Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 7 – There are growing
indications that some of the overwhelmingly Sunni majority of Russia’s more
than 20 million Muslims are upset about Vladimir Putin’s support of Bashar Asad’s
Shiite government in Syria and the Kremlin leader’s increasingly close
cooperation with Shiite Iran.
On the one hand, there are
complaints about the fact that the official Muslim hierarchy in Russia has
fallen into line behind the Kremlin on Syria (orda1313.com/2015/10/06/molchanie-yagnyat/), that Putin is
helping the ayatollahs rather than the Sunnis (dsnews.ua/world/kak-putin-pomagaet-ayatollam-05102015152500), and that what Syria
reminds Muslims of the Afghan war which helped trigger the end of the USSR (kavpolit.com/articles/afgan_simptom-20455/).
And on the other, there is growing
evidence that Moscow’s position has allowed the overwhelmingly Sunni Islamic
State to consolidate dominance over militants in the North Caucasus and to
extend its influence deeper into other regions of the Russian Federation (sovsekretno.ru/articles/id/5091/).
These feelings likely have been
exacerbated by what some commentators have suggested is the mounting “anti-Islamic
hysteria,” almost all of whose targets are Sunni rather than Shiia members of
the faith now emanating from Russian officials and the Russian-government
controlled media (nv.ua/opinion/panfilov/antiislamskaja-isterika-kremlja-72619.html).
And they have
been reinforced as well by the opposition of Sunni countries, including Saudi
Arabia, to Putin’s campaign in support of Asad and Tehran, opposition that Muslim
news outlets in Russia are devoting ever more attention to as can be seen at islamio.ru/news/policy/saudovskie_islamskie_deyateli_nelegitimny_obyavlyat_dzhikhad_rossii/.
If Putin is not yet worried about this
development, others in Russia are. Artur Atayev, head of the Caucasus Sector of
the influential Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, says that it appears
that Syria was designed by the West as a trap for Moscow to discredit Russia in
the Muslim world and the Kremlin itself in the eyes of Russia’s Muslims (beregrus.ru/?p=5127).
And today, the editors of “Nezavisimaya
gazeta” argued that the Syrian operation entails “serious risks” for Moscow and
none more serious than the possibility that it will make Russia a target for
jihadists and generate terrorism within the borders of the Russian Federation (ng.ru/editorial/2015-10-07/2_red.html).
As the
Moscow paper’s editors note, “the USSR for a long time played an important role
in the Middle East, and now Moscow is again counting on gaining levers of
influence in the region. However,” they add, “the current military action in
Syria brings with it serious risks.” And they proceed to enumerate them.
First of
all, there is the likelihood that the West will react to Moscow’s moves with
even tougher sanctions or other actions.
Second, Russia may get drawn into a land war as in Afghanistan. And third,
Russia may find itself the target of jihad and thus of terrorism domestically.
Sunni
religious figures in Saudi Arabia have already called for a holy war “against
the government of Syria and its ‘Iranian and Russian protectors,” and no one
should forget that the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan “also led to a declaration
of jihad” against the USSR and that “many current terrorist groups” have their
roots in that earlier conflict.
“But the
most terrible thing of all,” the paper concludes, will be if the terrorists
whom Russia is attacking from the air decide to deliver a response on Russian
territory. A representative of the
Islamic State has already spoken about the creation of a Caucasus branch of the
Islamic State and the possibility of unleashing a holy war in Russia.”
“Moscow,”
“Nezavisimaya gazeta” says, “is seriously concerned about the return of terrorists
from Syria and Iraq, and these fears have a real basis,” especially if those
coming in to the Russian Federation came from there in the first place and find
support for their ideas among Russia’s Muslims on their return.
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