- Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Muhammad bin 'Awad bin Laden, most often mentioned as Osama bin Laden or Usama bin Laden, is a Saudi militant Islamist and is reported to be the founder of the organization called al-Qaeda. He is a member of the wealthy bin Laden family. In conjunction with several other Islamic militant leaders, …
- Che Guevara
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, commonly known as Che Guevara, El Che or just Che was an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary, political figure, and leader of Cuban and internationalist guerrillas. As a young man studying medicine, Guevara traveled rough throughout South America, bringing him into direct contact with the impoverished conditions in which many people lived.
- Fulgencio Batista
General Ruben Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar was the "de facto" military leader of Cuba from 1933 to 1940, and thus the eminence grise of Cuban politics for that period of time, and the "de jure" President of Cuba from 1940 to 1944 after having won election. He then became the country's leader after staging a coup, from 1952 to 1959.
- Zhu De
Zhu De began to read about Marxism and Leninism in Shanghai. In the mid-1920s, he went to Europe, studying at Göttingen University in Germany from 1922 to 1925 at which point he was expelled from the country by the government for his role in a number of student protests. Around this time, he joined the Communist Party. Zhou Enlai was one of his sponsors. In July 1925, he traveled to the Soviet Union to study military affairs.
- Carlos Marighella
Carlos Marighella (5 December, 1911 - 4 November, 1969) was a Brazilian guerrilla revolutionary and Marxist writer. Marighella's most famous contribution to guerilla literature was the Minimanual Of The Urban Guerrilla, consisting of advice on how to disrupt and overthrow authority with an aim to revolution. He also wrote For the Liberation of Brazil. The theories laid out in both books have greatly influenced modern ideological activism.
- Aslan Maskhadov
Aslan Aliyevich Maskhadov was a leader of the separatist movement in the southern Russian republic of Chechnya. He was credited by many with the Chechen victory in the First Chechen War, which allowed for the establishment of the de facto independent Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Maskhadov became President of the nation in January of 1997 with heavy backup from Moscow. Following the start of the Second Chechen War, …
- Nathan Bedford Forrest
Nathaniel Bedford Forrest (July 13, 1821-October 29, 1877) was a Confederate Army general during the American Civil War. Perhaps the most highly regarded cavalry and partisan (guerrilla) leader in the war, Forrest is regarded by many military historians as that conflict's most innovative and successful general. His tactics of mobile warfare are still studied by modern soldiers. Forrest is also one of the war's most controversial figures.
- David Kilcullen
David Kilcullen, Ph.D. (born 1967) is a leading contemporary practitioner and theorist of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. A former Australian Army officer, he left the Army as a Lieutenant Colonel in 2005 and is now a senior civil servant, seconded to the United States State Department. He is currently serving as Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser, Multi-National Force - Iraq, a civilian position on the personal staff of American General David Howell Petraeus.
- Tom Barry
Thomas (Tom) Barry was one of the most prominent guerrilla leaders in the Irish Republican Army during the Irish War of Independence.
- Ethan Allen
Ethan Allen (January 21 1738 – February 12 1789) was an early American revolutionary and guerrilla leader during the era of the Vermont Republic and the New Hampshire Grants. He fought against the settlement of Vermont by the Province of New York, and then for its independence in the American Revolutionary War.
- Régis Debray
Jules Régis Debray is a French intellectual, journalist, government official and professor. He formally engaged in Che Guevara's activities, especially in Bolivia where he was arrested and jailed in 1967. He is today better known for his theorization of mediology, a critical studies of medias, and was a member of the 2003 Stasi Commission, named after Bernard Stasi, which was at the origins of the 2003 French law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools.
- William Quantrill
William Clarke Quantrill (July 31 1837 - June 6 1865), was a Confederate guerrilla leader during the American Civil War.
- Roger Trinquier
Roger Trinquier (March 20 1908 - 1986) was a French army officer with an immense impact on the development of Counter-insurgency theory.
- Joseph Kony
Joseph Kony (b. 1962) is the head of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a guerrilla group that is engaged in a violent campaign to establish a theocratic government in Uganda, reportedly based on the Bible and the Ten Commandments. The LRA, which earned a terrifying reputation for its brutality against the people of northern Uganda, abducted an estimated 20,000 children since its rebellion began in 1987. Norah Anek Oting gave birth to Kony in Odek, …
- John S. Mosby
John Singleton Mosby (December 6 1833 - May 30 1916) also known as the "Gray Ghost," was a Confederate partisan Ranger (a partisan is similar to a guerrilla fighter) in the American Civil War. He was noted for his lightning quick raids and his ability to successfully elude his Union Army pursuers and disappear (like a ghost) with his men, blending in with local farmers and townspeople.
