Russia’s Оther Pipeline: Migration and Radicalization in the North Caucasus

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Russia’s Оther Pipeline: Migration and Radicalization in the North Caucasus

y Denis Sokolov

Today there are more than 2,000 fighters from Russia on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq fighting on behalf of the Islamic State. Russian is estimated to be the second most common language spoken by all foreign ISIS militants.

A large number of these fighters are Muslims originating from the Northern Caucasus, a fact that feeds a narrative back in Russia that has been growing since the 1990s. Many Russians now link the Muslim populations of the North Caucasus with extremism and terrorism. That perception is not entirely without basis: the North Caucasus region has been rent by war, terror, and brutal state crackdowns for over two decades. But the story of the territory is as much about rapid social change as it is about conflict. Russian state policies over the past two decades have done much to build today’s pipeline of radicalized extremists originating from the North Caucasus to spread across Russia and beyond to the battle zones of the Middle East.
When the Soviet Union collapsed 25 years ago, the entire Islamic population south of the post-Soviet space still lived in traditional rural communities. Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, and other territories of the North Caucasus were among the last regions of Russia to urbanize. The urbanization processes that often take generations were compressed here into two short and violent decades.

Interethnic conflict in 1992 in North Ossetia forced thousands of Ingush people out of their homes. The 1994 and 1999 wars in Chechnya displaced hundreds of thousands more people. Once you factor in similar rural to urban migration from the Volga Region, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia, which are still part of a common economic space with Russia, it all adds up to millions of “new urbanites” who have left the rural areas of the former Soviet Union to cities big and small, primarily to Russia.

Read More At: http://www.kennan-russiafile.org/2016/08/29/russias-other-pipeline-migration-and-radicalization-in-the-north-caucasus/