Alpha was active during the Second Chechen War that began in 1999, as well as the subsequent Insurgency in the North Caucasus. During the 2000 Battle of Komsomolskoye, Alpha snipers attached to Vladimir Shamanov's Western Group of federal forces, were deployed in an attempt to suppress Ruslan Gelayev's snipers in the village. According to the unit's veterans, operations in which Alpha took part led to the arrest of Chechen commander Salman Raduyev in 2000, the killing of Chechen commander Arbi Barayev in 2001, the killing of Chechen separatist President Aslan Maskhadov in 2005, and the killing of foreign militant leader Abu Hafs in Dagestan in 2006. Following the transfer of responsibility for operations in Chechnya from the Ministry of Defence to the FSB in January 2001, and prior to the "Chechenization" policy that began in 2003, Alpha members (along with the other Russian personnel and pro-Moscow Chechen militia) participated in at least 10 mixed "combined special groups" (, SSGs), considered death squads by human rights groups and outside observers. It is believed that the SSGs were behind many of the numerous "name/address cleansings" ("imeny/adressny zachistki"): usually night-time raids by masked men in unmarked vehicles, targeting specific active or former rebel combatants, their supporters, their relatives, or other civilians for either forced disappearance or outright extrajudicial killing. In 2005, Human Rights Watch declared that the disappearances had reached the scale of a crime against humanity, and that "Russia has the inglorious distinction of being a world leader in enforced disappearances." Chechnya's UFSB also formed a local Alpha unit, believed to be similar in its role to the SSGs.