On February 4, the North Caucasian jihadist website Kavkaz-Tsentr published a video featuring the “Islamic Emirate of Caucasus” (IEC) rebel leader, Doku Umarov, in which he said a special operation would be carried out in Moscow. He threatened to “make this year a year of blood and tears” for Russians. Umarov said he had arrived at a base of the Riyadus Salikhiyn brigade before a mujahid was sent on a mission to Russia. Umarov appeared to be sitting beside Amir Khamzat, the chief of Riyadus Salikhiyn, and another person identified as “Mujahid Saifullah,” who was assigned to carry out an unspecified attack in response to the Russian government's actions in the North Caucasus.
BACKGROUND: The next day, most Russian media outlets suggested that Saifullah was the suicide bomber who carried out the January 24 Domodedovo Airport bombing, which left 36 people dead. On February 7, the same website released a video of Umarov in which he clearly claimed responsibility for the attack.
In the Russian media, Saifullah was identified as Magomed Yevloyev, a 20-year-old coming from the Ali-Yurt settlement in the Republic of Ingushetia. Yevloyev is the son of a school teacher and a retired bus driver. He was thrown out of a local college, where he was studying accounting, because of low grades.
Russian authorities were obviously unable to identify the airport bomber from the beginning. In addition to pointing out to Yevloyev, there were at least two other hypotheses regarding the identity of the Domodedovo bomber. The first one initially postulated that the bomber had between 35 and 40 years old, and of European or Arab descent. He was then tentatively identified as Vitaly Razdobudko, a Russian convert to Islam from Pyatigorsk in Stavropol Krai, and a member of the Nogai jamaat or battalion, whose members reportedly come from villages in Stavropol on the border of Dagestan. A second hypothesis came about after the authorities concluded that the first one had been inaccurate. It suggested that Nazir Batyrov, aged 26 and a member of the Dagestani wing of the North Caucasus insurgency, had been responsible. This explanation was later also downplayed in favor of the hypothesis pointing out Yevloyev from Ingushetia.
The confusion displayed by the Russian security services in their attempts to identify the suicide bomber at the Domodedovo Airport indicates that the new generation of North Caucasian insurgents and jihadists are outside their radar.
Although the Russian authorities employed the strategy of targeting insurgent and jihadist leaders during the 1990s, for example in the assassination of the President of the Chechen Republic and leader of the nationalist movement Jokhar Dudayev in 1996, it only became official Russian policy in Chechnya in 2001. This policy was launched as a means for combating the leadership of the Chechen independence movement and jihadists arriving from Arab countries to support the movement and bringing with them extreme religious ideologies. The policy can be traced back to the elimination of Arbi Barayev, Salman Raduyev (who died in captivity under mysterious circumstances), Khattab (assassinated with a poisoned letter), former Chechen interim President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev (who was killed in the Qatari capital Doha), Ruslan Gelayev, Abu al-Walid al-Ghamdi, Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, Abu Hafs al-Urdni, and Shamil Basayev.
IMPLICATIONS: Later, after the Chechen insurgency movement spilled over to the neighboring republics and declared the establishment of the IEC as an umbrella for the North Caucasian armed groups, the Russian policy continued and targeted leaders such as Anzor Astemirov, Emir Magas (who was arrested, but not killed), Said Buryatsky, and others. The result of this policy was the emergence of a new generation of North Caucasian insurgents, the members of which are little known to the Russian security services. The lack of information available on these younger insurgents implies that the present instability in the North Caucasus will likely continue.
As long as grievances among North Caucasian residents persist, the insurgent movement will continue to grow in the region. As the Economist noted, the socio-economic situation in the region, which fuels the insurgency and provides the insurgents with new recruits to the IEC, is related “to the Kremlin’s policies in the mainly Muslim north Caucasus. While Chechnya has been brutally pacified, the region is in a simmering civil war. Republics such as Dagestan and Ingushetia are formally part of the Russian federation, but have long ceased to be treated as such either by Moscow or by their own inhabitants. Corruption and the failure of everyday politics have made governance in the north Caucasus completely ineffective”.
Furthermore, the recent divisions within the IEC between the Chechen nationalist wing and those who want to link the Emirate to wider agendas and expand their attacks in the region and Russia suggest that jihadist ideology is increasingly becoming attractive to younger generations in the above mentioned areas of the North Caucasus.
The previously mentioned dire circumstances explain why the region is generating its own local jihadists such as the Domodedovo Airport suicide bomber. Whether he was a Nogay, Dagestani, or an Ingush, he was linked to the jihadist faction of the IEC. Other examples of locally produced jihadists are Buryatsky, Astemirov, and the two Dagestani female suicide bombers who attacked the Moscow Metro on March 28, 2010. Maryam Sharipova and Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova had no direct connections to Chechnya, suggesting that increasing numbers of insurgents from other areas are influenced and inspired by jihadist ideology, a development which is certainly fuelled by local grievances.
CONCLUSIONS: Commenting on the airport bombing, columnist Fareed Zakaria wrote that “outside the Af-Pak region and Iraq, Islamic terrorism has not been able to strike with great force in recent years. Except in Russia. In fact, one could argue that the Russian government, far more than Osama bin Laden, has managed through its actions over the past two decades to create the largest and most active new centre of Islamic terrorism in the world today”. Zakaria’s assessment could certainly be exaggerated, as al-Qaeda and affiliated groups are in the process of building strongholds and safe havens in various places such as Yemen, Somalia, and of course the Af-Pak region. However, if the current Russian policies in the North Caucasus continue, they run a high risk of confirming Zakaria’s conclusion.
AUTHOR’S BIO: Murad Batal Al-Shishani is a London-based analyst. He holds an M.A degree in Political Science, specializing in Islamic Movements in the Middle East and the North Caucasus. He is author of the book "Islamic Movement in Chechnya and the Chechen-Russian Conflict 1990-2000, Amman 2001 (in Arabic).