Chechen politicians said that many commanders in the region had been killed by 2007 and the losses had broken the back of the resistance, reducing its strength to a few hundred men. Resistance websites, however, told a different story.

Sources: Reuters/jamestown Foundation/here

(Writing by David Cutler, Editorial Reference Unit in London; Editing by Ralph Boulton)