The Russian Federal Security Service is conducting a major operation on the territory of Russia. It is aimed at revealing the financial and recruiting sources of Islamic State in Syria. In the last two weeks several people suspected of supporting Islamic State in Syria have been arrested in Russia. Operations were carried out in Moscow and Bashkiria.
In the capital six employees of a car service center were arrested. They are suspected of financing IS. In Bashkiria the Security Service is dealing with several cases: residents of the republic have headed not only to Syria to fight, but also to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Sergei Goncharov, the president of the Association of the Alfa Group of Veterans, told Vestnik Kavkaza that even though Russia couldn’t be completely secured from the extremist ideas of Islamic State, we couldn’t expect an epidemic of IS in Russia.
At the same time, Akhmet Yarlykapov, a senior scientist of the Center for Ethnic Political Studies of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the RAS, notes that the inflow of Russian citizens to the Islamic State’s army has decreased at the moment.
