The North Caucasus conflict has been among Europe’s deadliest for two decades. Two wars in Chechnya caused tens of thousands of deaths among Chechens and Russian military, but also claimed the lives of Russian civilians beyond Chechnya. The anti-Russian insurgency that emerged in the mid-1990s as part of the Chechen separatist movement transformed into a regional jihad movement by 2007. The Caucasus Emirate (CE) declared by its then leader, Dokku Umarov, loosely associated with al-Qaeda and designated as a terrorist organisation in Russia, the U.S. and European Union (EU), aimed to create a Sharia (Islamic law)-based Islamist state in the...

North Caucasians have fought in Syria since the beginning of the war. According to official figures, 2,900 Russian citizens are in combat there and in Iraq; the actual figure could be much higher, but there is considerable disagreement among the experts.¹³ Up to 5,000 Russian citizens may be fighting in ISIS, according to the director of the Anti-terrorist Centre of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a regional organisation of some of the former Soviet republics.¹⁴ Based on various official sources, some 900 may be Dagestanis, of whom 105 have been killed;15 also, 485 Chechens, of whom 44 have returned...

The Russian Federation’s prosecutor general announced in November 2015 that 650 criminal cases had been opened on participation of Russian citizens in illegal armed formations abroad. According to the FSB head, they concern 1,000 citizens. Additionally, 770 insurgents and their accomplices were arrested and 156 fighters killed in the North Caucasus in 2015, including twenty of the 26 leaders of groups which had sworn allegiance to IS.⁹³ More than 150 returnees from Syria and Iraq were sentenced to prison.⁹⁴ Nonetheless, the outflow of violent jihadists continues, and, experts say, the strongest insurgency leaders who swore loyalty to IS are still...

Alongside the crackdown on local militancy and Salafi dawa (religious mission), another set of factors that has driven the ideological shift in the North Caucasus insurgency from regional to global is related to the nature of IS’s appeal to local radicals. Disentangling the complex motivations is a prerequisite for identifying de-radicalisation strategies and policies for reducing the social tensions that led to emergence of radical movements. This section maps the drivers of local radicals to IS and is based on interviews with North Caucasus Salafis, relatives of fighters, officials and experts, as well as Crisis Group observations.

The security services...

The IS culture, including the socialisation of children and teenagers to violent jihad and the banalisation of suicide-bombings, is producing a generation of young people raised in ultra-radical, extremist ideology who may present a challenge for generations to come. The jihadist camps that freely functioned in Chechnya for over two years between the two wars (1996-1999) produced a new generation that has created cells of jihadists throughout the North Caucasus and contributed to the emergence of the region-wide Caucasus Emirate project.¹⁸⁶ Devising global strategies for countering IS should consider this experience. The analysis of drivers of jihadism in Iraq and...

In 2015, the North Caucasus insurgency underwent a major ideological transformation and rebranded itself as a province of IS. However, “the Caliphate has marked its presence in the Caucasus by silence”.²¹² In 2015, the only known attacks by IS affiliates in the region, all in Dagestan, have been the murder of a village mosque’s imam, the shooting of a fortune teller’s family and the attack on Derbent castle, which killed one and injured eleven at year’s end.²¹³ In February 2016, IS claimed responsibility for a suicide attack in South Dagestan, which killed four and injured eighteen.²¹⁴ New converts to IS...