Assuming greater oversight powers. The Kremlin passed the “Law on Combating Extremist Activity” in the aftermath of the September 2004 massacre carried out by Islamic extremists at a children’s school in Beslan. The law granted the Kremlin the power to ban parties from elections if any of its members were found to be engaging in “extremist activities.” 52The Kremlin also enacted counter-terrorism laws that gave it greater police powers. And Putin signed into law new regulations requiring all non-governmental organizations to register with the government and comply with strict scrutiny over their activities. These measures were ostensibly meant to ensure that the organizations were meeting their objectives. But the implementation of these new policies followed a wave of “color revolutions” that had swept over the post-Soviet space (including Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution and Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 Tulip Revolution). They were therefore interpreted as a not-so-subtle expression of the Kremlin’s fears that Western-funded civil society groups would generate similar political upheaval in Russia. 53
Putin’s reforms were radical, but they coincided with sudden resource-based wealth generated by Russia’s booming energy sector and a time of comparative political stability after the turbulent Yeltsin years. As a result, the public largely tolerated Putin’s attempts to consolidate power. 54
But Putin’s reconfiguration shattered the fragile ethnic and social balance of power between Russia’s regions and the so-called “federal center.” Through centralization, the Kremlin left the country’s minorities with no recourse—and no trust in the state. “[B]y dismantling federalism and democracy,” Gordon Hahn noted in 2007, “Putin is destabilizing regional politics, providing an additional opening for ethno-nationalism, radical Islam and Islamist jihadismin Russia.” 55
A DANGEROUS DISTANCE
Hahn’s observation turned out to be predictive. Not all of Russia’s Muslims feel alienated and isolated, of course. But overall, the Kremlin’s inattention to the country’s Muslim minority and that community’s difficult relationship with non-Muslim Russians have produced a deepening ideological distance between Russia’s Muslims and the Russian state. 56
According to Damir-Khazrat Mukhetdinov, deputy chairman of the Muslim Spiritual Directorate of European Russia, the Russian umma(community of believers) is “becoming increasingly polarized and atomized,” and young Russian Muslims are demonstrating a “rejection of Russian society and of the Russian state.” 57This detachment, Mukhetdinov notes, has prompted many Russian Muslims to embrace “ideological concepts that have come to us from abroad.” 58
Chief among these foreign ideological concepts is a virulent strain of radical Islam that, two decades after its introduction into the Russian Federation, now threatens the very integrity of the Russian state.
CHAPTER FOUR
RUSSIA’S HIDDEN WAR
In the morning of January 24, 2011, a twenty-year-old Muslim from the region of Ingushetia named Magomed Yevloyev hitched a ride to Domodedovo, Russia’s busiest airport, located forty minutes south of Moscow. Yevloyev, a member of the Caucasus Emirate, Russia’s most violent Islamist group, had arrived in the Russian capital several days earlier, where he met up with at least two accomplices. In Domodedovo, Yevloyev walked past the international terminal to the facility’s luggage claim area, where he detonated a concealed explosive device containing shrapnel and as much as five pounds of TNT. The blast ripped through the bustling terminal, killing thirty-seven travelers and wounding nearly two hundred others. 1
The suicide bombing, the second major terror incident to hit the Russian capital in less than a year, did more than murder and injure hundreds of people and temporarily bring air traffic in the Russian Federation to a standstill. It also exposed the dirty little secret the Kremlin has worked diligently to hide from the world. Some two decades into Russia’s own version of the “war on terror,” it is no longer possible to ignore the country’s rising Islamist insurgency. Nor is it possible to ignore the fact that the Russian government, which once promised a swift, decisive victory over what it calls “Wahhabism,” seems to have little idea what to do about it.
THE CHECHEN QUAGMIRE
It was not always this way. Two decades ago, the threat posed by Islamic radicalism was still distant to most Russians. True, the collapse of the USSR had unleashed a wave of ethnic separatism on the territory of the former Soviet Union. Over thirteen months, fifteen new countries, six of them majority-Muslim, emerged from the wreckage of the “Evil Empire.” But the number of Muslims within Russia itself decreased as a result, and many of those who remained lacked a clear religious direction or sense of spiritual identity.
If the growth of Islamic radicalism was not an immediate concern, a further breakup of the Russian state was. The successful independence movements in the countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia ignited dreams of similar revolutions in many corners of the Russian Federation. This was particularly true in Russia’s Caucasus republics—the majority-Muslim regions that abutted the newly independent nations of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. These stirrings culminated in the November 1991 declaration of independence by Chechnya’s nationalist leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev.
Dudayev did not initially embrace Islam as the foundation for an independent Chechnya. 2Slowly, however, the Chechen self-determination struggle transformed into an Islamist jihad. This was due in large part to an influx of “Afghan alumni”—foreign (mostly Arab) mujahideenwho previously fought the Soviets in Afghanistan—into the breakaway republic in the early 1990s. 3These forces helped bolster the ranks of the Chechen resistance against Russian troops, but they also served to progressively alter its character. Experts estimate that, soon after, some three hundred “Afghan” Arabs were active in Chechnya and engaged in hostilities there. 4So was an array of other Islamist forces, from Saudi charities to al Qaeda, all of which had an interest in promoting a religious alternative to the Russian state. 5By the time of the signing of the Khasavyurt agreement, which formally ended the First Chechen War in August 1996, Chechen politics had become both Islamized and internationalized—laying the groundwork for future conflict.
Instability followed, as the republic deteriorated into rampant criminality and lawlessness, often caused by local warlords such as Shamil Basayev, who strengthened the Chechen Islamist movement’s ties to international terror and engaged in increasingly brazen acts of domestic terrorism. 6This disorder, in turn, soon spread to neighboring Russian republics. 7