Growing extremism

The Russian government is vowing retaliation after suicide bombings ripped through two Moscow metro stations March 29, killing 40 people and injuring more than 80. Authorities quickly announced they were investigating a "North Caucasus trail," and, days later, Dokku Umarov, the leader of the militant underground in the North Caucasus, took responsibility for the bombings. The metro attack is the 16th suicide bombing in Russia since April 2009, when authorities formally declared victory against separatist rebels and ended their decade-long counterterrorism campaign in Chechnya.

While it is a misnomer to refer to the acts of terrorism in Russia that have been organized by militants in the North Caucasus since 2007 as specifically Chechen, the present-day violence does stem from the Chechen nationalist movement. However, it is a movement that has seen its original secular separatist aims - forged amid the collapse of the Soviet Union - undergo an ideological transformation to a more Islamist agenda. This ideological shift took place over time due to external influences, as well as to changes within the Chechen leadership in how it utilized religious ideology to adapt to the changing military environment.

Islam played little if any role in the election of Dzhokhar Dudayev as the first president of Chechnya in 1991. But, within two years, as he faced rising domestic opposition to his regime, Dudayev resorted to consulting with the religiously sanctified Councils of Elders on state matters in order to appease the more traditional elements of Chechen society and thus strengthen popular legitimacy for his government. A year later, in the face of an imminent Russian invasion, Dudayev began consciously adopting the symbolism and rhetoric of political Islam to consolidate the nation - not only by strengthening its citizens' sense of ethnic identity, but by also imbuing them with a strong religious identity to mobilize resistance forces. Dudayev's appeals for a greater role for political Islam were a calculated political tactic, which inadvertently became a critical factor in transforming the resistance from a primarily nationalist secular movement to an increasingly radical Islamist group. Amid the ideological vacuum that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Islamic ideology fused with the distinct ethnic identity in Chechnya and further intensified its people's sense of separation from other groups.

In addition to the internal political dynamic, external factors also contributed to shaping and directing the course of Islamization and radicalization in Chechnya, where historically Islam is a moderate Sunni-Sufi mix. Foreign fighters, mainly from the Muslim world, brought a new form of Islam based on Salafi teachings into Chechnya, along with an agenda for Chechnya to play a larger role in the network of global jihad. Some of these foreigners, such as Ibn al-Khattab - a Saudi guerrilla fighter and financier - gained access to the top leaders of the Chechen resistance movement, enabling them to influence decision-making during the interwar period of 1996-99 and indoctrinate a new generation of young Chechen men.

The interwar period marked the beginning of a process by which older leaders of the nationalist resistance movement were supplanted with more radical elements, mostly backed by the increasingly more militant Chechen youths. The demographic shift in the leadership of the Chechen resistance movement between the first and second Chechen wars led to the espousal of more radical methods, namely the use of suicide bombers. However, the radical religious ideology that influenced the Chechen resistance in the Second Chechen War in 1999 did not supplant the goal of Chechen sovereignty with a desire for a pan-Islamic state on the territory of the North Caucasus until 2007. However, the introduction of suicide bombing as a tactic in Chechnya in 2000 indicated proponents of more radical ideologies now had a stronger influence within the resistance movement and more deadly means of achieving their goals.

The use of terrorist tactics on behalf of the Chechen independence movement was last evidenced in 2004 during the school hostage crisis in Beslan, North Ossetia. The captors submitted a list of demands that included Russian troop withdrawal and Chechen independence, indicating a clear, albeit political, secular motivation behind the terrorist act. The siege ended in three days after a bomb in the school gymnasium detonated, triggering shootings that led to mass confusion. As many as 500 people were killed, including children. The Beslan hostage crisis - unlike the siege of a Dubrovka theater in 2003 - did not prompt mass demonstrations against Russian military operations in Chechnya. Condemnation and outrage over the attack in Beslan was unanimous on the local and national levels. The attack on the school also triggered strong anti-Chechen sentiment in the international community and failed to galvanize support for the Chechen cause, although some analysts suggested Russia's brutal, anti-insurgency campaign fostered terrorism in the North Caucasus.

During the 1994-96 war, the Russian military resorted to indiscriminate carpet-bombing of Chechen cities, killing thousands of civilians in the first weeks of the conflict. Furthermore, this period was marked by the introduction of zachistki, or "mop up operations," in which Russian forces would torture and kill anyone suspected of having connections to separatists. Eventually, the Russian military campaign to "fight terrorism" with zachistki led to a cycle of reprisals and unrestrained violence - further fueling radicalism across the region. In 2007, Chechen rebel leader Dokku Umarov announced the establishment of the Caucasus Emirate - an Islamic state under Shariah law - which would include the entire territory of the Muslim North Caucasus, thus re-casting what was initially a secular, political movement as a jihadi cause. Islamic extremism, the product of the two Chechen wars, grew more potent in other republics of the North Caucasus as fewer continued to support fighting for Chechen independence while many Islamist radical groups in the region claimed allegiance to Caucasus-wide, Islamic militant formations.

The use of suicide bombers returned to Chechnya last year, within a month of the Kremlin announcing the end of its counterterrorism operations. Furthermore, the pool of new, rebel recruits in the North Caucasus seems inexhaustible. This suggests that a climate of fear and impunity is produced by the widening economic gap, ongoing human rights violations that remain uninvestigated and proclamations of social justice within the framework of the Shariah legal system that militants propagate (and which remain appealing to a segment of the population with pervasive corruption).

Umarov claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings in the Moscow metro as retaliation for the Russian security services killing civilians during special operations on the border of Chechnya and Ingushetia in February. To undermine militant activity and eradicate terrorism in the North Caucasus, the Russian government needs to fight for the hearts and minds of the people in the North Caucasus. The Kremlin can do this by toughening its anti-corruption policies in the region and by addressing the human rights violations that continue to fuel radicalism.

- The author is a program officer with the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus at Freedom House. She is based in Washington, D.C.

Ella Asoyan can be reached at
features@praguepost.com