The Internationalisation of the
Russian–Chechen Conﬂict: Myths and Reality
EMIL SOULEIMANOV & ONDREJ DITRYCH
Abstract
The article provides a critical reading of various related discourses, depicting the political motives
behind the conﬂict in Chechnya as a battleﬁeld of the global jihad. These narratives have sought to
present the involvement of external Islamist groups as a major factor in the conﬂict, and to portray
many of the main groups within Chechnya as subscribing to a jihadist ideology. The authors suggest an
alternative narrative focusing on the signiﬁcance of the blood feud in the societies of the North
Caucasus. It is argued that it is necessary to diﬀerentiate between the radicalisation of the resistance as
such and the strengthening of the ideology of jihad. It is concluded that the resistance currently
assumes a supranational character, yet one which is delimited regionally rather than globally.
AT THE PEAK OF THE SECOND CHECHEN WAR, IN 1999, President Vladimir
Putin famously declared: ‘Russia is really standing at the forefront of the war against
international terrorism. And Europe ought to fall on its knees and express its great
thankfulness that we, unfortunately, are ﬁghting it alone’.1
The war was already
portrayed in Russia as an ‘anti-terrorist operation’ more than a year before the 9/11
attacks,2
and indeed, a debate about the internationalisation of the Chechen conﬂict
had been going on ever since the ﬁrst Chechen War of 1994–1996.3
Nonetheless, on the
eve of the Russian invasion of the de facto autonomous Chechnya in the autumn of
1999, the debate became particularly intense. From that time on, it became a powerful
instrument in Moscow’s rhetoric to accentuate the alien nature of the separatist
movement by pointing to its alleged endorsement of the imported ‘Wahhabi’ faith, to
This article is partially based on research carried out by Emil Souleimanov and Ondrej Ditrych on
transnational terrorism as part of the Transnational Terrorism, Security and the Rule of Law (TTSRL)
project funded by the European Commission’s Sixth Framework Programme.
1
Nezavisimaya gazeta, 8 July 2000.
2
Nezavisimaya gazeta, 8 January 2000.
3
By internationalisation, we mean territorial extension of the conﬂict beyond the borders of a nation
state, in this case the Russian Federation. In contrast, we refer to regionalisation as the spread of the
conﬂict within the North Caucasus (see particularly fourth section below).
EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES
Vol. 60, No. 7, September 2008, 1199 – 1222
ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/08/071199-24 ª 2008 University of Glasgow
DOI: 10.1080/09668130802230739
the number of foreign combatants involved in the insurgency, and the ﬁnancial
support channelled from the Middle East by Islamic charities—in other words, to the
alleged internationalisation of the conﬂict. This rhetorical action is an instrument, it is
argued, in the delegitimisation campaign with the objective of facilitating the
representation of Chechen rebels as ‘terrorists’, dehumanising them by pointing to
their ‘otherness’, and portraying the conﬂict as a sequel of a struggle against jihadi
terrorism around the world, thus securing the support for the Kremlin’s policies vis-a`vis
the international public.4
Russia’s enemies in the North Caucasus were no longer
national separatists, which they were predominantly perceived as being during the
First Chechen War, but were now Islamist terrorists—criminals and fanatics who were
interested not in securing freedom for their homeland, but were instead immersed in
the totalitarian ideology of global jihad, striving to establish an Islamic caliphate
following the Salaﬁ pattern, or conducting terrorist acts because of mere sadistic
satisfaction (Khlobustov & Fedorov 2000, pp. 72–97).
The success of this rhetorical action, it is suggested, was facilitated by the post-9/11
paradigm of the ‘war on terror’ which enabled the successful securitisation of Chechen
terrorism vis-a`-vis both the domestic and international publics.5
The purpose of this
article is to critically examine this rhetorical action, and ipso facto the securitisation of
terrorism in the North Caucasus on the grounds of its inclusion under the heading of
the Islamist international (an international movement). In the ﬁrst part, this rhetorical
action and some internal contradictions are discussed, including the paradoxical
representation of the conﬂict as both an internal and external aﬀair. The second part
of the article then oﬀers a critical review of two persistent myths about the conﬂict in
the North Caucasus: ﬁrst that the North Caucasus is a battleﬁeld of global jihad, and
second that the Chechens are members of the global terrorist movement, and a
manifestation of some transcendent and irrational evil. The third part of the article
then proposes an alternative narrative of the radicalisation of the Chechen resistance
movement focusing on the unprecedented spread of a blood feud.
Our intent is not to present a case study validating securitisation theory, which has
received much attention, and critique, in security studies since the 1990s, although we
do accept its basic theoretical assumptions, particularly those related to the ontology
of security.6
Rather, the article seeks to point to the rhetorical manipulation of
material conditions by the actors concerned, including the ‘securitising actor’ (Russia).
This is an element arguably underdeveloped in the traditional formulation of
securitisation theory, which focuses more on the eﬀect of successful securitisation—
namely the acceptance by an audience of the securitising actor’s assumption of
extraordinary powers—than the possible misrepresentation of extrinsic ‘facilitating
conditions’. Based on an analysis of this rhetorical manipulation, it may be suggested
4
In this article the term ‘rhetorical action’ is used in the sense borrowed from Schimmelfennig, that is
‘the strategic use and exchange of arguments based on ideas shared in the environment of the
proponents and intended to persuade the audience and the opponents to accept the proponents’ claims
and act accordingly’ (Schimmelfennig 2003, p. 199).
5
By ‘securitisation’ is meant the framing of a certain issue as an existential threat to the referent of
security and legitimising extraordinary means to tackle the issue (Buzan et al. 1998).
6
These assumptions may be summarised in the proposition that ‘it is by labelling something a
security issue that it becomes one’ (Wæver 2004, p. 13).
1200 EMIL SOULEIMANOV & ONDREJ DITRYCH
that the theory should be reformulated to consider more closely the relation between
power and discourse as examined for example, by Michel Foucault. However, our
argument here is conﬁned to the critical examination of the dominant representations
related to the conﬂict in the North Caucasus and presenting an alternative narrative. It
is assumed that both the critical and the constructive enterprise betray potential to
expand the possibility for political action leading to the resolution of the conﬂict.
Representations of the conﬂict
Ever since the start of the First Chechen War (1994–1996), the Russian government
has attempted to delegitimise the Chechen national liberation cause by depicting the
rebels as ‘bandits’ and ‘Islamists’ (Cornell 2004, p. 267). There has been a qualitative
diﬀerence between the legitimation of the ﬁrst and the second conﬂicts. Whereas the
First Chechen War was enacted de facto by the ‘Decree on Measures for Restoring
Constitutional Law and Order’, the Second Chechen War (1999) was consistently
represented as an ‘anti-terrorist operation’. This illustrates that Chechen rebels have
over time become securitised not as insurgents or bandits, but as ‘terrorists’, whose
cause is not national liberation as they declare, but the unleashing of a global Islamic
jihad on yet one more battleﬁeld (Moore 2007). This rhetorical action by Moscow’s
government seems to have been successful insofar as the portrayal of the Chechen
resistance has been accepted by both domestic and international publics, or at least
those who report the news from the area (the media) or formulate policies vis-a`-vis
Russia; notable exceptions are nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and the civil
societies and governments of a few states around the world.
The immediate pretext of the Russian oﬀensive that started the Second Chechen
War was a series of bombings in residential buildings in Moscow and the Russian
cities of Buynaksk and Volgodonsk during the period of 4–16 September 1999, which
claimed approximately 300 lives. Although the perpetrators have never been identiﬁed,
and senior representatives of the Chechen resistance including Aslan Maskhadov,
Shamil Basayev and Emir Khattab distanced themselves from the attacks, the
government was able to capitalise on the immeasurable fear induced in Russian
society—comparable to the post-9/11 atmosphere in the US—in order to gain support
for a harsh response towards the de facto autonomous Chechen government, and
indeed the Chechen people.7
7
There seems to be some substance in theories about the involvement of Russia’s security service
FSB (Federalnaya sluzhba bezopasnosti, heir to the KGB): for discussion of these theories see
Souleimanov (2007, pp. 153–57). There are no reliable numbers of casualties of the Second Chechen
War, but they run into thousands on both sides. Moreover, frequent human rights violations including
targeting the civilian population, murder, rape and torture committed at the checkpoints and during
infamous zachistka (purge) operations by Russian and pro-Moscow Chechen government forces have
been reported by NGOs such as Memorial or Human Rights Watch. For the latter organisation’s
recent report, see http://hrw.org/backgrounder/eca/chechnya1106/, accessed 10 August 2007. Cornell
speaks of a ‘brutal war against the entire people’ (Cornell 2004, p. 275); in addition, Gall and de Waal
have written of a ‘War against the People’ (Gall & de Waal 1997). Russell cites as many as 200,000
Chechen casualties (a ﬁfth of the Chechen population) and 25,000 dead Russian soldiers in both the
ﬁrst and the second conﬂict (Russell 2005, p. 101).
