Opinion The Volgograd warning

Various apologists for extremist Chechen separatism, Islamic radicalism and more recently, Circassian nationalism, have sought to divert attention from the CE’s alliance with al-Qaeda and other groups in the global jihadi revolutionary movement. Their partial though waning success has left a few important details out. The CE is a strongly committed extremist Salafi terrorist group seeking to establish its emirate across not just the north Caucasus, but also Russia and the south Caucasus as a building block of the global caliphate envisaged by the larger movement. Since the October 2007 formation of the CE, its mujahideen have been responsible for more than 2,200 attacks and violent incidents, including 54 suicide bombings. So although the timing and locations of the three Volgograd suicide bombings since October were probably dictated by the upcoming Olympics, they would have occurred anyway, even in the absence of the Games.

The mujahideen must act within the limits of their capacity and Russian counter-terrorism efforts, but their capacity and geographic range are considerable and growing. The CE has networks across at least four republics in Russia’s North Caucasus: Dagestan, which is the CE’s spearhead, carrying out some 65 per cent of all attacks over the last four years; Kabardino-Balkariya; Chechnya; and Ingushetiya. Two bombings in Dagestan went largely unnoticed because of the Volgograd attacks. A CE cell was wiped out in Chegem, Kabardino-Balkariya. The CE’s network in Dagestan, the so-called Dagestan Vilayat (DV), has carried out half of the 36 suicide bombings that have occurred in Russia since 2010, and has specialised in recruiting ethnic Russian converts, including the perpetrators of the October attack and one or both of the December attacks in Volgograd. This tactic is a strong candidate for use by the CE at or during Sochi.

The CE’S DV has also spearheaded efforts to expand its presence at home and abroad. It pledged to attack the Sochi Games even before the city won the right to host them. Perhaps to that end, the DV has been active in recent years in Stavropol — a largely ethnic Russian-populated region in the North Caucasus neighbouring Dagestan, located closer to Sochi than Volgograd, and with a significant minority of various Dagestani ethnic groups. The DV has recruited both Dagestanis and ethnic Russian Islamic converts from Stavropol, who carried out several suicide bombings and were responsible for a failed plot targeting the 2010-11 New Year’s Eve celebrations in Moscow’s Red and Manezh Squares.

Two days before the December 29 Volgograd train station bombing, a bomb detonated near a police station in Pyatigorsk, Stavropol, which killed three civilians. The local police did not designate it a terrorist attack, but began carrying out searches and arrests in a Muslim populated district. Since the new year, “special additional patrols” have been deployed across Stavropol, including a 70-man patrol in Pyatigorsk. More than 700 people were detained in a “counter-terrorist” operation carried out across the region. Perhaps prompted by the Volgograd bombings and with the Olympics approaching, it seems likely that local and higher authorities may have originally sought to hide the terrorist origins of the Pyatigorsk explosion. But this fiction has become impossible to maintain. The Pyatigorsk explosion will, in all likelihood, be categorised as a jihadi attack after the Sochi Games, and the CE’s DV will almost certainly turn out to be responsible.

The CE has affiliates deeper in Russia’s Volga region than Volgograd. Tatarstan and Bashkortostan have experienced a few terrorist and insurgent attacks in recent years by cells that have declared their allegiance to Umarov, the CE and the global jihad. The CE’s DV has also sent cells and hatched plots abroad, including a major plot to begin jihad in Azerbaijan by attacking the 2012 Eurovision music festival and other targets in Baku. In 2011, a DV cell was uncovered in the Czech Republic raising funds and recruits for the CE. Other attacks and uncovered plots inspired or perpetrated by the CE have been uncovered in Denmark in 2009, in Belgium and Germany in 2010, in Spain in 2012 and in Boston last year.

The uptick in CE activity suggests preparations for an attack to coincide with the Sochi Games. At the same time, there are now hundreds of CE mujahideen and perhaps thousands of other North Caucasus, Tatar and other Russian mujahideen fighting under the flag of al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the Syrian civil war and the Islamic State of Iraq. CE-affiliated mujahideen, whose Syrian ventures were initially financed by Umarov, have reached the top ranks of the ISIS and other jihadi groups fighting in Syria.

Therefore, the greatest potential threat to Sochi, though one less likely to be realised, is an attack perpetrated by the CE and/ or its allies using chemical weapons acquired in Syria. Chemical weapons acquisition could be the main reason for Umarov’s support for the exodus of CE mujahideen to Syria when they are badly needed on his front. So the next time you hear about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “neocolonial war in Chechnya”, “Chechen separatism” or “Chechen nationalism”, remember that Chechen fighters are yet but a small part of the CE, and that neither Chechens nor any other ethno-nationalism have anything to do with the attacks in the North Caucasus. Any attack before, during, after, or in protest of the Sochi Games inside Russia or elsewhere will be a jihadi one carried out by CE (likely the CE-DV) mujahideen or their allies in the global jihadi revolutionary alliance.

Hahn, senior associate at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC, is author of ‘Russia’s Islamic Threat’