Russia Aiding in Sending Islamists to Syria

[Boethius]

In today's Daily Beast -

(A) recent investigation conducted by Novaya Gazeta, one of the few independent newspapers left in Russia, complicates (U.S.-Russia) counterterrorist cooperation. Based on extensive fieldwork in one village in the North Caucasus, reporter Elena Milashina has concluded that the “Russian special services have controlled” the flow of jihadists into Syria, where they have lately joined up not only with ISIS but other radical Islamist factions. In other words, Russian officials are adding to the ranks of terrorists which the Russian government has deemed a collective threat to the security and longevity of its dictatorial ally on the Mediterranean, Bashar al-Assad.

It may sound paradoxical—helping the enemy of your friend—but the logic is actually straightforward: Better the terrorists go abroad and fight in Syria than blow things up in Russia. Penetrating and co-opting terrorism also has a long, well-attested history in the annals of Chekist tradecraft.

Milashina makes her case study the village of Novosasitili in Dagestan’s Khasavyurt district. Since 2011, nearly 1 percent of the total population of Novosasitili has gone to Syria—22 out of 2,500 residents. Of that figure, five were killed and five have returned home. But they didn’t leave Russia, a country notoriously difficult to enter and exit, without outside help. The FSB established a “green corridor” to allow them to migrate first to Turkey, and then to Syria. (Russians, including those living in the North Caucasus, can catch any of the daily non-stop flights to Istanbul and visit Turkey without a visa.)

“I know someone who has been at war for 15 years,” Akhyad Abdullaev, head of the village, tells Milashina. “He fought in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now in Syria. He surely cannot live peacefully. If such people go off to war, it’s no loss. In our village there is a person, a negotiator. He, together with the FSB, brought several leaders out of the underground and sent them off abroad on jihad. The underground resistance has been weakened, we’re well off. They want to fight—let them fight, just not here."

Milashina next interviews the “negotiator” Abdullaev mentions. He tells her of his role as an intermediary between the FSB and local militants in arranging the latter’s departure to the Levant. In 2012, for instance, he helped arrange for a man known as the “emir of the northern sector”—a “very dangerous man,” believed by the FSB to have been behind several terrorist bombings—to go to Turkey if he agreed to quit jihadism in Dagestan. The FSB gave the emir a passport and acted as his travel agent. The condition was that he’d deal exclusively with the FSB and not inform any of his confederates of his true sponsor. The emir has since been killed in Syria, but the “negotiator” tells the journalist that he’s subsequently brought another five militants to the FSB who benefited from the same quid pro quo arrangement. “This was in 2012,” he says. “Just before the Syrian path opened up. More precisely, [the FSB] opened it.”

So far the tactic of encouraging hijrah, or jihadist emigration, has appeared to help the Russian government pacify its decades-long insurgency in the North Caucasus. Akhmet Yarlya, a researcher at Moscow State Institute of International Relations’s Center of the Problems of the Caucasus and Regional Security, a group attached to Russia’s Foreign Ministry, has estimated that between two and three thousand Islamic militants have joined ISIS in the Middle East. By all accounts, the result has been great for counterterrorism officials, who are now able to claim direct credit for seeing terrorist violence in the region halve since the Syria crisis kicked off.

Tanya Lokshina, the Russia program director and a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told The Daily Beast that while she can neither confirm nor deny the allegations put forward in Novaya Gazeta, “It is also evident that [Russian] law enforcement and security agencies are proud of the fact that the number of casualties in armed clashes between insurgent forces and security has declined very significantly by some 50 percent. Officials attribute it to the success of the government in fighting the insurgency; in reality, it seems the drop derives from the fact that all the aggressive, competent fighters are no longer fighting in Dagestan but are in Syria as part of ISIS.” . . .

And for all Putin’s bellicose tough-on-terror rhetoric, this displacement actually suits his interests quite nicely. In June, the Caucasus Emirate, the leading radical insurgency in Russia, pledged allegiance to ISIS, giving Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s terror army a nominal affiliate in a major Eurasian country. That fact ought to be terrifying to Moscow. Except that it isn’t. “Russia is very happy about this because it means that it can now blame the local insurgency on ISIS—‘an international group created by the West’—rather than on local problems in the Caucasus,” Paraszczuk said. . .

"The Russian government has several aims and they're mixed together and it's very difficult to say which one applies in any particular case." Paul Goble, an expert on Russia's ethnic minorities . . . told the Daily Beast.  "First, the Russians are not idiots.  They've thoroughly penetrated militant groups in the North Caucasus.  These aren't 'controlled' by Moscow, but they're wholly penetrated.  The easiest way to garner intelligence is to get these militants to Syria posing as freedom fighters.  Second, Moscow is running out of money to buy off the North Caucasus and needs a new way to oppress the opposition there.  Well, the best way to oppress it is to exile it.  Better they should be fighting the U.S.-led coalition in Syria and Iraq than fighting (the) Russian government in Dagestan or Ingushetia. . .

David Satter has written extensively on Russian security organs’ double-game with terrorism and, just before the Sochi Winter Olympics last year, became the first American journalist to be banned from Russia since the end of the Cold War. “No sooner did Chechnya emerge as a quasi-independent state than there appeared Islamists who demanded that the population only submit to the laws of Allah and not to the government,” he said. “This is something people in the West have a very hard time understanding. Russian authorities and particularly the FSB don’t react to acts of terror with the horror that people in the West do. They just see it as one more tactic that can be used by a regime to advance its aims. It can be used against foreigners and it can be used against its own people.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/23/russia-s-playing-a-double-game-with-islamic-terror.html