RUSSIAN–CHECHEN CONFLICT 1201
Among the rhetorical steps taken by the Kremlin, aimed at both domestic and
international publics, was an order to the Russian media to cease using designations
other than ‘terrorists’, such as ‘insurgents’ or ‘rebels’, when referring to the members
of the Chechen resistance movement (Russell 2005, p. 108). They also sought to frame
the insurgence in the North Caucasus as part of the global jihadi struggle (Trenin et al.
2004, p. 79), by pointing out, according to Putin that ‘we are witnessing today the
formation of a fundamentalist international, a sort of arc of instability extending from
the Philippines to Kosovo [and including Chechnya] . . .’ (Russell 2005, p. 109). This is
linked to the above-mentioned portrayal of Russia as the sole champion resisting a
new form of totalitarian and destructive terrorism8
and, in Putin’s messages of
condolence to America after the 9/11 attacks, to a description of Russia as the ﬁrst
victim of the same ruthless enemies: ‘The Russian people understand the American
people better than anyone else, having experienced terrorism ﬁrst-hand’ (Cornell 2004,
p. 268). It was also claimed in pro-government media reports that, following the fall of
the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar themselves
found refuge in the mountains of Chechnya (Williams 2003a, 2003b).
These claims have facilitated the dehumanisation of the Chechen rebels by
detaching their actions from their true goals, and instead portraying them as a part
of a transcendental global contest between the forces of good and evil. Myths about
the internationalisation of the conﬂict have served to reify representation of the
conﬂict as but one battleﬁeld in the universal campaign, instead of as a guerrilla
movement’s resistance, part of which embraced terrorist methods of combat.
Interestingly in this context, Bayev and de Waal point to an internal contradiction
in the Russian administration’s rhetoric, which renders the North Caucasus campaign
both as a chapter in the universal ‘war on terror’, and as Russia’s internal aﬀair in
which no external actors should interfere (Bayev 2003, p. 40; de Waal 2003).
Responses to the rhetorical delegitimisation campaign of the Chechen rebel
movement by the Kremlin have met with various responses from Russian society and
the international public. During the First Chechen War (1994–1996), the Russian
people—of which 70% opposed the war from the start—did not seem to respond to
the delegitimisation campaign favourably (Russell 2005, p. 105). Even after the
Budenovsk (1995) and Kizlyar (1996) incidents, public opinion was not so much
inclined to condemn Chechen ‘terrorists’ as to criticise the Russian security forces’
incapacity to secure peace and order. In 1998, 82% of the Russian people in a public
opinion poll preferred Chechen independence as a means of resolving the, then frozen,
conﬂict (Pain 2000). The decisive turn, however, came after the bombings of
residential buildings in 1999. Despite the lack of evidence pointing to the Chechen
rebels’ complicity, Russian society in general did not question the oﬃcial narrative
about who should be held responsible—53% of them spoke afterwards in favour of air
strikes on Chechen communities (Russell 2005, p. 108; Souleimanov 2007, p. 160).
When the Russian public grew weary of the war in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks,
President Putin kindled their spirit anew by employing rhetoric of the global struggle
against terrorism. In 2002, he did admit that ‘as far as the negative image of Chechens
is concerned, the Chechen people are not to blame for anything . . . our task is to
8
Nezavisimaya gazeta, 8 July 2000.
1202 EMIL SOULEIMANOV & ONDREJ DITRYCH
destroy this image [of them] as terrorists’ (quoted in Russell 2005, p. 111); yet on the
practical level, the Kremlin has continued the delegitimisation campaign and
contributed to the rise of anti-Chechen sentiments and, in a broader sense, xenophobia
against native peoples from the Caucasus.
In general, the trend in international responses has resembled that of Russian society.
The Chechen rebels, assisted by images of horror and destruction caused by Russian
units and air strikes, prevailed in the media battle during the First Chechen War (Russell
2005, p. 105), but they have been losing sympathy since the outbreak of the second
conﬂict. Whereas during the First Chechen War, even when reporting on the Budenovsk
or Kizlyar incidents, foreign media did not tend to speak about terrorism, the Dubrovka
or Beslan sieges were represented as undisputed cases (Russell 2005, p. 102). After the
outbreak of the First Chechen War, Western states and representatives of international
organisations showed restraint in condemning the oﬀensive in order to not irritate
Russia, which was perceived as undergoing a sensitive process of transition to democracy
(Cornell 2003, p. 234). US President Clinton and his then Secretary of State Warren
Christopher even likened the Chechen conﬂict to the American Civil War (1861–1865)—
thus metaphorically legitimising the right of the ‘North’ to regain control of the revolting
‘South’ and prevent dissolution of the Russian Federation. However, as atrocious images
from the North Caucasus started appearing in Western media, the position, at least in
Europe, changed. The Council of Europe suspended Russia’s membership (1995) and the
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) severely criticised
extensive human rights violations in 1996.
The criticism of Russia by leading representatives of Western governments peaked
at the Istanbul Summit of the OSCE in November 1999 and in the following months.
It was at that time, in the autumn of 1999 and the winter of 1999/2000, that the
international public was shocked by the pictures of massive and indiscriminate
artillery and air strikes aimed at the capital city of Grozny and other urban areas
heavily populated by civilians. However, the paradigm of the ‘war on terror’ silenced
Western governments on the issue of the events in the North Caucasus. For the US
government, the decisive turn in rhetoric occurred by the ﬁrst post-9/11 meeting
between President Putin and President Bush in November 2001. Following the
bilateral talks in Ljubljana on 16 June 2001, the latter still mentioned ‘diﬀerences on
Chechnya’.9
By late October 2001, Chancellor Schro¨ der said at the EU–Russia summit
that ‘as regards Chechnya, there will be and must be a more diﬀerentiated evaluation
in world opinion’.10
Thus, Western expressions of concern about human rights
violations and the terrorising of the population by governmental institutions have thus
gradually become the sole domain of NGOs and some sections of the media. Few
notable exceptions include Poland, Denmark and, until recently, the Czech Republic
(Ditrych & Souleimanov 2007). For instance, the then Polish Foreign Minister, Adam
Rotfeld, commented on the killing of Aslan Maskhadov: ‘Not only was it a murder. It
was also a grave political mistake’.11
The Danish government, on the other hand,
9
White House ‘Press Conference Transcript’, 16 June 2001, available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/
news/releases/2001/06/20010618.html, accessed 8 August 2007.
10
Asia Times Online, 28 September 2001.
11
Izvestiya, 9 March 2005.
RUSSIAN–CHECHEN CONFLICT 1203
refused to bend to Moscow’s pressure to extradite Ahmed Zakayev, the Chechen
Foreign Minister, to the Russian Federation in 2002.
Myths and reality
It cannot be denied that to some extent the Chechen resistance movement has been
internationalised, and that this dynamics of internationalisation has contributed to the
radicalisation of some of its segments. In turn, this seems to have aﬀected an increase
in terrorist attacks since the late 1990s and the occasional cherishing of global jihad by
some Chechen rebels. However, it is argued in this section that importing Islamist
ideas, ﬁnancing and human capital (foreign mujahideen) to the North Caucasus,
particularly from the Middle East, has had limited inﬂuence on Chechen resistance.
Rather its nature has been predominantly a national liberation movement with the
limited political aims of recognition and self-rule over a deﬁned territory. To achieve
these aims, conventional warfare tactics and terrorist methods have been used by
various segments of the movement. However, adherence to terrorist ideas could be
interpreted as rather instrumental.
