A New Islamist Underground Emerging in North Caucasus, One Far More Violent than Its Predecessor, Dubnov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 1 – A new and more radical Islamist underground is emerging in the North Caucasus, one far less secular, far more informed by Islamist practice in the Middle East, and far more violent than the one Moscow and republic officials thought they had defeated forever a decade ago, Vadim Dubnov says.

            The specialist on the North Caucasus who works for Radio Liberty says that this becomes clear if one examines carefully the difference between the attack at the Makhachkala airport and the attacks on synagogues and churches in Derbent and the Daghestani capital earlier (theins.ru/opinions/vadim-dubnov/273292).

            The former was a protest against people returning from Israel, but the latter was an attack on all Jews and an anti-colonial action against all Christians as representatives of imperialism as such. The powers that be don’t yet fully appreciate this shift and what it means and are not equipped intellectually or practically to cope with it, Dubnov argues.

            This “new underground is much less involved in clan conflicts and connections with the siloviki and much more religious: at its basis is radical Islam brought in from the countries of the Middle East and supported by preachers locally. To struggle with fanatics prepared to die is much more difficult,” he continues.

            When Moscow suppressed the armed uprising in Chechnya, many in Moscow assumed that it had eliminated the problems it faced across the North Caucasus because Chechnya had been a model for many. But Dagestan, always more religious, has become “the center” of a new underground based on radical Islamism.

            If the former underground felt it could pick and choose those elements of Islam it wanted to follow, the new one consists of people who believe that they must accept all of Islam, not the denatured kind Sovietized and Russian Islam offered but rather the true Islam found among radicals in the Middle East and be prepared to die for it.

            The authorities believed they could defeat the former by fighting corruption and using force to wean away those at the edges of the underground and to a large extent they were right, but fighting this new underground is far more difficult because it is far more ideological and far more ready to die for that ideology. 

            And the authorities also believed, with the support of some sociological studies, that if they promoted the kind of Islam in Dagestan on offer a decade ago, they would win over the younger generation (cyberleninka.ru/article/n/dinamika-religioznosti-gorodskogo-naseleniya-dagestana/viewer), but that approach isn’t working with the new underground.

            This new force wants to demonstrate to the world that it is fully capable of forming its own Islamic state on its own territory and doesn’t need the orders of outsiders to do so. Instead, Dubnov suggests, it will increasingly draw on anti-Semitism and anti-colonialism in Dagestan and elsewhere to achieve its goals. Fighting that will be more difficult than Moscow imagines.