It is necessary to protect young people from extremism, Sergei Melikov says

By Vestnik Kavkaza

Fighting criminal groups in the North Caucasus demands more than the work of the security services; it requires the involvement of the whole of civic society to protect the most vulnerable part of the population – young people – from influence by extremist organizations, Sergei Melikov, the presidential envoy to the North Caucasus Federal District (NCFD), told Vestnik Kavkaza at a meeting with editors of federal and regional mass media.

“We admit that today the Caucasus still has problems with illegal armed and criminal groups. We state that the largest number of Russian citizens going to the Middle East to participate in military activities are from the Caucasus. We are aware of instances where the Caucasus is attractive for neophytes, radical Islamists who later become members of illegal armed groups,” Sergei Melikov said.

“However, certain countermeasures are taken in all these directions; and the security structures are coping with their duties effectively at the moment. At recent sessions of the NAC, the federal control headquarters, and the Security Council, it was stated that the number of terrorist crimes had halved. No terrorist attack has been registered in Dagestan this year, for the first time in the last 10 years. However, we would like to involve our civic society and non-security structures in settlement of the problems,” the envoy noted.

Melikov explains that today the security services have already fulfilled the majority of their functions, and it is time to work at a different level. “Speaking about the fulfillment of goals on prevention of terrorism and extremism, we are relying on the security services; but today criminal groups are not acting directly. To prevent their intensification in the future, we should shut down access to extremist organizations for young people and other social groups. We should develop methods of ideological struggle and education,” the presidential envoy to the NCFD concluded.