It is necessary to understand why people are fighting for Islamic State

This week the head of the 'North Sector' Dagestani criminal group, Islam Muradov, was killed in the Khasavyurt District of Dagestan. The National Anti-Terrorist Committee believed that he was one of the first militants from Dagestan to join the international terrorist group Islamic State.

Experts have different views on the level of threat the group poses to Russia.

Stanislav Ivanov, Senior Researcher of the IMEMO Center for International Security, says that ISIS is 30-40 thousand ‘thugs’, or as we call them, jihadists, that without honor, without conscience, have engaged in obscurantism, destroying people, trying to restore the Shariah of the 7th century, there can be no justification for these actions. But at the same time, there is a 10-12 million population of Sunni Arabs, who are living in the occupied territories, in the so-called 'Islamic Caliphate'. The Islamic jihadists have dispersed among the local population, the war is not in a usual mode; there is no front line. Bombings and air strikes, which have been led by the coalition since the last fall, do not provide the expected results. Instead, they configure the local population against the Americans, against Riyadh, and Doha.”

According to the expert, ISIS has thrived on the contradictions that have been there, perhaps, since the days of 1921, when the mandate of the League of Nations began to cut a map artificially into the wreckage or the ruins of the Ottoman Empire to create these states. In the days of the British Mandate, first the Sunni elite came, which was continued by the appointed king, then by Saddam Hussein. Then they hanged Saddam ‘democratically’, the Shiite power elite arrived. So the spring straightened back,” Ivanov says.

He believes that it is necessary to understand why people go to war. “As announced in March at the international conference on counter-terrorism by the director of the FBI, headquarters for recruiting jihadists have been recorded in 50 states. At the same forum, our director of the FSB, Bortnikov, spoke at the time that about 1700 Russians are recorded fighting in Syria, in Iraq, on the ISIS side. Why is that? What is this phenomenon? Why do people, the same Varvara Karaulova and others, go there, take weapons, fight? Obviously, we should start with this,” the expert states.