In early April, Azerbaijani authorities carried out a massive crackdown on presumed Jihadi cells in the northern areas of Azerbaijan (Qakh, Zaqatala, Sheki, and Qusar districts) along with Baku and the republic’s two largest cities after the capital city, Ganja and Sumgait. According to official sources, Ministry for National Security troops detained up to 20 members of the infamous Jihadist group “Forest Brothers.” The operation raises questions about the growing appeal of Jihadist ideology in especially Azerbaijan’s north, as well as the forceful measures applied by the authorities to tackle the problem.
BACKGROUND: During the operations, a large amount of illegally owned weapons, ammunition, and literature propagating “Wahhabism,” terrorism, and militant Jihad was discovered. In the course of the detainment of Vuqar Padarov, a Zaqatala-born Salafi and one of the leaders of the unit, an Azerbaijani officer lost his life in a shootout. Most importantly, Azerbaijani authorities have asserted that members of a militant unit were planning a number of terrorist and diversionary attacks in the republic with the aim of “undermining the political stability in the country and causing panic among the population.” Among other things, Jihadists were said to prepare attacks on members of law enforcement units, Shiite shrines and other objects associated with the state and with “heresy.”
This information might have surprised many outsiders. Until recently, sandwiched between Dagestan in the North Caucasus with its ongoing Islamist insurgency and the clerical regime in Iran in the south, Azerbaijan seemed to have remained an island of secularism. Having experienced seven decades of Soviet-imposed state atheism, Azerbaijani society has been considered impervious to manifestations of political, let alone militant, Islam. The roots of Azerbaijani secularism run even deeper to the period of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when Azerbaijani national identity was shaped by local intellectuals whose modernist and anti-clerical sentiments were remarkable for that time.
The increased interest in religion that established itself in the second half of the 1980s in Azerbaijan – as elsewhere in the Soviet Union – nevertheless barely overcame the realm of ethno-cultural identity as it remained focused on symbolic aspects of social life. In the late Soviet and early post-Soviet era, the vast majority of Azerbaijanis identified themselves as Muslims. However, surveys disclosed that only a tiny share, generally less than a quarter of those who considered themselves Muslims, had an even basic understanding of the pillars of Islamic religion. According to a survey conducted in 2000, less than 7 percent of the respondents considered themselves “firm believers”, while only 18 percent claimed to observe salat (namaz), one of the pillars of Muslim faith. Owing to the weak position of Islam in the public sphere in Soviet and Post-Soviet Azerbaijan, even the confessional split played a minor role in Azerbaijani society. Although no statistics exist, two thirds of Azerbaijanis presumably belong to the Shiite branch of Islam, whereas the remainder inhabiting primarily the northern and western areas of the republic identify with Sunni Islam.
IMPLICATIONS: Yet, the situation has changed somewhat over the last decade. First, due to the strengthening of the political regime in Azerbaijan and widespread corruption, clientelism and nepotism as indispensable features, and reduced space for the republic’s political opposition – traditionally a domain of secularist parties – an increasingly high number of Azerbaijanis have turned to religion as a kind of protest ideology. Second, what is often considered “spoiling” of societal morals (a more frivolous behavior of women, alcoholism, drug addiction, homosexuality, gambling, decreasing respect toward the elderly, etc.) centered in Baku and other urban areas has outraged many conservative Azerbaijanis primarily in the rural areas, who have found their path to Islam as a source of counterbalance to the alleged decay of traditional values.
With support from Iran and inhabitants of some rural areas, elements of anti-regime Shiite clergy have emerged in Azerbaijan, which have not shunned from clashing with the authorities over symbolic issues related to religion. This has most notably involved the highly debated issue of headscarves, which were banned in schools by Azerbaijani authorities in 2010. This was particularly obvious during the mass demonstrations held in the village of Nardaran on the Absheron peninsula, a stronghold of radical Shiites, and some other areas of the republic during headscarf-related clashes with police.
