Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 15 – The Islamic
State has set up a division which is distributing materials in Russian not only
on a website – which the Russian authorities have already blocked -- but also via
Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks – which some of them have removed
-- in order to reach residents of the Russian Federation and other post-Soviet
states.
Nonetheless, much of its content is
getting through both via screenshot and the multitude of personal pages that
various ISIS supporters maintain, thus limiting the impact of the blocking and
removal of such sites and increasing the nervousness of officials in
post-Soviet capitals about these channels.
This is a matter of particular
concern in Russia where many of the Muslims whom ISIS may hope to recruit do
not know Arabic, the language in which most ISIS propaganda appears.
Consequently, such a site or postings on social networks may attract people who
otherwise would not know about the Islamic State’s message.
In today’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” Vladimir
Skosyrev describes how the ISIS Russian language effort came into existence.
The first such materials appeared at the end of 2012 and were directed almost
exclusively at Russian-speaking militants already fighting in Syria. At that time, there were from 2,000 to 4,000
of such people (ng.ru/world/2015-07-15/7_halifat.html).
Many of those, the journalist says,
were recruited by ISIS in Moscow from among gastarbeiters there. They were also
reached by another predecessor site that was founded by Chechen militants in
that country. Headed by Omar ash-Shishani, that site became part of the ISIS
stable when the Chechen declared his allegiance to the Islamic state.
“The main goal” of this ISIS
program, Skosyrev continues, is “to build bridges between the militants in
Syria and Iraq and those residents of the North Caucasus” who may be
sympathetic to it. But a second goal is
to reach Russian speakers from elsewhere in the former Soviet space as well as
ethnic Russians.
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