One of the many reasons that the Soviet Union blew up and went bankrupt is that these Republics were part or all Sunni Muslim. This culturally was in contradiction to most of the Russia of today which is primarily Christian except for Chechnya and Dagestan. And we have seen Chechnyan soldiers and Generals join ISIS in fairly great numbers. Now, the ones who have survived are going to return home as ISIS is defeated on the battlefield and as a direct result likely terrorist actions will grow in Russia now just like in the rest of the world at this time. Whether these will appear in the news or not is another story.
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Former Soviet Republics Are Fertile Ground for ISIS Recruiting
| Wall Street Journal | - |
MOSCOW—The
Istanbul airport attack on Tuesday spotlights a major new security
threat as the former republics of the Soviet Union have become a
recruiting pipeline for Islamic State.
- 35
Former Soviet Republics Are Fertile Ground for ISIS Recruiting
Istanbul attackers said to be from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia’s north Caucasus region
ENLARGE
Moscow’s Domodedovo
International Airport was the target of a suicide bombing in 2011.
Muslim insurgents from Russia’s north Caucasus region claimed
responsibility for the attack, which killed 37 people.
Photo:
Agence France-Press/Getty Images
Turkish officials have identified the suicide bombers who attacked Istanbul’s main airport as citizens of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.
While details are still emerging in that attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said as many as 7,000 recruits from Russia and Central Asia have joined the ranks of Islamic State militants in the Middle East.
Observers of regional politics say Russian nationals, particularly from the mostly Muslim North Caucasus region, have been one of the fastest-growing segments of the group’s recruits. They worry that hundreds may have already made their way back to Russia.
“Those who have left to join Islamic State, they’re on their way back,” said Jambulat Ozdoyev, human rights ombudsman for predominantly Muslim Ingushetia in southern Russia. “And when enough are here, we’ll see a return of instability, a return of terrorist acts, perhaps here, perhaps elsewhere.”
ENLARGE
In one recent case, two young men named Adlan and Movsar left their small village in Ingushetia and traveled to Turkey. Like other Russian nationals who go to fight for Islamic State, they were met by traffickers who provided a car to travel across the border with Syria.
The pair were then ferried onward to a camp where other Russian-speaking men from Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia were learning how to train in firearms and bomb making. Local officials corroborated their story.
Reached at his home in his native village, Adlan said: “I was there, that’s all I can say.”
Like most of those who leave to join Islamic State from the North Caucasus, Adlan and Movsar had engaged in discussions on radical Islam online, but had done little more. Others who fight are militants long ago hardened by a regional Islamic insurgency rooted in Chechnya’s separatist wars.
Following the second Chechen war that brought the rebel Muslim region back under Moscow’s control, separatists turned the fight into a regionwide insurgency and pushed the violence into neighboring Ingushetia and Dagestan. The insurgents, who named themselves the Caucasus Emirate, took responsibility for a number of attacks, including the suicide bombing at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport in 2011 that killed 37 people.
Last year, the leaders of the regional insurgency pledged their loyalty publicly to Islamic State, informally establishing links with the terrorist organization.
Adlan and Movsar were able to come back to Russia and serve light sentences, having proven that they hadn’t fought for Islamic State on the battlefield. They told authorities that after a week in Syria, they escaped the training camp, crossed the border back into Turkey and contacted their families to come home.
ENLARGE
Muslim insurgents from
Russia’s north Caucasus region took responsibility for a suicide
bombing, shown here, at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport in 2011, an attack
that killed 37
Photo:
Reuters
After being interrogated by federal and local authorities, the two young men are essentially under house arrest, and consider themselves lucky. Russia has made joining Islamic State a crime, and those found guilty can serve up to 20 years in prison.
Russia’s aggressive approach toward Islamic militancy on its soil—it imprisons most suspected militants who return from Syria and Iraq—has caused many to choose to live in Turkey, in a state of limbo, rather than risk arrest back home.
“There are a number of people who are simply living in Turkey, because they have nowhere else to go,” said Yekaterina Sokirianskaya, the think tank International Crisis Group’s chief analyst on Russia’s North Caucasus.
The chances of some becoming further radicalized in Turkey aren’t clear, though Turkish authorities have arrested numerous Russians fearing they may commit terrorist attacks on Turkish soil.
Turkish authorities in the city of Konya arrested a man in 2013 who went by the nom de guerre Abu Banat. The man gained notoriety for appearing in a video in which he cut the head off a Christian priest in 2013 near the border with Syria in front of a crowd of onlookers.
Turkish authorities last year detained a woman from Dagestan named Kristina Tikhonova, who is still in pretrial detention in Turkey, said an official familiar with her case.
Russia and Turkey regularly shared information on militants until a freeze in ties, which occurred after Turkey shot down one of Russia’s SU-24 bombers along the Syrian border.
The thaw in relations between Mr. Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may provide an opening to boost antiterrorism work. Both leaders emphasized the need to coordinate against terrorism in a telephone conversation Wednesday.
Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.
