The Rise of Islamist Extremism in Kabardino-Balkariya

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines the expansion of Russia's emerging Chechen-led revolutionary Islamist terrorist network into the central-western North Caucasian republic of Kabardino-Balkariya (the Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria or KBR), which in many ways is the geopolitical and ethnopolitical gateway to the western North Caucasus. The network's expansion into the region demonstrates the ability of Chechen-based Islamism to travel across geography and ethnicity among Russia's Muslims. This article argues for a comprehensive, multicausal explanation of communal mobilization that includes international, institutional, and economic factors in addition to communal-political ones, especially in cases of extremist terrorist groups, such as those in Russia's growing revolutionary Islamist network. It also shows that in Russia, as elsewhere, the international jihadist movement, inspired and funded by al Qaeda, has made some progress in coopting local nationalist movements among Muslim peoples to the Islamist cause. Key words: Chechnya, jihad, Kabardino-Balkariya, Islamism, terrorism ********** Russia's ongoing Chechen war and President Vladimir Putin's antifederalist, antidemocratic recentralizing counterrevolution are leading to the radical re-Islamization of some of Russia's Muslims and the formation of a geographically expansive, ethnically diverse, flexibly organized terrorist Islamist network across Russia, not unlike the al Qaeda model on the international level. If earlier the Islamist network of combat jamaats was limited first to the eastern North Caucasus--Chechnya, then Dagestan and Ingushetiya--it has recently spread to the western North Caucasus, dominated by the Circassian (or Adygei) groups. The emergence of Islamist cells, jamaats, or a full-fledged network node in the KBR, would not only reflect on the jihadist movement's geographical reach, but also on its potential multiethnic, pan-Caucasus and pan-Islamic appeal. The appearance of Islamism in the KBR seems to confirm that frustrated ethnonationalist aspirations under certain conditions can transmogrify into Islamic nationalism or revolutionary Islamist jihadism. The Immediate Causes of Communalism and Islamist Mobilization under Putin Watershed historical turns and processes, such as war, revolution, and other forms of regime transformation, have multiple causes. They are simply too large and multifaceted to be explained by one or two causes. Long-term historical, cultural, and structural causes mix with intermediate and immediate tipping or precipitating causes to produce major events. Putting aside historical (past conflict between the parties) and cultural (tendencies toward authoritarianism, expansion, and violence among the parties) structural causes, there are at least six intermediate and immediate causes of rising communalism (the drive for isolation and self-determination based on ethnic, national, linguistic, religious, or regional identity communities), Islamic nationalism, and Islamist terrorism in Russia. First and foremost, the festering Chechnya quagmire and the penetration of international Islamist terrorists through the Chechen movement are fomenting Islamist mobilization, revolution, and war throughout many Muslim-populated regions of Russia. The ongoing Chechen war is facilitating the international Islamists' deeper infiltration into Russia by justifying radicalism in some Muslims' eyes and extending the influence of Islamists beyond Chechnya. In the new war, both sides have attained an inhumane scale of atrocity. On the Russian side, the indiscriminate use of force at the start of the war was succeeded by more precise, but still often criminal, security sweeps, involving the seizure and murder of many thousands of innocent Chechens. On the Chechen side, there have been small-scale and unprecedented large-scale terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings and hospital and school sieges, targeting innocent citizens, including schoolchildren. …