The North Caucasus as a battleﬁeld of global jihad
The representation of the North Caucasus as a battleﬁeld of global jihad appears not
only in Russia’s rhetoric or occasional statements and gestures by Chechen rebels
discussed below. It is also characteristic of Islamist ideologists’ imagination, in which
various regions such as the Balkans, Central Eurasia or East Asia—peripheral in terms
of their location in relation to the Middle East—are portrayed, somewhat
paradoxically, as central landscapes of global jihad (Devji 2005). Moscow’s
government with its construction of the North Caucasus as a battleﬁeld of global
jihad aimed at gaining international support and mitigating criticism by domestic and
international publics thus ironically meets the jihadists and their visionary plans of
universal war with the inﬁdels—hand-in-hand, they continue to withdraw from the
realm of reality.
A man of fertile imagination, chief al-Qaeda ideologist, Ayman al-Zawahiri,
sketched his vision of causal events leading to the victory of global jihad in the
following terms (quoted in Vidino 2005):
The liberation of the Caucasus would constitute a hotbed of jihad . . . and that region would
become the shelter of thousands of Muslim mujahideen from various parts of the Islamic
world, particularly Arab parts. This poses a direct threat to the United States, represented by
the growing support for the jihadist movement everywhere in the Islamic world. If the
Chechens and other Caucasian mujahideen reach the shores of the oil-rich Caspian Sea, the
only thing that will separate them from Afghanistan will be the neutral state of
Turkmenistan. This will form a mujahid Islamic belt to the south of Russia that will be
connected in the east to Pakistan, which is brimming with mujahideen movements in Kashmir.
The belt will be linked to the south with Iran and Turkey that are sympathetic to the Muslims
of Central Asia. This will break the cordon that is struck around the Muslim Caucasus and
allow it to communicate with the Islamic world in general. Furthermore the liberation of the
Muslim Caucasus will lead to the fragmentation of the Russian Federation and will help
1204 EMIL SOULEIMANOV & ONDREJ DITRYCH
escalate the jihad movements that already exist in the republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan,
whose governments get Russian backing against those jihadist movements. The fragmentation
of the Russian Federation on the rock of the fundamentalist movement and at the hands
of the Muslims of the Caucasus and Central Asia will topple a basic ally of the United States
in its battle against the Islamic jihadist reawakening.
Al-Zawahiri continues to provide a realpolitik explanation of the US approach to
the Northern Caucasus:
For this reason the United States chose to begin by crushing the Chechens by providing
Western ﬁnancing for the Russian army so that when this brutal campaign against the
Chechen mujahideen is completed, the campaign can move southwards to Afghanistan either
by the action of former Soviet republics that are US agents or with the participation of US
troops under the guise of combating terrorism, drug traﬃcking, and the claims about
liberating that region’s women. (Quoted in Vidino 2005)
What is interesting about this statement is not so much the (unsubstantiated) claim
about US ﬁnancial support to Russian troops operating in the North Caucasus—at
the time, the US stance was in fact still rather critical towards Russian policies in
Chechnya—or the prescient forecast of US involvement in Central Eurasia in the post-
9/11 period. It is rather the assumption that the importance of the North Caucasus as
a battleﬁeld of global jihad is shared not only by al-Qaeda, but also by its principal
enemy.
Most of all, al-Zawahiri’s train of thought accurately characterises the immodest
hopes and great expectations invested after the First Chechen War (1994–1996)—at
the conclusion of which Chechen rebels were able to negotiate an extensive autonomy
under the provisions of the Khasavyurt agreement—into the ‘Chechen aﬀair’ by many
international jihadists. In 1996, two years before he wrote Global Islamic Front, alZawahiri
tried to visit Chechnya. However, he was detained in Dagestan because of
problems with his passport and served a six-month sentence there before he was
released and deported (his true identity remained concealed to the Russian
authorities). Yet surely it was not al-Zawahiri who discovered Chechnya for the
Middle East’s mujahideen. During the First Chechen War, the North Caucasus already
had became a focus of interest to the internationalist ﬁghters who saw it as an
extension of the struggle in Afghanistan where they had engaged the Soviet Union
with the tacit support of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Saudi Arabia’s
ﬁnancial backing.
The disgruntled and radicalised Middle Eastern youth also found the romanticised
landscape of the North Caucasus appealing, an ideal representation of spiritual refuge
(Devji 2005). Moreover, in the interwar period when considerable attention started to
be focused on Chechnya by jihadists, the North Caucasus was viewed as perhaps the
only place in the world—Bosnia being a case of disappointment—where an original
Islamic polity could be established after the Salaﬁ pattern. The main cause of this
optimism was the temporary absence of any great power (Russian Federation)
involvement, weak secular government, grave socioeconomic conditions resulting
from dissolution of the Soviet Union, the cruel war as a structural variable for popular
radicalisation, and penetrable southern borders. Involvement in such a noble project
RUSSIAN–CHECHEN CONFLICT 1205
as waging global jihad against the inﬁdels in distant lands of—albeit perhaps
religiously confused—Muslim ‘brethren’ furthermore granted one a social prestige and
provided valuable experience and contacts within the emerging global jihadi network.
The critical question to be posed is: to what extent did this appeal of Chechnya in
the eyes of the Salaﬁsts and jihadists from abroad translate into direct or indirect
assistance to the Chechen resistance movement and penetration of radical alien
elements and inclusion of the North Caucasus into the great jihadi design? The
Chechen resistance has indeed been the recipient of material assistance and inﬂow of
‘human capital’ (mujahideen) in the struggle against the enemy which had been
represented by the jihadists as Kisra—a name used in the Qur’an for Persia—a
Zoroastrian, pagan empire (Devji 2005, pp. 83–84). Yet how substantial this
contribution has been and to what extent the North Caucasians have lent ears to
the radical jihadist ideas—and in consequence, transformed their cause from the realm
of the particular (national liberation) to the universal (global jihad)—remains a subject
of careful critical scrutiny.
The presence of Middle Eastern ‘Islamic charities’ in the Chechen Republic was ﬁrst
recorded in 1995 (Baran et al. 2006, p. 29). Benevolence International Foundation,
Islamic Relief Organization, al-Haramein and the Joint Committee for Relief of
Kosovo are all reputed to have been active in the North Caucasus. The Muslim
Brotherhood seems to have been a key source of funding for Emir Khattab’s activities
(Wilhelmsen 2004, p. 41). Some amount of money, according to Russia’s government,
has also been provided by Osama Bin Laden, but radicals in the North Caucasus have
never conﬁrmed the information, and it remains disputed (LaFraniere 2001).
The US State Department estimated that in sum, around $100 million was
channelled to the Chechen resistance from the Middle East (Williams 2003a). The FSB
put the amount at $6 million per month in 2000.12
The method of arriving at these
ﬁgures has, however, not been revealed and given the fact that the North Caucasus’
culture has traditionally been militarised—that is, there has been considerable
circulation of small arms and alternative sources of funding have been available to the
Chechen resistance, notably from Chechen maﬁas operating in the Russian
Federation—this estimate is likely to be much overstated. Under the conditions of
extensive arms proliferation in the post-Soviet area, weaponry and equipment for
improvised explosive devices (IEDs) used in terrorist acts may be considered to be
readily available at reasonable costs. In this context Aslan Maskhadov’s rhetorical
question sounds reasonable: ‘Why do we need weapons from abroad? There are plenty
of weapons here, and much cheaper, too. We do not need military or training from
abroad’.13
Most of the resources may be assumed to have been used for funding the
salaries of Islamist armed ﬁghters—who are not very numerous—and in the interwar
period (1996–1999), for founding mosques and increasing the power of some Chechen
resistance members against the secular leadership. Moreover, not all the channelled
resources should be considered to support military activities of the resistance
movement or the dissemination of Salaﬁ ideas—it is not implausible to assume that
some were aimed at post-conﬂict reconstruction and presented a genuine relief aid.
12
Izvestiya, 26 January 2002.
13
Quoted in LaFraniere (2001).