- Farabundo Martí
Agustín Farabundo Martí Rodríguez was a revolutionary in El Salvador. Early on, he worked with Nicaraguan revolutionary leader Augusto César Sandino, although they broke over political disagreements. Farabundo Marti, a communist, with the Socorro Rojo Internacional, led a communist alternative to the Red Cross. In 1932, they helped start a guerrilla revolt of indigenous campesinos.
- Otto Skorzeny
Otto Skorzeny (June 12 1908 – July 6 1975) was an Standartenführer in the German Waffen-SS during World War II. After fighting on the Eastern Front, he is known as the commando leader who rescued Benito Mussolini from imprisonment after his overthrow. He also was the initiator of Operation Greif, for which he was judged after the war: this special operation involved false flag tactics, that is wearing the uniform of the enemy to confuse him and advance into his lines.
- Abd El-Krim
Abd el-Krim (c.1882, Ajdir -February 6, 1963, Cairo) (Amazigh: Mulay Abdelkrim, full name: Muhammad Ibn 'Abd El-Karim El-Khattabi, was the Berber leader of the Rif, a Berber area of northeastern Morocco. He became the leader of a wide scale armed resistance movement against French and Spanish colonial rule in North Africa. His guerilla tactics are known to have inspired Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, and Che Guevara.
- Jorge Briceño
Victor Julio Suárez Rojas aka Jorge Briceño Suárez is a high-ranking member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia a Colombian guerrilla organization. Briceño commands the Eastern Bloc of the FARC-EP and is a member of the FARC Secretariat He is under indictment in the United States for killing three Americans, terrorism and narcotics trafficking activities. The Colombian government also indicted him.
- Wendell Fertig
Wendell Fertig (b.1900 - d.1975) was an American civil engineer in the Philippines, who became a leader of a guerrilla force in the Japanese-occupied Southern Philippine island of Mindanao during World War II. Fertig was commissioned as a Captain (reserve) in the United States Army Corps of Engineers at the outbreak of the Second World War in the Pacific theater (1941).
- Teodoro Petkoff
Teodoro Petkoff Malec is a Venezuelan politician, ex-guerrilla, journalist and economist. One of the most prominent politicians on the left in Venezuela, Petkoff began as a communist but gravitated towards liberalism in the 1990s. He has been a prominent critic of President Hugo Chávez, and was a candidate to run against him in the December 2006 presidential elections, but dropped out of the race in August to support Manuel Rosales.
- Armando Hart
Armando Hart Dávalos is a Cuban politician and a Communist leader. His grandfather was born in Georgia, USA and emigrated to Cuba as a child. Before the revolution which ousted President Fulgencio Batista, Hart studied to be a lawyer at the University of Havana. While there, he became politically active and would soon join Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in their fight against Batista.
- Edmund Charaszkiewicz
Edmund Kalikst Eugeniusz Charaszkiewicz was a Polish military intelligence officer who specialized in clandestine warfare. Between the World Wars, he helped set Poland's interwar borders. Also, for a dozen years before World War II, he coordinated Marshal Józef Piłsudski's Promethean movement, aimed at liberating the non-Russian peoples of the Tsarist Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
- Diponegoro
Pangeran Diponegoro (born Yogyakarta 1785- died Makassar 1855) was a Javanese prince who opposed the Dutch colonial rule. He played an important role in the Java War (1825-1830). In 1830, the Dutch exiled him to Manado. Diponegoro was a prince in the Javanese court of Yogyakarta. In the early 19th century the Javanese nobles were deprived of their right to lease land, which right was taken over by the Dutch colonial authority in order to improve their finances.
- Ramush Haradinaj
Ramush Haradinaj (born 3 July 1968 in the village of Glodjane near Dečani, in Kosovo, Yugoslavia) is a former guerrilla leader and prime minister of Kosovo. He finished High School in Đakovica and graduated from the Faculty of Law in the University of Priština.
- Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider
Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider, better known as Tania or Tania the Guerilla, was a communist revolutionary and spy who played a prominent role in the Cuban government after the Cuban Revolution and in various Latin American revolutionary movements. She was the only woman to fight alongside Bolivian communist rebels under Che Guevara.
- William T. Anderson
William T. Anderson a.k.a "Bloody Bill" (1839-October 26, 1864) was a pro-Confederate guerrilla leader in the American Civil War, known for his brutality towards Union soldiers and pro-Union civilians in Missouri and Kansas.
