Dagestan fertile ISIS ground
Russia fears return of fighters to province from Syrian war
MAKHACHKALA, Russia — The Russian province of Dagestan has been a starting point for hundreds of fighters seeking to join the Islamic State in Syria, and now Russian leaders say they fear some are returning home with experience gained from the battlefield.
The departures mean that the region in the North Caucasus has become markedly less violent recently with fewer bombings and shootings. And the returning fighters have either landed in jail or been kept under close police surveillance. But there are long-term concerns that the presence of radical Muslims trained in Islamic State warfare could lead to greater instability and violence.
Eduard Urazayev, a former minister in Dagestan’s provincial government who now works as a political analyst, said that poverty and unemployment in the region made the Islamic State recruiters’ job easier.
“If the high level of corruption and unfavorable socioeconomic situation remain,” Urazayev said, “it may further fuel protest sentiments and increase sympathy for the [Islamic State].”
The Islamist insurgency that has swept the North Caucasus after two separatist wars in Chechnya has a proclaimed goal of carving out an independent state governed by Shariah law. The Caucasus Emirate, an umbrella group composed of rebels in several Caucasus provinces, has sworn allegiance to the Islamic State.
Alexei Malashenko, an expert on Islam with the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow office, said that officials in the Caucasus had an interest in encouraging the militants to move out of the region.
“A drop in the Islamists’ activity and the reduction in the number of casualties in the North Caucasus in 2014-2015 were the result of militants leaving for the Middle East,” Malashenko wrote in a recent article.
Officials said they were keeping close watch on those
who return. Dagestan authorities have tried to register all followers of Salafism, a radical branch of Sunni Islam, taking their fingerprints and DNA samples.
Sharaputdin Arslanbekov, a police official in Makhachkala in charge of fighting extremism, said the official number of Dagestan residents who have left for Syria stands at 419, but reliable intelligence indicates that the actual figure is closer to 700, a large share of an estimated 2,500 Russian citizens with the Islamic State, also know by the acronym ISIS.
Arslanbekov said Islamic State recruiters were working actively in universities and schools, taking advantage of economic and social problems in the region. “The recruiters are quite sly and well-prepared, they know methods of ideological indoctrination and are good psychologists,” he said.
Police captured five former Islamic State members and killed three others, he said, adding that nine of those who fought alongside the Islamic State in Syria have voluntarily surrendered after returning home.
Gazimagomed Aligadzhiyev, a native of the mountainous village of Gimry, a key center of Salafism in Dagestan, was one of those who left for Syria and spent three months at an Islamic State training camp in Syria before he decided to return home. Upon return, he joined a militant group but eventually got sick of hiding and surrendered to the authorities.
“We only went out at night, as they could spot us in daytime. I haven’t seen sunlight since December,” he told Russian state television.
Even though some officials in the Caucasus may feel relief about militants fleeing to Syria, the Kremlin has voiced strong concern about the potential threat the militants could pose upon return.
President Vladimir Putin has described the Islamic State threat to Russia as a key factor behind his decision to launch airstrikes on militants in Syria. He said that between 5,000 and 7,000 people from Russia and other former Soviet countries are now fighting alongside Islamic State militants.
Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the main KGB successor agency, said recently that under the brunt of Russian airstrikes, some militants were trying to leave the war in Syria with a goal to conduct terrorist attacks in Russia, Europe and elsewhere.
A few weeks ago, the Federal Security Service arrested a group of people, including some trained by the Islamic State in Syria, that it accused of plotting a terrorist attack on Moscow’s public transport system. It also found a homemade bomb loaded with 11 pounds of explosives.
The Islamic State has been active on social networks across Russia and other ex-Soviet nations in search of new recruits, focusing primarily on young people.
Along with the poor and the desperate, the Islamic State has caught up some members of the middle class . A second-year student of the elite Moscow State University, who studied Arabic and developed an interest in Islam, left to join the Islamic State but was detained on Turkey’s border with Syria a few days later after her father raised the alarm.
Most imams in Dagestan shun radical views, but they have found it hard to counter the appeal of radical ideas promoted by the Islamic State. Some imams who spoke against radical Islam have been killed.
Muhammad-Haji, an imam in Makhachkala, who spoke using a pseudonym because he feared Islamist revenge, said many young people fell under the spell of the extremist ideas, and he found it hard to persuade them to change their views.