1206 EMIL SOULEIMANOV & ONDREJ DITRYCH
However, although the extent of external ﬁnancial ﬂow from the Middle East to the
North Caucasus should not be overestimated, it has been signiﬁcant for the Middle
Eastern emissaries of jihad in the North Caucasus such as Emir Khattab and Abu alWalid—leaders
of the ‘Islamic Battalion’ in the North Caucasus—and for factions of
the Chechen resistance which, at least for some time, and for rather instrumental
purposes, adhered to the jihadist credo, such as the network around Shamil Basayev
between 1965 and 2006. The increase in anti-terrorist ﬁnancing policies enacted
around the world after the 9/11 attacks and the coordination of activities in the area of
intelligence services at a supranational level have, however, facilitated unprecedented
supervision of the activities of organisations involved in ﬁnancing global jihad—
resulting for example in the arrest in London of the controversial Muslim cleric, Abu
Hamza al-Masri, who, amongst other activities, had participated in fundraising and
leadership assistance for Chechen separatists. The increased and more eﬀective
surveillance of terrorist ﬁnancing has ‘dealt a hard blow to these Arab ﬁghters, whose
ﬁnancial power was an essential factor in recruitment and politics in Chechnya’ (alShishani
2005). The Chechen rebels who had been receiving foreign funding have
complained about the new unfavourable situation. For example, as Basayev told
reporters in 2004:
I am ashamed of Muslims. During the three years since September 11, nobody at all has
helped us. Everybody is afraid of being associated with ‘terrorists’, and I am not good enough
to ask for help from everyone that can be asked.14
Much has been said and written about the personal involvement in the Chechen
conﬂict of militants from the Middle East—some of whom were mujahideen in
Afghanistan in the 1980s. These include Emir Khattab and Abu al-Walid, Saudi born
veteran mujahideen, adherents of Salaﬁsm and successive commanders of the Special
Purpose Islamic Regiment (SPIR) in the North Caucasus, who facilitated contacts
between the global jihadi network and Chechen rebels, particularly those around
Shamil Basayev. Both of them were killed—the former after being poisoned in
mysterious circumstances in 2002, the latter in 2004. Abu Ahmad al-Azimi, Abu Omar
Muhammad al-Saif and Mahmud Hinnawi were other Salaﬁ militants of Middle
Eastern descent who took part in the North Caucasus war, and ‘Abu Bakr’ was
identiﬁed as a Middle Eastern henchman to the commando leader Movsar Barayev in
the Dubrovka terrorist incident (2002). The Russian government’s assessment that
approximately one third of ‘Chechen’ combatants are in fact mercenaries from the
Middle East completes the reiﬁcation of the representation of the Chechen resistance
as a battleﬁeld of global jihad penetrated by alien personal elements.15
However, while the temporary presence of aliens, even prominent ones, in the North
Caucasus may conﬁrm the attraction of this landscape for those persons as a
14
Globe and Mail, 11 November 2004.
15
Occasionally, the battleﬁeld would be expanded to include Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge as a safe haven
for the Chechen militants and global jihadists in order to exert international pressure on that country.
According to numerous accounts—including formal statements by the Tbilisi government—this
hinterland area inhabited by Kists, an ethnic group related to Chechens, was not under the control of
Georgia’s state authorities from the end of the 1990s until 2003 and indeed served as a haven to both
Chechen guerrillas and some international mujahideen.
RUSSIAN–CHECHEN CONFLICT 1207
battleﬁeld of global jihad, it does not necessarily transform the conﬂict from a national
liberation war to a contest over universalist principles. Moreover, their involvement
has in quantitative terms been rather limited. The total number of Arab Islamist
militants has been estimated at no more than 300 (Williams 2003a; Souleimanov 2007,
p. 285), in contrast to the oﬃcial Russian ﬁgures of between 500 and 700.16
Furthermore, since the operations of global jihad were expanded to include
Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, peripheral areas such as the North Caucasus
and Bosnia have lost most of their former prominence for Arab volunteers, and their
presence and inﬂow have decreased. This inﬂow was in fact already hindered in the
late 1990s when Russian troops began to guard the formerly porous Chechen borders
with Dagestan and Georgia more eﬀectively.
Life has not been easy for Middle Eastern jihadi internationals in any of the
‘peripheral’ battleﬁelds—whether in Afghanistan, Bosnia or the North Caucasus—due
to their diﬀerent appearance, ignorance of local languages and customs, the diﬃculties
in blending with local populations because of traditional social patterns,17
harsh living
conditions and the risk of immediate death. In the North Caucasus, despite
radicalisation due to the continuous state of insecurity and chaos, the lukewarm
reaction to Salaﬁ ideas by the local population—who adhered to the indigenous
version of Islam and were keenly attached to local festive traditions—contributed to a
chasm between the locals and Middle Eastern jihadists. Moreover, the ‘purist’
foreigners were associated with importing many new troubles to the area, such as drug
traﬃcking and the spread of organised crime (Wilhelmsen 2004, p. 31).
It is also interesting to note in this context that many of the ‘internationals’ from the
Middle East with foreign passports issued in Arabic or Turkish names were in fact
assimilated descendants of North Caucasian migrants from the nineteenth century
(muhajirun), maintaining an intense spiritual link to their former homeland. It is thus
no coincidence that most of the ‘foreigners’ who came to the North Caucasus hailed
from Turkey, Syria and Jordan (Williams & Altindag 2005), countries where there are
relatively sizeable and mutually supportive communities of Chechens, Circassians
(Adyge) and other North Caucasian ethnicities.
The assumption that Salaﬁ and jihadi universalist ideas met with a restrained
response from local populations is further supported by a discussion of the
characteristics of local Islam which are in fundamental discord with the contemporary
Salaﬁst interpretation of jihad. Notwithstanding the mark that seven decades of Soviet
‘scientiﬁc’ atheism left, particularly in the urbanised segments of the North Caucasus’
societies, the local tradition of Islam survived in a form that varies signiﬁcantly from
16
This ﬁgure assumes that the total number of Chechen rebels reached approximately 1,500
combatants—a number presented by Regional Operations Staﬀ for Direction of Anti-Terrorist
Operations in the North Caucasus, Major General Arkady Yedelev and the Russian Presidential
Plenipotentiary in the Southern Federal District, Dmitri Kozak (Chechenskoye obshchestvo, 26
September 2005). Even this total number of Chechen rebels may arguably be overstated to justify the
deployment of the Russian army and FSB units of considerable size in the North Caucasus, alongside
the local government’s militias.
17
Traditionally endogamous Chechens tend to be very reluctant to give consent for their daughters
and sisters to marry foreigners. Emir Khattab did marry in the North Caucasus, however, to a
Dagestani Darginian.
1208 EMIL SOULEIMANOV & ONDREJ DITRYCH
the version of Muslim faith advanced by the jihadists. The Chechen, and more
generally the Vaynakh people—the latter ethnonym encompassing also the Ingush and
the Kists in northern Georgia—embraced Islam only in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth
centuries, and their faith was in many aspects superﬁcial, including some remnants of
paganism and retaining some elements alien to orthodox Islam, most particularly the
local customary law (adat) which is irreconcilable with the shari’a particularly due to
the institutions of the blood feud and the warrior ethic of sacriﬁce (Souleimanov 2007,
pp. 30–33). These ‘deviations’ were retained even after the more substantive
Islamisation of the mountainous nations of the North Caucasus during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, when notable Suﬁ elements penetrated the Chechens’ Islamic
faith. Together with local habits such as widespread consumption of alcohol, these
aspects of local Islam made the incoming ‘Wahhabi’ and Salaﬁ consider local
populations to be apostates from the true, pure faith (murtaddun) or, in the extreme
interpretation, even unbelievers (kuﬀar). This signiﬁcantly contributed to the chasm
between the indigenous societies and incoming jihadists, particularly due to the
missionary zeal of the latter.
Perhaps even more fundamental discord lay in the diﬀerent interpretations of ‘holy
war’ by the North Caucasian societies and the jihadists. Whereas for the latter, jihad is
a universal conﬂict about order, the North Caucasus’ tradition of ghazavat has served
rather as an instrument of social mobilisation against the external enemy. Hand-inhand
with the social function of Islam as a banner under which the mountain dwellers
of the North Caucasus, fragmented into numerous communities, could be united
against a common foe, religion has also served as a vehicle of national identity in the
absence of any other clearly deﬁned common denominator vis-a`-vis the external
‘other’. By this mobilisation and identiﬁcation function, the North Caucasus’ ghazavat
stands in essence as a particularist concept, distinct from the universalist and Utopian
vision of the global jihad. It was this tradition of ‘holy war’ that was utilised by secular
political elites led by Jokhar Dudayev in the period 1994–1996, as well as the already
noted functions of Islam, and the evocation of heroic representations of eighteenth
and nineteenth century resistance against Russia in the Chechen collective memory.
