The justification for Moscow’s Syrian adventure is the threat from Islamic State – ISIS – and thus the opportunity to fight them on someone else’s turf. “If we just stood by and let Syria get gobbled up,” said Vladimir Putin, “thousands of people running around there now with Kalashnikovs would end up on our territory, and so we are helping President Assad fight this threat before it reaches our borders.” But how serious is the threat?
On 31 October, three alleged ISIS-affiliated North Caucasus insurgents were arrested in the middle of Nazran, capital of Ingushetia. A week before, a Dagestani fighter with alleged ISIS links was shot resisting arrest in Gimry, accused of a bomb attack on the Irganayskaya hydroelectric power station. And a week before that, a dozen alleged terrorists, including one who was said to have been trained in an ISIS camp, were arrested in Moscow, charged with planning to detonate a bomb on the metro. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, never one to be late to a party, has also claimed three ISIS jihadists were killed by security forces in Grozny.
Quite what one thinks of this depends to a large extent on what one thinks of the Kremlin. To some, Russia is simply and cynically using ISIS as a rationale for a military deployment in Syria meant to shore up an unpleasant regime and force the West to abandon its attempt to keep Moscow in the geopolitical sin-bin. There is more than a little truth in this, but that does not mean that Russia’s rulers and their security apparatus do not have a genuine concern about ISIS.
There appears to have been a steady change in attitudes over the last year. At first, ISIS seemed to be a gift to Moscow, as it drew away young militants from the North Caucasus – precipitating a distinct downturn in terrorist attacks – to Iraq and Syria where, it as confidently assumed, American bombs and drones could do the rest. However, increasingly there is a worry that as Russian citizens begin to return from the battlefield, they not only do so with the guns, experience and allies they picked up there, but they also bring with them a commitment to uniting the various scattered and divided insurgent and jihadist groups into a single command.
Even how many Russian citizens are fighting for ISIS is unclear. In February, Federal Security Service (FSB) director Alexander Bortnikov said 1,700, but now guesstimates – and that is all they can be – put the figure at 2,700 or more. (One of the reasons for confusion is that there are also rebels in Syria drawn from the country’s ethnic Chechen minority, who sometimes get counted as Russian expatriates.) Either way, though, at least some are returning: over a hundred have been arrested back in Russia, according to the FSB, and their presence in recent terrorist incidents is also an alarming indication.
ISIS vs IK
The obvious fear is that they will galvanize the running conflict in the North Caucasus. There is, after all, something of a leadership vacuum within the region. In August, the Caucasus Emirate (IK), which claims (if never actually exercises) overall control over the scattered local jamaats, or insurgent groups, had to admit that it had lost its third leader in less than two years, Emir Magomed Suleimanov (also known as Abu Usman Gimrinsky). Ever since its formation by Doku Umarov in 2007, IK has never been an especially relevant or powerful command structure. The efforts of Suleimanov – a compromise candidate and a Sharia judge rather than a fighting leader – to try and persuade young militants not to travel to Syria and join ISIS sounded pathetic enough even before it became clear just how ineffective they were. With his death, the very future of IK is in doubt.
Meanwhile, increasingly numbers of not just individual fighters but whole jamaats began pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. As a result, he declared the establishment of the new vilayat (province) of the North Caucasus under Rustam Asilderov, a Dagestani who defected to ISIS at the end of 2014. At present, this is just as token a structure as IS, but it marks the serious start of a struggle for the loyalties of the North Caucasus insurgency.
Mindful of the way that the influx of Al-Qaeda funds, fighters and money helped energize and radicalize the Chechen rebellion in the 1990s, turning a nationalist struggle for independence into something much more vicious and expansive, Moscow is inevitably concerned that ISIS could do the same in the wider North Caucasus. Perhaps most serious is the threat that ISIS, with its commitment to structure and state-building, could unite the jamaats, and turn a generalized, low-level insurgency into a full-blown regional insurrection.
But this is, to be honest, a relatively distant prospect. My sense is that while the security agencies appear to have little real penetration of the jamaats – their intelligence seems drawn from communications intercepts and the, ahem, “enhanced interrogation” of those fighters and sympathizers who do end up in the hands – they are still relatively effective at the ABCs of domestic security and counter-insurgency. Of course, their ABC too often comes down to Arbitrariness, Brutality and Corruption. Thus there is the danger that, if Moscow really comes to believe that a serious ISIS threat is metastasizing in the North Caucasus, it will unleash the kind of campaign that will drive more and more locals into the hands of jihadists and other rebels. Will the Kremlin seek Ingush, Dagestani and Kabardin Kadyrovs? A terrifying thought that could see a vicious circle of violence and counter-violence with no obvious way to stop it.
ISIS at home and in the head
Of course, Russia may also be vulnerable to ISIS on its Central Asian flank. Not only is there a real danger of the movement’s penetration of the often-unsteady authoritarianisms of the region, but there is also the huge population of Central Asian migrant workers inside Russia. From laying pavements in Moscow to servicing oil pipelines in the Urals, they are a crucial economic asset, to a considerable extent because of the exploitative conditions under which they are forced to work. No wonder that some have proven susceptible to jihadist ideas. To a considerable extent this has up to now largely been the preserve of Hizb ut-Tahrir, proscribed as a terrorist movement under Russian law since 2003. In fact, Hizb ut-Tahrir in Russia has largely disassociated itself from calls for direct action, but this may change as its leaders begin to worry about being “out-jihaded” by ISIS and its more militant rhetoric. It may itself become a source of terrorism within Russia, or simply be eclipsed by more radical ISIS-linked groups.
After all, following the start of the Russian airstrikes in Syria – even though ironically most did not target ISIS – its spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani called on “Islamic youth everywhere, [to] ignite jihad against the Russians … in their crusaders’ war against Muslims.” The recent arrests may reflect this, or simply be a sign of Moscow’s concerns, and the extent to which ISIS connections really have begun to spread within Russia’s tiny but dangerous jihadist communities.
Of course, here again in many ways the greatest risk is over over-reaction: even Kremlin-friendly Chief Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin, while acknowledging of the spread of jihadism within Russia’s Moslem minority and the “foolishness, utter ignorance” of those seduced by ISIS (especially converts to Islam), is also making increasingly pointed warnings that 12% of the total population should not by judged by the actions of a handful.
As the Syria show drives Donbas off the TV screens – hardly an accident, giving the Kremlin more scope to negotiate a quiet extrication from that particular adventure-turned-quagmire – and as more and more alleged ISIS-related cases are announced, the risk of a social backlash is considerable. Prejudice towards Moslems and Central Asians is hardly unknown within Russian culture, and the more Moscow builds up the scale of the threat to justify its operations in Syria, then the greater the risk that it simply plays to the kind of xenophobic tendencies that have already exploded in the past – such as against Caucasians in Biryulevo in 2013 and Kondopoga in 2006 – and yet which more often manifest themselves in low-level prejudice and discrimination. (Think of all those adverts for apartments just for “slavs” or adverts for services provided by agencies with a “no migrants” policy).
And that, in its own way, also becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, as prejudice breeds anger, and anger opens the door to ISIS and similar parasites of hate. Besides which, it also empowers and excuses Ramzan Kadyrov, the bloody jailer of Chechnya, who is already making his pitch that if he goes, Moscow loses its best weapon against ISIS in the North Caucasus. Here is Russia’s greatest challenge: it has nothing to fear, except fear itself – and the misunderstanding and hatred that can cause.