A similar evolution has been underway with the country’s Sunni Salafi community, whose adherents have been considered relatively peaceful until recently. First, Salafis in Azerbaijan primarily recruit from the country’s mountainous areas in the north which are predominantly inhabited by Lezgins, Avars and Tsakurs. These are Dagestani ethnicities sharing the Sunni religion with their fellow countrymen from across the Russian-Azerbaijani border, even though the share of ethnic Azerbaijanis among Salafis has also been on the rise. In fact, North Azerbaijani ethnicities have been receptive to the impact of Salafi teaching that has been flourishing in Dagestan since the 1990s and intensifying in recent years as a result of the dramatically growing insurgency in that republic. Moreover, dozens of Azerbaijani citizens of Sunni faith and predominantly – yet not exclusively – of Avar and Lezgin origin have reportedly participated in the North Caucasus insurgency. A prominent example is the case of Ilhar Mollachiyev, a Tsakhur from Northern Azerbaijan who until his death in 2008 was the leader of “Shariat”, the largest Dagestani Jihadist jamaat.
Additionally, for many young Sunnis living in Azerbaijan, Salafism has been seen as a fashionable ideology of protest. Becoming a member of a Salafi jamaat in their eyes equals joining a global Jihadi movement waged in the name of God and with the aim of overthrowing illegitimate regimes and creating an Islamic state based on the principles of divine justice, piety, and welfare. The general resentment of the republic’s pro-regime Shiite clergy, which is viewed as discredited and corrupt, has also contributed a great deal. Importantly, in the agenda of some Azerbaijani Salafis, particularly from the ranks of Lezgins and Avars, irredentist claims have been on the rise as they view it as their task to join the country’s northern mountainous provinces with the Caucasus Emirate in general and Dagestan in particular.
Anti-Azerbaijani sentiments have been growing in the republic’s Lezgin and Avar-populated areas as well, not least due to the growing crackdowns by Azerbaijani authorities against alleged or real “Wahhabis” in local mosques and villages. In anti-Salafi crackdowns, ethnicity often coincides with religion, which deepens the gap between the highlanders and the idea of the Azerbaijani nation. Importantly, local inhabitants have complained about xenophobic overtones which, they allege, frequently accompany police operations in the republic’s north, most lately during the most recent massive mop-ups in northern Azerbaijan in 2010.
Last but not least, Lezgin and Avar areas have historically belonged to the most traditionalist communities in Azerbaijan with partially still prevalent archaic patterns of social organization (tukhums or clans), the principles of customary law (clan or family honor, blood feud) and Islamic religion playing a bigger role in the mountainous north than elsewhere in Azerbaijan. Following the scheme of mobilization familiar from the case of the Dagestani insurgency, “Wahhabis” from among Lezgins, Avars, and North Azerbaijani highlanders are generally more prone to avenge members of law enforcement agencies for injuries and humiliation inflicted on them than in the rest of Azerbaijan.
CONCLUSIONS: Lacking substantial support from external sources and enjoying a very limited popular support from highly secularized or Shiite Azerbaijanis, who generally distance themselves from what they call “radical Islam,” Salafism or its militant form Jihadism, seems to be the easiest task for Azerbaijani authorities to cope with. Yet the potential of Jihadist ideology presents a potential danger to the security and territorial integrity of the Azerbaijani state. This is due to the intersection of religious and ethnic loyalties in the northern areas of Azerbaijan with a strong demographical presence of Dagestani ethnic groups with latent irredentist sentiments. Should the Azerbaijani authorities continue to carry out fierce and indiscriminate “anti-Wahhabi” policies fueled by nationalist sentiments in the republic’s borderland areas with Dagestan, Salafism might turn into an umbrella – a transnational ideology of resistance among Avars, Lezgins, and Tsakhurs linking them even closer to the Dagestani cause, and possibly ensuring support from Dagestan-based insurgents. In this case, Baku might face another territorial conflict with unpredictable consequences.
AUTHOR’S BIO: Dr. Emil Souleimanov is assistant professor at the Department of Russian and East European Studies, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of “Understanding Ethnopolitical Conflict: The Wars in Karabakh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia Reconsidered” (Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming in 2013) and “An Endless War: The Russian-Chechen Conflict in Perspective” (Peter Lang, 2007).