However, the idea of the Islamic state was resisted by Chechen leaders since the
beginning of the 1990s. ‘I would like the Chechen Republic to be an institutional
secular state’, Dudayev told Literaturnaya gazeta.18
In respect to the religious rhetoric
assumed by the secular elites of the resistance at this period, Lieven speaks of ‘a
spiritual clothing for [Chechen] national struggle’ (Lieven 1999, p. 357). The
subsequent ‘religionisation’ of Chechen politics in the latter part of the conﬂict and
in the interwar period, manifested for example, in the rise of shari’a courts, may also
be interpreted in instrumental terms rather than as a consequence of the
internationalisation. Instead of resulting from the importation of Salaﬁ and jihadi
ideas from abroad, the order eﬀected by Islamic norms was sought due to the
perceived need to impose discipline on the chaos and to provide a substitution for
weak or absent governance when the traditional socio-political patterns were being
disrupted. Radicalisation of the Chechen resistance has been a continuous feature in
the North Caucasus since this period, yet it is diﬃcult to attribute this radicalisation to
18
Literaturnaya gazeta, 12 August 1992.
RUSSIAN–CHECHEN CONFLICT 1209
internationalisation of the conﬂict as the one main variable rather than the weak
socioeconomic conditions, insecurity, generational change or the spread of the blood
feud; and it is even more problematic to equate this radicalisation to jihadism. Salaﬁ
ideas are adhered to by no more than between 5% and 10% of the Chechen
population, their limited appeal stemming from the reasons mentioned above. It is
true, however, that this movement, however small, is disciplined and orchestrated, and
in consequence may have disproportional political inﬂuence.
In the late 1990s, when the chasm between the secular and Salaﬁ segments of the
rebel movement widened, in particular after the incursion into Dagestan in 1999,
President Maskhadov strove to forge a social compromise with the radicals—venturing
as far in 1999 as to declare Ichkeria, the mountainous area in the southeast of
Chechnya, an Islamic state. Even earlier, Maskhadov established a ‘shari’a regiment’
responsible for the adherence of citizens to the shari’a code, not dissimilar to Saudi
Arabia’s mutawa’in. But unable to accommodate their radical demands, he condemned
the Salaﬁ, stating for instance in a televised speech that ‘[they] divide us according to
faith, which subsequently leads to civil war’ (Ichkeria TV, 20 January 1999)—and even
asked Moscow for assistance to avoid internal collapse in 1999. The Kremlin, however,
chose another solution—launching the Second Chechen War instead.
It was during this conﬂict that the radical Islamist elements—those imported from
the Middle East—became more noticeable, their manifestation being twofold. First,
the continuing radicalisation of not only the Chechen resistance movement, but the
entire Chechen and North Caucasian society displayed more signs of imported
‘Wahhabism’ and a number of new jamaats emerged over the region; and secondly, the
new wave of terrorism gained a more pronounced Islamist character. Terrorists in the
Dubrovka Theatre (2002), for instance, made extensive use of Islamic symbols in their
televised appearances on Russia’s NTV and Qatar’s al-Jazeera network, and
ubiquitously employed shahid (martyr) rhetoric: ‘Each of us is ready for self-sacriﬁce
for Allah and for the independence of Chechnya. We desire death more than you
desire life’, one of the terrorists claimed in an interview for al-Jazeera (broadcast 24
October 2004). The suicide attacks carried out by ‘Black widows’ earlier that summer
on airliners en route from Moscow to Sochi and Volgograd, claiming 90 lives, could
also be interpreted as an imported Islamist element. Following Maskhadov’s death in
2005 it was expected that the ‘Wahhabi’ would prevail in the power scramble that was
to ensue. However, Sheikh Abdul-Khalim Saydulayev, who acceded to the position of
leader of the Chechen resistance movement was indeed a man of religion (unlike
Maskhadov, who was a former Soviet colonel), but of the traditional variety.19
His
position on the character of the Chechen state was formulated, for example, by his
participation in the debate between Ahmed Zakayev, the Chechen separatist
government’s foreign minister and proponent of the idea of a secular nation state,
and Movladi Udugov, one of the main Chechen resistance’s ideologists and founder of
the main website of Caucasian Jihadists (Kavkazcenter.org), who promoted the idea of
a united Islamic state in the North Caucasus. Responding to Udugov, Saydulayev
stated that forming a Chechen nation state would not at all infringe on its Islamic
19
‘I have learned mainly from the teachings of Imam Shaﬁ’i [a celebrated Sunni scholar of the eighth
and ninth century]’, Saydulayev maintained in an interview in Chechnya Weekly, 6 July 2006.
1210 EMIL SOULEIMANOV & ONDREJ DITRYCH
character.20
In Saydulayev’s vision, this nation state would become a part of the loose
Islamic confederation of the North Caucasus, ‘similar to the European Union’.21
Such
a position reﬂects both the intrinsic link between religion and the national
identiﬁcation of the North Caucasus societies, and the limited political objectives of
the leading representatives of the Chechen resistance movement. Moreover,
Saydulayev condemned all terrorist activities: ‘[Military targets, economic objectives
and the state institutions of our enemies] are legal targets in any war. Of course, it is
impermissible to make a target for attack of peaceable, defenseless people who are not
engaged in the ﬁght, let alone of women and children’.22
The accidental death of
Shamil Basayev a few weeks after Saydulayev was killed in Argun (2006) and
succeeded by another moderate leader and a ﬁeld commander Doku Umarov further
weakened the ‘Wahhabi’ faction of the Chechen resistance.
Several other important qualiﬁcations should be made. First, the intoxication of the
Chechen resistance by the imported ideas from the Middle East has been a subject of
constant criticism by the majority secular segment, as have been the terrorist attacks
committed by the radicals. This is Maskhadov’s reﬂection of the late 1990s, and his
summary of his position towards the ‘Wahhabi’:
Even today I oppose all directions including Wahhabism that divide Muslims, my people, into
two camps, giving our enemies the chance to provoke a fratricidal civil war. Even today I oppose
the spreading of any ideology that is to be acceptable for my people. It is not necessary to teach
us what kind of Muslims we are supposed to be; they should come here and learn, including the
Arabs. Not even the Soviet empire dared to force Chechens to give up their religion. Not until
after the ﬁrst war did we hear the words ‘Wahhabism’ or ‘fundamentalism’, and at the start of the
second war we found that those who were spreading those ideas were in Russia and Dagestan.
Their goal is to create dissension among Muslims and to provoke a civil war.23
Later, in 2002, Maskhadov addressed Chechen radicals in the aftermath of the
Dubrovka incident as follows:
I understand you, but I cannot support you. The Kremlin will take advantage of every
opportunity to prove a connection between Chechens and international terrorism. Our job is
not to give them pretexts, so that it would appear that they are right.24
The Chechen President missed no opportunity to rhetorically detach the resistance
movement both from transnational terrorism and Middle Eastern or al-Qaeda links.
When asked about the possible participation of al-Qaeda militants in the Chechen
rebels’ operations, he replied:
I don’t know. Maybe someone belonging to al-Qaeda has even got into Chechnya, but I have
no idea what they would be doing here. We are ﬁghting for our freedom without striving for
any world domination. The United States is not our enemy.25
20
Chechnya Weekly, 27 May 2006.
21
Chechnya Weekly, 16 February 2006.
22
RFE/RL interview, 4 June 2005.
23
Nezavisimaya gazeta, 28 February 2001.
24
Washington Post, 29 December 2002.
25
Reuters, 19 August 2004.
RUSSIAN–CHECHEN CONFLICT 1211
A few weeks later, during the Beslan siege, the Chechen resistance website carried the
following message:
There is not and there cannot be any justiﬁcation for people who raise their hands against
what is most holy to us—the lives of defenceless children. There are no words to express the
full depth of our shock at what has happened . . . We deeply regret that the repercussions of
the inhumane war against Chechnya have come to our brother state Ossetia in such a tragic
manner.26
Second, the ‘Wahhabi’ segment of the Chechen resistance has always been a
minority, with the political power they possessed stemming primarily from Shamil
Basayev’s individual authority and esteem among the Chechens. More importantly
however, for many, including Basayev, talking about participation in the global jihad
seems to have been a pragmatic instrument for securing resources and other support
(for example, training skills) to fund their activities against the Russian government or
improve their position in a continuous power scramble within the Chechen resistance
movement. For Basayev, a close relationship with Emir Khattab seems to have been
motivated by this purpose. Salman Raduyev’s Islamist rhetoric was an instrument to
challenge Maskhadov’s position as the leader of Chechen resistance after Dudayev’s
death; a case very similar to Movladi Udugov, whose presidential race against
Maskhadov in 1997 was probably funded by Saudi Arabian sources (Gall & de Waal
1997, p. 366). Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev’s motivations seem to be complex and
changing—from turning to shari’a as an institution to prevent state failure after the
First Chechen War, to a ‘strictly business’ justiﬁcation that ‘Islamic fundamentalism is
not dangerous. It’s a partnership, international relations . . . One cannot divide help
into that from Wahhabis and help from others . . .’,27
and then to a praising of the
Dubrovka theatre’s terrorists in 2002 followed by his resignation from the position of
Maskhadov’s personal envoy in the Middle East because of the latter’s condemnation
of the attack (Wilhelmsen 2004, pp. 12–27). (It can yet be suggested that Yandarbiyev
was pursuing a personal political agenda by these statements and hoped for a return to
the higher levels of Chechen politics.)
