Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 22 – The Islamist
underground in Daghestan has restructured itself into a collection of conspiratorial
cells but it has not disappeared, despite the fact that the number of terrorist
incidents has declined in recent months, according to officials and experts on
the region with whom the Kavkaz-Uzel news agency has spoken (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/333266/).
Magomed Baachilov, the head of the
Daghestan branch of the Russian National Guard, points to this development as
well as to another: In the past, it was the wives of radicals who left to go the
Middle East; now, he says, the flow consists increasingly of unmarried young
girls, thus creating an additional threat in the future.
Claims earlier this year by
Baachilov and Daghestani interior minister Abduraashid Magomed that the situation
in Daghestan itself is much improved, however, are misleading, according to
Yekaterina Sokiryanskaya, the director of the Center for the Analysis and
Prevention of Conflicts.
“On the one hand,” she says,” he is
right: now there are none of the armed groups which at one time existed in
Daghestan. But this is connected not only with their destruction but also with the
fact that the underground itself has changed its structure and method of
operations.” Now, these people operate in “conspiratorially organized cells.”
They typically consist of people who
from the outside look completely ordinary and carry out ordinary lives but “at
the same time are preparing attacks.” Typically,
their attacks are suicidal, because of the actions of the authorities, but they
are nevertheless important as an indicator of allegiance to radicalism and
opposition to the authorities.
Sokiryanskaya says that she does not
think Daghestan is threatened by the return of a large number of radicals from
Syria and Iraq. The borders are too tightly controlled, and the repressive
measures that Russian officials use against those who do try and are arrested
are sufficient to frighten most people off.
Instead, she says, Daghestanis who
have gone to fight for ISIS are hiding out “in other countries or zones of
military conflict” rather than trying to come back.
Akhmet Yarlykapov, a specialist on
the Caucasus at MGIMO, says that the formerly organized resistance is largely a
thing of the past but there are still “so-called lone wolves” who are prepared
to act on their own and stage terrorist attacks. That means it is far too early to say the
situation in Daghestan is stable.
Dzhoanna Prashchuk, the founder of
the Chechens in Syria project, says that she has very serious doubts that any
unmarried women are leaving Daghestan for the Middle East now. Some did
earlier, but now ISIS does not control much territory; and many women who went
earlier are in prison camps in Kurdish areas.
And Mikhail Roshchin, a scholar at
the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies, says that Daghestanis like Muslims in
other parts of Russia continue to turn to Islamist radicalism because of
official persecution of their faith and because of social problems which if
anything are greater in Muslim regions than anywhere else.
“I would suggest that this sympathy
for the militants is a form of protest.” Some people may believe in ISIS goals,
but far more see that group as one that is at least opposed to the regime under
which they are forced to live. And the
existence of such attitudes means that “new armed groups” can be formed in
Daghestan and elsewhere at any time.
Consequently, the reported decline
in the number of armed incidents in Daghestan from 24 in 2017 to 11 in 2018 is
far from the full story, Roshchin says. They
do not show that “no active underground remains in Daghestan. There may be
fewer incidents than there were, but the size of the underground may be even larger,
now in the form of “sleeper cells.”
One cannot easily predict when such “cells”
will awake and cause a new wave of violence and problems.
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