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Could ISIS bring Russia and the west together?

The first Chechen war: Grozny. Demoted/Alexander Nemenov. All rights reserved.“The Islamic State (IS) is Russia's main enemy”, the Russian
Foreign Minister Serguei Lavrov has recently declared and, indeed,
the Kremlin has reasons to be worried about them. Out of an estimated 20,000
foreign recruits fighting in Iraq and Syria in the ranks of IS and other
extremist groups, it is believed that 2,200
are Russian nationals.

Russia’s main concern is the impact the rise of these
jihadist groups may have on its domestic Islamist insurgency. For decades, the
North Caucasus region has been prone to political instability and violence, and
Russia has waged two wars in Chechnya since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
After Russia's last military campaign, which lasted throughout the 2000s,
Chechnya has remained relatively calm but the instability spread to the rest of
the mountainous region. During this time, Chechnya’s initially secular national
liberation movement has been transformed by a militant jihadist movement,
strongly influenced by pan-Islamic fundamentalist ideas.

Nowadays, jihadist militants such as the self-proclaimed
“Caucasus Emirate” in the North Caucasus are seeking to establish a
pan-Caucasus state governed under Sharia law. However, the escalation of the
conflict in Syria in recent years has shifted the regional insurgency dynamic
in Russia. In particular, the exodus of hundreds of fighters from the North
Caucasus to Syria to join IS and al-Qaeda’s official local affiliate, the
al-Nusra Front, has led to attacks in the North Caucasus falling to the lowest
levels in years.
Evidence exists that fighters of North Caucasian origin were present in Syria
since 2012. They decided to embark on armed jihad in Syria and gain valuable
battlefield experience which may ultimately have repercussions on the struggle
in the Caucasus on their return. 

At the beginning, all North Caucasian jihadists began their
fight as part of the same group, Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, closely linked
to the al-Nusra Front (the al-Qaeda branch in the area) and led by Omar
al-Shishani, an ethnic Chechen originally from the Pankisi Gorge (Georgia).
Now, they are scattered in several groups: ISIS, the Caucasus Emirate in Syria,
and Junud al Sham, among others.

In their efforts to recruit fighters from Russia, ISIS has
recently launched a Russian-language magazine, Istok,
and created a new Russian-language propaganda channel, Furat
Media. In fact Russian is the third most used language by ISIS in its
propaganda material, after Arabic and English.

Some sources indicate that this exodus of jihadist fighters from the Caucasus
to the Middle East may be actively supported by the Russian secret services
(FSB). It is claimed that they have been providing the necessary foreign
passports to travel there, establishing a so-called “green corridor”. In an
article published recently in Novaya Gazeta, the mayor of a village in Dagestan explained the
following: “In our village there’s a person, a negotiator, who, together with
the FSB, has brought several commanders of the Caucasus Emirate out of the
underground and has sent them abroad to join the jihad. The insurgency here has
been weakened, and that’s a good thing. If they want to fight, let them fight,
but not here”.

Similar claims were made by Abas Makhmudov, a former member of the Islamic
Council of Chechnya and Dagestan, whose son was recently killed in Syria
fighting for the jihad: “What baffles Mr Makhmudov is how his son, who had a
criminal record, obtained the Russian passport needed to travel abroad—even
after he alerted the authorities to his son’s intentions”, he told The
Economist.
Moreover, some notorious Islamic preachers from the region have also
travelled to Syria, encouraging their followers to join extremist groups in the
Middle East. One of them, Nadir Abu Khalid, was under house arrest in Dagestan
when he suddenly popped up in the Middle East pledging allegiance to ISIS. This
strategy to throw off potential terrorists out of a home country and direct
them towards another conflict zone is not a new strategy. According to a CIA
operative who had worked in Central Asia, this is a counterterrorist tactic
that Saudi Arabia itself had used against the USSR: “It’s perfectly conceivable
that the FSB would take their most violent types and say, ‘Yeah, you want your
caliphate? Go set it up in Raqqa.’ The Saudis did this in the ’80s with the
Afghans. It’s sort of tried and true».

Last, but by no means least, the organisational structure and hierarchy of the
Caucasus Emirate has also been substantially altered by the impact of Islamic
State. In 2014 some of its mid-level commanders began to defect to ISIS, a
trend that escalated until June of this year, when the emirs of the four main
Vilayats (provinces) that make up the Caucasus Emirate pledged
allegiance to ISIS leader al-Baghdadi. He accepted these pledges and
appointed a local militant, Abu Muhammad al-Qadri, as Emir of the Caucasus, as
well as establishing a new Vilayat of the Islamic State in the Caucasus
(Vilayat Kavkaz). Since then, the Caucasus Emirate has been restructured and
continues to exist although it has been greatly weakened. Its members coexist
with the Caucasian branch of Islamic State, as competing forces, in the
mountains of the North Caucasus.

Given this scenario, and as occurred during the Chechen wars, Russian
politicians and media outlets are underlining the fact that the Islamist
insurgency in the North Caucasus is instigated by a global, external force.
Depicting the domestic insurgency as exclusively international terrorists
worked well before. For a couple of years after 9/11, there was a solid
US-Russia anti-terrorism cooperation that basically gave the Kremlin a freer
hand in crushing the Chechens. In exchange, Moscow worked with the west in
forcing aside the Taliban from power in Afghanistan.

And now, with Moscow stressing that ISIS is Russia’s main enemy, and taking
into account that the ISIS has a branch in Russian territory, the Kremlin wants
to create an image of Russia as one of the main legitimate forces to lead an
international coalition to fight against ISIS. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin will be in New York, at the
United Nations General Assembly, at the end of September, and possibly Syria
may be one of the main topics to discuss. Mr. Putin might propose a new format
for a broad anti-ISIS coalition in which Russia would have a central role and
Assad would be included. “We really want to form some kind of an international
coalition, therefore we conduct consultations with our US partners,” Putin said,
noting that he spoke about it with President Obama. 

In order to push the west towards this direction, some
evidence shows that now the Kremlin is sending some of its most modern weapons
to Tartus, Russia's base in Syria, in order to have a significant military
foothold in the region to back up Assad's regime and fight ISIS.

In this context, if a new dialogue between Russia and
the US takes place, that could ultimately reset the relations between the west
and Russia, which is, possibly, an objective the Kremlin would like to pursue.
In this respect, as Joanna Paraschuk pointed out in
her blog, it is worth examining how Rossiskaya Gazeta,
one of the Kremlin’s newspapers, described a meeting between the head of FSB,
Aleksandr Bortnikov, with members of 64 countries to discuss the fight against
terrorism: "None of the European and American colleagues recalled the
sanctions against Moscow at the meeting. They all understand that the war
against global terrorism without Russian participation in principle is
impossible."

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