To conclude, the radicals’ true intentions may in fact be as particularistic and
limited as those of the secular segment, rather than universal as those of true
global jihadists—even if in their geopolitical visions Basayev, Udugov, Raduyev
and Yandarbiyev, and some moderates such as Saydulayev, had some sympathy for
a North Caucasus Islamic confederation which would encompass Chechnya and
Dagestan. The inﬂow of resources from the Middle East and Europe did inﬂuence
the political situation in interwar Chechnya and contributed, together with the
uncooperative stance of the Kremlin, to empowering radical dissent against the
secular leadership embodied by Maskhadov and the emergence of internal conﬂict
between the two branches of the resistance movement including armed clashes,
26
http://www.chechenpress.co.uk/russian/news/2004/09/04/01.shtml, accessed 8 August 2005.
27
Vremya Novostei, 17 December 2001, quoted in Wilhelmsen (2004, p. 24).
1212 EMIL SOULEIMANOV & ONDREJ DITRYCH
putsch and assassination attempts, and ﬁnally the founding of Islamist ‘alternative
polis’.28
Particularly since the late 1990s, the rhetoric of the more radical segment of the
Chechen resistance has abounded in references to the global jihad, self-representations
as mujahideen and martyrs, and some, for example, Emir Khattab, even occasionally
referring to the common enemy of Islam, ‘Jews and Crusaders’.29
Udugov’s
Kavkazcenter.org betrays, besides its clear political programme, numerous traces of
Islamic fundamentalism and adherence to the cult of shahid. Yet the rhetoric of Shamil
Basayev as the leading ﬁgure of the ‘Wahhabi’ segment was in fact much more
ambivalent in respect to the idea of global jihad. With an exception of Udugov and
former Chechen President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, who was assassinated by FSB
agents in Qatar in 2004, the prominent ﬁgures of the Chechen resistance, whether
belonging to either the secular or radical factions, resisted alienating the United States
and the West. Instead, assuming a rather pragmatic perspective, these countries have
been seen as a counterforce to Russia, even though the post-9/11 paradigm of the ‘war
on terror’ caused dismay at the general change of foreign policy vis-a`-vis Chechnya
and the North Caucasus.
Seen in this light, notorious terrorist acts such as the Dubrovka theatre siege (2002),
with their kitsch Islamist symbols and ﬁerce fundamentalist statements by the
terrorists, could be interpreted as cases of the communication function of terrorism,
following Jenkins’ assertion that in essence, ‘terrorism is theater’ (1985, p. 4) and ‘[for
terrorists] the most signiﬁcant technology is not weapons but direct communication
with their multiple audiences’ via the media (2006, p. 125). The audiences in the cases
of those incidents, it may be assumed, were not only the Russian public and the
Russian state as ‘target audiences’, but also the international public and the Middle
Eastern sponsors of global jihad. The communication was ineﬀective on all levels—
unlike in 1995 after the Budennovsk incident when the Russian government refused to
negotiate with the terrorists, Islamist symbols alienated the public in the West, and it
did not attract the much desired attention and support of the Middle Eastern
sponsors. Alternatively, assuming a formal rationalist theory stance, the fanatic
statements by Movsar Barayev and his accomplices in Dubrovka could be interpreted
as a deliberate strategy of pretending irrationality, with the aim of deterring the
opponent from storming the building in a classical ‘game of chicken’ (Nicholson
1992).
Thus, it can be suggested, the declared aims of Basayev’s followers who organised
and executed these attacks, despite the pervasive employment of Islamist symbols,
were secular, limited and political, and particularistic, as opposed to the universalistic
goals of the global jihadists. In the case of the Dubrovka theatre siege, the terrorists
demanded an immediate cessation of hostilities and Russia’s retreat from Ichkeria; the
list of rather more reﬁned demands presented by the group occupying Beslan school
No. 1, signed by Shamil Basayev, included the withdrawal of Russian troops,
28
Coerced by the circumstances, and according to some accounts, by the guns pointed at him by
Basayev and Khattab (Nezavysimaya gazeta, 17 July 1999), Maskhadov ﬁnally signiﬁcantly yielded to
the demands of the radicals (Wilhelmsen 2004, pp. 57–58).
29
Terrorism Monitor, 26 January 2006.
RUSSIAN–CHECHEN CONFLICT 1213
declaring Chechnya to be an independent state, its accession to the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS), staying in the ruble zone and the engagement of
international peacekeepers. Basayev and his fellow North Caucasus ‘Wahhabi’ rebels
seem not to have shared much either of al-Qaeda’s hatred for the United States or alZawahiri’s
grandiose visions of the defeat of the Russian Federation in the North
Caucasus as a link in the causal chain of events leading to the eventual triumph of the
global jihad. Their political projects have been essentially limited and political. The
Russian Federation and Russian people have, moreover, not been represented as ‘total
enemies’ in Schmitt’s sense (2004), who should be eliminated; and the resort to
terrorism, as argued in the last section, could be interpreted as a purely rational
decision motivated by practical expediency rather than imported fanaticism. Basayev
could refer to the Russian people at times as ‘brothers’, and the victimisation of
primary targets of terrorist violence could be seen as a result of the vicious cycle of
violence created by the war:
I do not regret having occupied the school. That is because just 100 kilometres from the
school, with the very active participation of Ossetia, a war is going on without any kind of
rules and borders, the open genocide of the Chechen people is continuing, and in our country,
just the dead up to 10 or 11 years of age number over 40,000.30
In a later statement he claimed:
The citizens of Russia are accomplices in this war, even if they may not be carrying weapons.
The only people that we regard as conciliatory are those who are not paying for this war
through taxes, who are not taking part in it and who are actively coming out against it.31
Despite occasional self-identiﬁcation with the worldwide jihadi movement, Basayev
was reluctant to admit that a close link would exist between the Chechen rebels and
the worldwide terrorist network, even to the radical media where such a statement
could be instrumentally motivated. When asked by a journalist from a newly
established jihadi magazine Sawt al-Qoqaz (The Voice of the Caucasus) ‘Are you
thinking of uniting ranks with jihadi groups abroad, for instance?’ he chose to answer
in rather vague terms:
As regards the Chechen leadership this is an issue which has had its precedent, however it may
be that other jihadi groups here in Chechnya have a particular opinion on that or a special
arrangement. In any case we aim to unify the banner of the mujahideen but it may be that the
time is not ripe yet for this . . .32
In the late 1990s, his profession of the ‘Wahhabi’ credo was much more enthusiastic
than in later years, namely after the 9/11 attacks, where the support from Middle
Eastern sponsors would drain away. In an interview with Andrei Babitsky, Basayev
admitted that he was a terrorist—a rare feature among those who are branded with
30
PrimaNews, 1 November 2004. Basayev used a very similar argument during the Budennovsk
attack in 1995: ‘We will use the same methods as the federal forces in Chechnya use. Remember the
hospital in Grozny, or the resident house in Shali’ (Segodnya, 17 June 1995).
31
The Times, 3 February 2005.
32
Terrorism Focus, 12 December 2005.
