Paul Goble
Staunton, Jan. 24 – Ingushetia’s Batal-Haji Sufi order is too large and too well-connected for Moscow to proceed against its members in the way it has done with other Islamic groups the Putin regime views as supportive of or otherwise connected to terrorist acts such as the killing of senior officials, Islam Kartoyev says.
When the FSB wants to come down hard on other Islamic groups, the blogger who himself was once a member of the Batal-Haji order says, it typically arranges to kill them rather than bring them to trial (kavkazr.com/a/novye-glavnye-terroristy-bratstvo-batalhadzhintsev-iz-ingushetii-i-ubiystvo-generala-kirillova/33287519.html).
But when the Batal-Haji order is involved, even the FSB has to proceed with caution because the order is too large, too rich and too well-connected even for Putin’s secret police to do otherwise, an indication of just how tenuous and weak Moscow’s rule in Ingushetia and even neighboring republics has become.
According to Kartoyev, the membership of the order is between 15,000 and 20,000, and each of these is required to hand over to the leadership 10 percent of all income. “Among the members of the sect,” he continues, “are major businessmen, heads of industrial enterprises and so on.”
That gives the leadership of the Batal-Haji enormous financial power, and it uses that to buy off police and security officials and to ensure that its members are treated well by the authorities, something few other social groups are in a position to do, Kartoyev reports on the basis of his personal experience.
And that is effective in staying the hand of the authorities even when the victim of the crime is a highly placed official. The powers that be may still go after those involved but it won’t kill them and will likely treat them better in confinement than would be the case with those not members of such a group.
One reason the authorities do so, Kartoyev continues, is that they know that even if they jail a significant number of Batal-Haji members, an even larger number of the followers of this Sufi order will remain free and ready to act on the orders of their leaders against the police or the FSB.
That is a manifestation of real power, the kind that has led others to suggest that in Ingushetia at least, this Sufi order is now “a state within a state” and not some marginal group the Putin regime can do with whatever it likes (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/12/batal-haji-sufi-order-in-ingushetia-new.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/11/moscow-attacks-ingushetias-batal-haji.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/12/kadyrov-raising-military-unit-based-on.html).
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
Moscow Authorities Forced to Proceed Cautiously against Batal-Haji Sufi Order Because of Its Strength, Observer Says
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