Akhmed Barakhoev lives in the village of Novy Redant in the Malgobek District, Ingushetia. He is a member of the Ingush National Unity Committee (INUC) and a member of the Council of Teips of the Ingush People.

Akhmed’s father, Osman Barakhoev, was a well-known Muslim theologian in the North Caucasus. Persecuted by the Soviet authorities for his theological work, he miraculously survived during the 1930s. After being forcibly deported to Kazakhstan. He was arrested in 1945 and sentenced to death; he managed to survive in prison and returned to his family after Stalin’s death in 1953. Together with his family, he was allowed to return to his Ingush homeland in 1957.

However, they could not return to their native village of Angusht (Tarskoye) in Prigorodny District, as it already belonged to North Ossetia. So they had to settle in the newly-created village of Novy Redant in the Malgobek District of the Republic of Ingushetia.

As a 16-year-old teenager, Akhmed Barakhoev enrolled in the Faculty of Oriental Languages of Moscow State University. Because of the charges for which he was acquitted, he was not allowed to continue his studies in Moscow but was offered a transfer to the Philological Faculty in North Ossetia. He accepted that offer but soon dropped his study as the new faculty did not offer the study of Arabic. So, he enrolled in the Technical Institute of North Ossetia. Soon he was expelled for taking part in a demonstration for the return of Prigorodny District to Ingushetia, and he changed faculty again, this time to the Almaty Polytechnic Institute (Kazakhstan). By then, both of Akhmed’s parents were no longer alive.

Akhmed returned to Ingushetia in the mid-1980s with a desire to live and work in his homeland. Since the beginning of the reformation period, Barakhoev actively advocated for the return of Prigorodny District to Ingushetia and became an assistant of Musa Darsigov, a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. After living outside Ingushetia for a long time, he returned again in 2008.

In February 2017, he organised a mourning event to mark the anniversary of the Ingush deportation, which led to a series of persecutions by the authorities (cutting off electricity, gas, water, etc.) and even physical attacks (Akhmed’s car was set on fire).

Nevertheless, the following year he played a leading role in the protest movement against the transfer of Ingush lands to Chechnya.

On 4 October 2018, the parliaments of the Chechen Republic and the Ingush Republic ratified the agreement, although a number of deputies of the People's Assembly of Ingushetia announced that the vote had been rigged. On the same day, an indefinite protest rally started in Magas. It lasted until 17 October, when the organisers decided to stop it due to their appeal to the Constitutional Court of Ingushetia (CCI). On 30 October, the CCI found the agreement to be contrary to the republican constitution. But despite this, on 6 December 2018, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation declared the agreement legal. The rallies held were peaceful, but law enforcers dispersed them. As a result, hundreds of rally participants were charged with administrative fines, while dozens of people were criminally prosecuted for violence against law enforcers. Protest leaders who helped to resolve the conflict became the subjects of criminal proceedings.

According to Sergei Davidis, co-chairman of the Memorial Centre, the Ingush Case is one of the most massive and unprecedented political cases in Russian history: ‘Civil society leaders are accused precisely because they are civil society leaders‘.