1214 EMIL SOULEIMANOV & ONDREJ DITRYCH
this label today—but denied that he would be ‘Wahhabi’ and maintained that the war
in Chechnya is a war of national liberation, while religious aspects play a secondary
role.33
To conclude, the internationalisation of the Chechen conﬂict since the mid-1990s
has had the implication of importing human capital (mujahideen) and radical ideas
from the Middle East and channelling funds from the sponsors of transnational
terrorism. However, the extent of the human and material assistance can be considered
to be rather limited, as is the level of favourable reception of ‘Wahhabi’ ideas both by
the societies of the North Caucasus and the Chechen rebels. The lukewarm local
reaction to those imported ideas stems both from the diﬀerences in the indigenous
tradition of local Islam and the global jihadists and their assertive missionary
activities. Radicalisation, particularly during the course of the Second Chechen War, is
on the rise in the North Caucasus, but only a small segment of local societies adheres
to Salaﬁsm, and that arguably on a rather superﬁcial level, as the global jihadists have
not devised an elaborate theory and their theses are instead disseminated in the form
of a few articles aimed at externalisation of the enemy ‘other’, and outlining a vision of
alternative political order. The displayed adherence of most members of the Chechen
resistance movement’s radical segment to the ideas imported from the Middle East
may be interpreted in instrumental and pragmatic terms, as their declared objectives,
which are in essence limited and political, betray—notwithstanding their jihadist
rhetoric and adopted Islamist symbols. ‘[The] struggle for power and the nature of
Islam in the heartlands of Eurasia’ as the ‘latest chapter in the ‘‘Great Game’’ struggle
for the soul of Central Asia and the Caucasus’ (Williams 2003a, p. 3) has indeed been
detectable in the North Caucasus, but the evidence that the global jihadists would
prevail—as the Russian, and on occasions also the US government, together with the
Islamists themselves, like to claim—is scant and invites deconstruction.
Chechens as members of a terrorist international
The lukewarm reaction of most Chechen resistance movement members to seeing their
essentially national liberation war against Russia as only a link in the universal global
jihad, and their preference instead to pursue limited and political aims in terms of a
vision of a particular political order either in Chechnya, or in the North Caucasus, also
translated in their reluctance to join the ranks of global jihadi internationals. In this
section, attention is paid particularly to the Russian government’s claims that the
North Caucasus resistance movement members engage in subversive and terrorist
activities around the world, which—it is suggested—are disseminated in order to
support their representation as a universal threat.
Media reports both in Russia and in the West have indeed reported a ‘Chechen’
presence in conﬂict zones outside the North Caucasus, and even in the massacre in
Andijan, Uzbekistan (2005). Whereas in the latter case, speculation may be raised
whether the reports about militants allegedly speaking Chechen or Vaynakh could
have been fabricated by the local authoritarian regime on Russia’s demand, in
Afghanistan it has been revealed that the ethnonym ‘Chechen’ has in fact been
33
Novaya gazeta, 4 August 2005.
RUSSIAN–CHECHEN CONFLICT 1215
employed to describe almost all foreigners whose identity Afghans were unable to
discover or whose language was incomprehensible (almost anyone but Pakistanis and
Arabs). An element of genuine ignorance is therefore likely to play a role, too. ‘We
knew the Pakistanis [and Arabs] by their language, but we didn’t understand the
Chechens’, the local people told Horak (2005, p. 123) in response to the question
about the involvement of foreign elements in the conﬂict in 2002.34
Nevertheless, exceptions of Chechen resistance movement members’ activities
beyond the North Caucasus do exist. The most notorious instances are Shamil
Basayev’s hijacking of a Tu-154 plane en route to Ankara after a state of emergency
had been declared by the Russian government in response to Dudayev’s declaration of
Chechen independence on 1 November 1991—followed by similar acts involving
hijacking Russian domestic ﬂights with international implications by other Chechen
radicals35
—and his role in the South Caucasus’ Abkhaz conﬂict in 1992. Neither of
these however, can yet be attributed to a jihadi character of the Chechen resistance
movement. The interest of the global jihadists in the North Caucasus was aroused only
in the mid-1990s. The mujahideen, such as Emir Khattab, most likely went to
Chechnya and became involved in the war in 1995, but their number is diﬃcult to
estimate—particularly in the wake of the First Chechen War (1994–1996). More
importantly, in the ﬁrst case Basayev (and his followers) were clearly inspired by the
1970s hijacking campaign by the secular and Marxist PLO, which was rather
successful in promoting their objectives by employing that terrorist tactic. Although
the activities of the Chechen rebels in the South Caucasus may suggest an
international character, they were framed under the general solidarity, shared history
and identity of the various people of the Caucasus and institutionalised in the
Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus. Basayev is reported to have
visited Khost, Afghanistan—where he came into contact with Emir Khattab—twice in
the early 1990s, yet these contacts per se do not seem to render him a global jihadist or
challenge his view of the conﬂict in the North Caucasus—once it broke out—as a
national liberation war.
Much discussed in Europe was the ‘Chechen network’, uncovered in December
2002, whose members had planned to plant an explosive at the Russian embassy in
Paris. However, to call this group the ‘Chechen network’ was highly misleading. The
detained persons, including their ring-leader Benahmed, were of Algerian nationality,
and received support from Groupe salaﬁste pour la pre´dication et le combat (GSPC),
which is a splinter faction of Groupe islamique arme´e (GIA) striving for the
34
It is quite certain that some Chechens were in Afghanistan. A late reported case has been that of
Ruslan Odizhev, killed in Nalchik (Kabardino-Balkariya) on 27 June 2007. Odizhev, who had been
captured by US forces in Afghanistan and detained for several years at Guanta´ namo Bay, was
subsequently released without charge. Following his death, he was referred to by the FSB as a
participant in the Moscow and Volgodonsk apartment building bombings (1999) which immediately
preceded the Second Chechen War, the Nalchik raid in 2005, and even as the ‘spiritual leader’ of
Yarmuk jamaat, which operated from 2002 to 2005, which was during his detention at Guanta´ namo
(Chechnya Weekly, 28 June 2007).
35
A few similar attempts to repeat the scenario occurred in this period. In 2000, a plane en route from
Makhachkala, Dagestan, to Moscow was hijacked and redirected to land in Israel. Unlike this incident
however, the hijacking of a Tu-154 heading from Turkey to Russia, which was forced to land at
Medina Airport, Saudi Arabia, ended with the storming of the plane and bloodshed the following year.
1216 EMIL SOULEIMANOV & ONDREJ DITRYCH
establishment of an Islamic state in Algeria,36
and the only link to Chechnya was the
previous presence of several of them in training camps in the North and South
Caucasus (Pankisi Gorge) and Afghanistan. The selection of the target pointed to the
possible assumption of the Chechen resistance’s agenda. More plausibly, however, the
group’s activity may be broadly interpreted as the manifestation of the jihad’s
‘globalisation’, whereas the immediate cause could have been the Russian government’s
response to the Dubrovka attack occurring earlier that autumn (Nesser 2004,
pp. 61–70). Given the nationality and global jihadi character of the conspirators,
referring to the group as the ‘Chechen network’ seems to be entirely unsubstantiated.
The hijacking by Muhammet Tokcan and his commando group of a Turkish ferry,
Avrasya, heading from Istanbul to Sochi in 1996 and the siege of the Swisshotel in
Istanbul in 2001 should also not be interpreted as acts of Chechen terrorism exported
abroad, although inspired by the Chechen cause and carried out by the resistance
movement’s sympathisers. Tokcan was himself a Turkish citizen of Chechen descent,
who chose diﬀerent means to further the Chechen (secular) cause than many of his
kind who took part in the conﬂict in the North Caucasus.37
It may be concluded
therefore that the association of the Chechen rebels with the global jihadi
internationals occurred mainly on the rhetorical level, and the real extent of Chechen
participation in guerrilla and terrorist activities abroad remains highly dubious.
Blood feud as a cause of the conﬂict regionalisation
Since doubt has been cast above on the narratives of the internationalisation of the
Chechen resistance as a root cause of its radicalisation and the depiction of the North
Caucasus as a battleﬁeld of the global jihad, a regional narrative may be proposed
instead. This is based on the custom of blood feud as an important factor explaining the
spread of the conﬂict into the adjacent areas of the North Caucasus. To fully understand
the causes and the nature of the current resistance both in Chechnya and—broadly
speaking—in nearly all of the North Caucasus, it is necessary to take into consideration
many speciﬁc local circumstances. Although for the majority of Caucasian ethnic groups,
the custom of blood feud has become a thing of the past thanks to societal developments
of recent decades, in the mountainous areas of Dagestan and the North Caucasian
republics, as well as nearly everywhere in Chechnya and Ingushetia, the custom of blood
feud persists in various forms (Souleimanov 2007, pp. 26–30).
