After the jihad ‘epidemic,’ a town re-embraces radicals
NOVOSASITLI, RUSSIA— In 2013, a quiet 23-year-old named Ahmed decided to travel to Syria to fight with an Islamist battalion against President Bashar Assad’s government.
Two years later, now a veteran of Syria’s civil war and on parole from a Russian prison, he looks back on that moment with a kind of dazed regret.
“It was a sickness,” said the native of Dagestan, a mostly Muslim region in southern Russia. “It was an epidemic.”
Ahmed is one of at least 20 men to have fought in Syria who came from Novosasitli, a village of 2,000 people in Dagestan where many have embraced Salafism, an ultraconservative form of Sunni Islam that has spread in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
When Russia launched airstrikes in Syria, President Vladimir Putin in part justified the campaign as a pre-emptive strike against thousands of Russian-born militants fighting in Syria who could soon return home to spread terrorism, a fear shared by many western countries.
Ahmed, who spoke on the condition that his last name not be used because he feared reprisals, said he and four other men from Novosasitli were recruited while studying at madrassas, or religious schools, in Egypt and spent several months fighting in northern Syria near the border with Turkey. They were arrested after returning to Russia in March 2014, imprisoned for a year and paroled.
“Almost all the boys have returned, some received their punishments and went to prison, others did not fight at all,” said Akhyad Abdullayev, the village’s 45-year-old administrator. “The boys are living peaceful lives in the village.”
Across Dagestan, many residents have a relative, friend or acquaintance who has left for Syria.
“Everyone here is talking about Syria,” said Abu-Muhammad Aliev, a former journalist and businessman prominent in ultraconservative Muslim circles in Makhachkala, Dagestan’s capital.
Salafi men are angry with police profiling, he said. Work is scarce. When young men get in trouble with the police, they often run. Sometimes they come to him for advice.
“If one wants to go to the Sham, then I will not talk him out of it,” he said, referring to the Levant region stretching from southern Turkey through Syria to Egypt. “But I can try to convince him not to join the Islamic State. Because drown- ing people and burning them alive have nothing to do with sharia law.”
In Novosasitli, the flow of young men to Syria has brought new scrutiny to an old problem.
For nearly a decade, Dagestan and neighbouring regions have endured a low-level insurgency led by radicals hoping to establish an Islamic caliphate, and young men who join the rebels are said to have “gone into the forest.”
Many are killed or remain on the run for years.
Since 2010, Abdullayev, the administrative chief, has moonlighted as a negotiator, seeking to guarantee safe passage for young men in the insurgency to turn themselves in without fear of retribution from the police.
In many ways, religious law has surpassed the Russian government’s authority in Novosasitli. Abdullayev spoke reverently about the town’s “double life” under Communism, when disputes were still quietly settled under religious law. Locals are proud of the village’s strong religious identity. They say there is no alcohol and that religious law has helped reduce crime.
Abdurakhim Magomedov, a Salafi spiritual leader from Novosasitli whose madrassa was shuttered by the government in 2013, believes that “Dagestan must be independent from Russia for us to practice our religion as we should.”
But he was disturbed by the rise of the Islamic State group, he said, and distraught at the death of the village’s youth in Syria.
“They have come back and hopefully this is behind us,” he said.
When he arrived in Syria, it did not take Ahmed long to realize that he was not cut out to be an insurgent. He had never fired a gun, he said, and was nearly killed one night when he stumbled on an enemy checkpoint.
“I had never planned to stay in Syria forever anyway,” he said.
Teachers at the madrassa in Egypt had shown Ahmed and his friends Internet videos of atrocities in Syria and insisted that they travel there to help. “Our plan was to go and see if this was all real.”
He said they had later discussed joining Islamic State, but decided it was too violent and “manipulative.” They returned home two weeks after the end of the Sochi Olympics and were quickly arrested in Dagestan.
Ahmed called his sentence, a year in a Russian prison above the Arctic Circle, illegal. He does not believe he broke the law in Russia by fighting in Syria.
“It was like Guantanamo,” he said of his detention facility, referring to the U.S. prison for enemy combatants in Cuba. But he is lucky to be alive. “Sometimes we joke: ‘Will you go there again?’ ” Abdullayev, the village head, said of those who returned. “And they say, ‘Never.’ ”