Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 3 – Islamist radicals
from the Imamate of the Caucasus and Hizb-ut-Tahrir have stepped up their
activities in Russia’s Far North, recruiting local residents and training them
in the North Caucasus to engage in terrorist acts, according to the head of the
anti-extremist office of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District Interior
Ministry.
The official,
Sergey Savin, recently reported his conclusions to the district’s consultative
council on issues of ethno-confessional relations thereby triggering fears in
that Far North territory and also setting off alarm bells in Moscow because of
concerns that such people might target key economic infrastructure there (www.rosbalt.ru/federal/2012/11/30/1065735.html).
The anti-extremism official told the
council that “this summer a group of ‘new recruits’ from the Gubkin district of
the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District were identified in Daghestan.” These
young people had “joined forces” with the militants there; two were killed, but
two others have disappeared and their whereabouts are unknown.
“One of the residents of Noyabrsk,”
Savin said, “was a student of the Tyumen Medical Academy” before he “adopted
Islam” and “secretly” travelled to the North Caucasus. Savin said his
officers had found his cell number, arranged for his mother to talk to him, and
were thus able to dissuade him from continuing to work with the Islamist
underground.
The anti-extremism official said that despite
this success, officials still face serious problems because “propaganda of
radical Islam is especially actively being conducted in the higher educational
institutions and mosques of Yamal and neighboring regions” and because “members
of ethnic organizations “are taking part” in criminal activities.
According to the Rosbalt.ru report, “Savin
in fact did not say anything new,” but despite the growth of Islamist activity
there, “the authorities have preferred to keep their heads in the sand” and
ignore it.
The news agency said that there are
three groups of “adepts of radical Islam” east of the Urals. First, there are “migrants
from the North Caucasus and Central Asia;” second, “Tatars and Bashkirs who
have fallen under the influence of radical preachers;” and third, “representatives
of peoples who historically have not confessed Islam but have accepted its ‘modernized’
form” as “one of the forms of social
protest.”
There are “relatively few” ethnic
Russian Muslims, but according to writers like Rais Suleymanov, they play a
disproportionate role in “the terrorist underground” and provide “more recruits”
to such bands “than do the Tatars of the Russian Federation.”
Both ethnic Russians and non-Russian
indigenous Siberian peoples, Rosbalt.ru continues, were subjected to intense
atheistic propaganda under the Soviets, but with the collapse of the communist
system, religion became fashionable, all the more so because preachers “promised
the resolution of earthly and spiritual problems to those who turned to the ‘true’
faith.”
Among the most prominent members of
Russia’s northern and Siberian peoples who turned to radical Islam were Said the
Buryat (Aleksandr Tikhomirov), Dmitry Danilov (Denisov), an Islamist radical “who
was killed in Daghestan in the summer of 2010,” anda third who was known in the
North Caucasus simply as “the Yakut.”
“The dissemination of radical
religiosity in Siberia would have been impossible,” Rosbalt.ru suggests, “if
the preachers did not have a well arranged organizational structure and thus
were not always forced to act in the underground” and if it were always clear
where “traditional Islam ends and radical Islam begins.”
Savin told Yamalo-Nenets council
that he sees the solution in educating more leaders of “traditional Islam who
would then be able to oppose the ideological advance of the extremist religious
trends” and that there should be an effort to “attract to work in the mosuqes
young, educated and spiritually strong religious leaders.”
Other students of this subject are
less sure that Savin’s recommended course will work. Speaking at a Salekhard
conference last month, Aleksey Grishin, a sociologist, said that the real
threat of Islamism had arisen because of “the uncontrolled growth in the number
of muftiates” – there are now “more than 80” in the Russian Federation.
In Sibria itself, there are a
variety of Muslim spiritual directorates (MSDs), among them the MSD of Siberia
and the MSD of Asiatic Russia, whose leader Nagifulla Ashirov often expressed
his sympathies for the Taliban and Hizb-ut-Tahrir. One of his colleagues, Damir
Ishmukhamedov, is the author of three books that Moscow has identified as “extremist.”
“The establishment of new spiritual
directorates,” he said, “which are not subordinate to the largest Muslim organizations
allow the extremists to come out officially and prevent traditional Muslims
from effectively cooperating with the state.” Moreover, he said, these
muftiates are used to “legalize” monies these groups collect and “keep them in
Russian banks.”
“Having received official status,”
Grishin continued, such groups even “demand land for mosques and support from
the government.” And they often obtain it because officials responsible for
overseeing religious groups currently have a vested interest in avoiding any
suggestion that the radicals have made gains.
Curiously, Rosbalt.ru observed, the
spread of Islamist radicalism in Siberia has attracted more attention abroad
than in Russia. One French scholar even has noted that Saudi Arabia may see
that development as something that could “weaken the second largest exporter of
oil in the world.”
One Yamal publicist, however, has
been focusing on this issue. Andrey Balandin has suggested that “the Islamists
are organizing a human and economic place des armes inn Russian regions in
advance of a certain ‘X’ hour.” Why aren’t
Russian officials worried about this? Rosbalt.ru asks rhetorically, suggesting
that “perhaps this is because by that date, “they and their families already
will be far away from this godforsaken country.”
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