Since the beginning of the year, the police of the NCFD have arrested dozens of suspects who were probably participating in military activities in Syria on the side of the terrorist group of Islamic State. The Acting Head pf the Anti-Extremism Center of the Interior Ministry in the NCFD, Eduard Rybintsev, said that the majority of the NCFD natives who left the country for participating in military activities on the side of terrorist organizations have been identified. The probability of their return to the North Caucasus is rather small. According to the Russian Interior Ministry, several thousand Russian citizens are fighting for ISIS.
Adalbi Shkhagoshev, member of the State Duma's international affairs committee, thinks that the current developments in the Middle East are a second attempt to establish a so-called Islamic state: “The first attempt was made in the North Caucasus. There were attacks on cities and the North Caucasus republics, Nalchik, Nazran. The attack on Dagestan, remember, where they wanted to establish a so-called Islamic state. Its name was ‘From Sea to Sea.’ Thousands of militants went to Dagestan. When Khattab came with thousands of his fighters, the underground movement strongly backed as a moral ground was shattered.”
Explaining his last thesis, Shkhagoshev said: “In the 1990s, civic society in the North Caucasus itself did not understand what the federal center wanted. Did it want to preserve the North Caucasus as a part of Russia? Only when Putin came to power in 1999 was it obvious that Moscow wanted to keep the North Caucasus within the Russian Federation, and then those people who came out to defend Dagestan with pitchforks and a federal will saved Dagestan and the entire North Caucasus. This was not enough in Iraq and Syria.”
Shkhagoshev is sure that if people from the North Caucasus, who are fighting for ISIS, come back, the only thing that they will find will be death. The MP also offered the EU free consultations: “There is a radical pyramid being built. And they are biding their time. Just as long as migration flows go there, until these radicals reach there, they will not be there to carry out any particular terrorist acts. We are, of course, not gloating, we still know the nature of terrorism in the Caucasus.”
