Yesterday, the Lefortovo Court of Moscow prolonged the detention of Varvara Karaulova, an MSU student, until March 27th. She is accused of attempting to participate in the terrorist organization Daesh, banned in Russia. Andrei Pashkevich, Chief of Staff of the Head of the Antiterrorist Center of the CIS Member States, says that “the problem of recruitment is not new, because all the organizations that are planning to commit terrorist extremist actions are always in need of new members of the organization, which the competent authorities of our community combat actively. The issue of Daesh intensifies our work. That is, the prevention of the involvement of the citizens of our states in these structures. Because such active information warfare, psychological warfare, enabled terrorist organizations to be formed and their members to be regulated actively.”
According to Pashkevich, there are several ways to counter international terrorist organizations: “There is border security, issues related to counter-propaganda, we are actively engaged in them. Countering the terrorist organizations has involved coordinated search operations of the CIS member states to cut off the supply chain, that is, moving the new members to the war zone and their return.”
Pashkevich urges those who listen to the propaganda appeal and lend themselves to indoctrination to understand that none of the new members of these organizations fall out of sight: “A lot of members of these terrorist organizations die on the battlefield. We are not talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of people. We have constant information about people from the CIS countries who have died in Syria and Iraq. Those people who return, they are already being monitored by the security services, so that even if they try to build a normal peaceful life farther behind them, there will be a trail. Do not spoil the fate of the future. Even with some one-off, so to speak, honest, calm, conscientious participation in a charitable, humanitarian action on the side of a terrorist organization.”
Some of those who returned with the specific goal of continuing the recruiting work also fall under the scrutiny of the special services: “Sooner or later they will face their criminal responsibilities in each state of the Commonwealth,” Pashkevich promised.