- Pier Gerlofs Donia
Pier Gerlofs Donia of Kimswerd (1480? - October 28 1520) was a Frisian warrior, pirate, freedom fighter, folk hero and rebel. He is most well known by his Frisian nickname "Grutte Pier" (in the old Frisian spelling "Greate Pier"), or by his Dutch aliases of "Grote Pier" and "Lange Pier", or, in Latin, "Pierius Magnus".
- Archie Clement
Archie Clement a.k.a "Little Arch" (1845-December 13,1866) was a pro-Confederate guerrilla leader in the American Civil War, known for his brutality towards Union soldiers and pro-Union civilians in Missouri.
- Omar Cabezas
Omar Cabezas Lacayo is a Nicaraguan author, revolutionary and politician. He was a commander in the guerrilla war against Somoza, and prominent Sandinista party member. He is perhaps most famous outside of Nicaragua for his book entitled "Fire From the Mountain" (published in Nicaragua as "La montaña es algo mas que una inmensa estepa verde"), which is a personal account of his days as a guerrilla fighting the Somoza dynasty.
- Schafik Handal
Schafik Jorge Handal was a Salvadoran politician. Born in Usulutan, he was the son of Palestinian immigrants.
- Christiaan de Wet
Christiaan Rudolf de Wet (7 October 1854 - 5 February 1922) was a Boer general, rebel leader and politician. He was born on the farm Leeuwkop, in the district of Smithfield in the Boer Republic of the Orange Free State and later resided at Dewetsdorp, the latter which was named after his father, Jacobus Ignatius de Wet. He served in the first Anglo-Boer War of 1880-81 as a Field Cornet, taking part in the Battle of Majuba Mountain, …
- Rolando Masferrer
Rolando Masferrer Rojas, born in Holguín, July 12, 1918, in Oriente province, better known simply as Rolando Masferrer, was a Cuban guerrilla leader, lawyer, congressman, newspaper publisher, member of the Cuban Communist Party and political activist. He was killed in Miami, United States, on October 31 1975.
- Anastasius I I
Flavius Anastasius or Anastasius I was Byzantine emperor from 11 April 491 until his death. He was born at Dyrrhachium not later than 430. At the time of the death of Zeno (491), Anastasius, a palace official ("silentiarius"), held a very high character, and was raised to the throne of the Roman empire of the East, through the choice of Ariadne, Zeno's widow, who married him shortly after his accession.
- Arnaldo Ochoa
Arnaldo Ochoa Sánchez was a prominent Cuban general who was executed after being found guilty of treason by a Cuban court. Ochoa was born in old Oriente area, to a family of farmers. Ever since its creation, he was part of Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement, and by March 1957 he had joined Castro's guerrilla army in the Sierra Maestra, fighting against dictator Fulgencio Batista. Ochoa played a major role in the fall of Santa Clara, …
- Fernando Belaúnde Terry
Fernando Belaúnde Terry was President of Peru for two terms (1963-1968 and 1980-1985). Deposed by a military coup in 1968, he was re-elected in 1980 after twelve years of military rule. During both terms, economic turbulence and the increase of guerrilla activities in the country led to human rights violations by both insurgents and the Peruvian armed forces. Nevertheless, he was admired for his personal integrity and his commitment to the democratic process.
- Guillermo Lora
Guillermo Lora is a Trotskyist leader in Bolivia. Lora has been active in the Revolutionary Workers' Party (POR) since the early 1940s and is its best known leader. Lora became active in the POR when it was building links with the Bolivian labor movement, most notably the Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers (FSTMB). Following the POR's participation in the 1952 "Bolivian National Revolution", …
- Koos de la Rey
Koos de la Rey (Jacobus Herculaas de la Rey) (22 October 1847 - 15 September 1914) was a Boer general during the Second Boer War and is widely regarded as being one of the greatest military leaders during that conflict. He is generally regarded as the most powerful and unyielding of the Boer generals during the Second Boer War and as one of the leading figures of Afrikaner nationalism. As a guerrilla, his tactics proved extremely successful.
- Aris Velouchiotis
Aris Velouchiotis, real name Athanasios (Thanasis) Klaras, was a prominent leader of Ethnikos Laikos Apeleftherotikos Stratos (ELAS), the communist segment of Greek guerrilla resistance during World War II, which was followed by the Greek Civil War.
- Comrade Artemio
Comrade Artemio is the alias of the man believed by many to be the current leader of the Shining Path, a Maoist guerrilla group in Peru. While Artemio's real name is unknown, the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Rospigliosi, has claimed that Artemio has a national identification card under the false name of José Flórez León. As a result of this card, the government has a picture of the face of the man they believe is Artemio.