The custom of blood feud is closely tied to consciousness of collective responsibility;
some North Caucasian societies are still based on clans. In those societies, a person is
not perceived as an autonomous unit, but far more as a part of a broader familial or
clan-based entity. Blood feuds apply to cases of murder, injury resulting in death, rape
or so-called blood insults or deadly insults.38
Inability to avenge oneself adequately is
36
Benahmed himself used to be emir (commander) of GIA, and a personal friend to Abu Musab alZarkawi,
whom he met in Afghanistan. He seems to be a true globetrotting mujadid with numerous
contacts in the global jihad movement (Nesser 2004, pp. 63–64).
37
Tokcan had, however, reportedly fought in the South Caucasus, in Shamil Basayev’s Abkhaz
battalion in 1993.
38
Traditionally, a wide range of acts may be understood as a so-called deadly insult leading to a
blood feud. Such acts, violating the principles of local (mountain) etiquette, may be verbal
RUSSIAN–CHECHEN CONFLICT 1217
regarded as a sign of weakness, not only of an individual, but of the whole clan,
contributing to the dishonouring of both the individual and the entire clan in the eyes of
their compatriots. Traditionally, revenge has applied to a male member of the family on
the father’s side, especially brothers, then fathers, sons and cousins to a lesser extent.
This custom is most widespread in backward, isolated areas high in the mountains of
the northeast Caucasus, where the inﬂuence of Islam—as well as of adat—has
traditionally been quite strong. This leads to a widening circle of people who are drawn
into the cycle of violence, regardless of what the original cause was. This is a further
reason why the present insurgency in the North Caucasus, especially in isolated,
mountain areas that historically represented the core of the resistance and where
waging the struggle is easier, reﬂects the tight intertwining of Islam and customary law.
This is shown by the fact that the vast majority of the armed groups operating in
Dagestan (such as the Botlikh Jamaat and Shari’a Jamaat) come from the upper reaches
of Dagestan, and that even in the north-western Caucasus, the core of the resistance
consists of members of the Karachay and Balkar nationalities.39
Similarly, the Chechen
resistance has traditionally relied on the mountainous area of Ichkeria.
We also ﬁnd certain similarities when analysing the situation in the neighbouring
North Caucasian republics. In Ingushetia, the population of which is both ethnically
and linguistically related to the Chechens, the situation began to worsen after President
General Ruslan Aushev, who eﬀectively foiled the eﬀorts of both the Chechen
separatists and the Russian generals to draw the republic into the warfare, was replaced
as president there. In 2002, his position was ﬁlled by Putin’s colleague from the FSB,
Murat Zyazikov, whose loyalty to the Kremlin was beyond question. Zyazikov
consented to the stationing of Russian troops in the republic; before long, security
procedures that had been routine in Chechnya started being practised in Ingushetia as
well—whether by the Russian or Ingush police or by secret service agents.40
The result
was the heretofore unparalleled radicalisation of some Ingushetia youth and their
solidarity with the Chechen resistance; one of the consequences was the massive attack
by ﬁghters of the so-called Ingush Jamaat on the Ingush town of Nazran (June 2004),
which cost the lives of about 80 police oﬃcers, mostly of Ingush nationality. An
analogous situation has existed since the late 1990s in Dagestan, where a sort of ‘quiet
war’ continues between the members of the jamaats and the police and army; the
intensity of ﬁghting there is comparable to if not greater than that seen in Chechnya.41
(and publicly expressed) insults of parents or female relatives or (brutal) beatings. While the custom of
blood feud does not apply today to the extent that it did 100 years ago or more, relics of the practice in
one form or another persist in the region to this day. In mountainous Dagestan and especially in
Ingushetia and Chechnya, blood feud exists in a form that remains virtually unchanged.
39
It was the Turkic population of the north-western Caucasus inhabiting the nearly inaccessible
mountain areas that recently made up the majority in the Yarmuk Jamaat, the activity of which is
noted below.
40
See Joint Statement by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Medical Foundation for
the Care of Victims of Torture, and (a Russian organisation for the protection of human rights)
Memorial, 8 April 2004, available at: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/04/07/russia8408.htm, accessed
10 July 2007.
41
Jamaats in the mountainous Caucasus were originally a part of long-established local traditions.
This originally Arab word was revived mainly in Dagestan to designate communities that united the
male population of the auls (mountain villages) for the purpose of the common defence of land, shared
1218 EMIL SOULEIMANOV & ONDREJ DITRYCH
Until recently, it seemed that events in the eastern part of the North Caucasus
would not inﬂuence developments in the ethnic republics in the western part
(Kabardino-Balkariya, Karachayevo-Cherkesiya, Adygeya), which have had a somewhat
diﬀerent cultural and historical development and which now have a sizeable
admixture of Russian inhabitants. Also here, however, the terrorist attacks in the
Russian interior were interpreted by the army and police as carte blanche for a sort of
prophylactic zachistka of the jamaats; practising Muslims suﬀered ever more frequent
repression; uniformly labelled as ‘Wahhabi’, they were arrested en masse by the police
and FSB and were subjected to brutal interrogations and humiliation. Those who
obeyed the tenets of Islam were ﬁred from their jobs and mosques were closed.42
In reaction to repression by state authorities, however, the jamaats there have also
begun to radicalise (although they are far from limited to a jihadist orientation). Other
causes of an internal nature are the massive, chronically unresolved social and
economic problems, poverty, corruption of the local elite and the ‘state-sanctioned’
religious leadership, dissatisfaction with Russian domination and ‘Russiﬁcation’ that
is often identiﬁed with the general decline of morality in society. A clear illustration of
this was the founding in 2002 of the so-called Yarmuk, an extremist group that split oﬀ
from an originally moderate jamaat in Kabardino-Balkariya that was founded in the
early 1990s and oriented mainly towards oﬃcial circles.43
Yarmuk, on the other hand,
is striving to ‘save Islam’, to ﬁght against a ‘mercenary’ and ‘godless’ regime, and it has
not hesitated to take up arms—in cooperation with the Chechen resistance. The most
notorious attack so far by this group was on Nalchik, the capital of KabardinoBalkariya,
which took hundreds of lives. Moreover, the case of Yarmuk is far from
isolated (McGregor 2005).
Just as in Chechnya, also in the rest of the North Caucasus, individuals seeking
vengeance may join in groups to strengthen their striking power and to achieve their
desired goal; thus their actions are not always determined on ideological grounds. In
this context, membership in jamaats or close cooperation with them would represent a
desirable alternative to acting as a solitary, ‘lone-wolf’ avenger; someone alone
embroiled in a (blood) feud with powerful enemies would have diﬃculty surviving,
agricultural work and military training, as well as activities related to religion. Over the centuries these
village communities came under the strong inﬂuence of Islamic mysticism. They existed more or less
illegally during the Soviet domination, and they did not become legal until Gorbachev’s perestroika in
the latter half of the 1980s, when they were viewed as the revival of a local tradition. Although it
cannot be denied that since the 1980s and especially the 1990s, many Jamaats have come under the
inﬂuence of Wahhabite or Salaﬁ Islam, in the great majority of cases the Jamaats have remained
faithful to Suﬁsm. To this day, the function of the Jamaats has never been limited to the sphere of
orthodox religious practice, and their blanket identiﬁcation with Islam is misleading since, as we have
seen, they have served and still serve as a synonym for the village (male) community and the eﬀorts of
the mountain people to provide each other with support and solidarity under the harsh conditions high
in the mountains.
42
See the report by Memorial, ‘Conﬂict Spill-Over Outside the Chechen Republic in 2004–2005
(Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkariya)’, available at: http://www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/
2006/03/m53212.htm, accessed 2 March 2006.
43
For example, it helped young people overcome diﬃcult personal problems (alcoholism, drug
addiction) and was involved in benevolent activities, dialogue with older generations of the Muslim
public and also in the joint resistance against racketeering in the economy and dishonest business
practices.
RUSSIAN–CHECHEN CONFLICT 1219
let alone achieving desired vengeance. In truth, in a society where the laws of the blood
feud still apply and the principle of collective responsibility is applied both by the state
and by those struggling against it, conﬂict is sure to spread like wildﬁre; the slogan is:
‘If you insult my brother (father, son, mother, sister, grandfather, uncle or cousin)—
whether or not a member of a jamaat is involved—I will avenge myself on you and
your relatives and comrades at any cost’.
This alternative narrative of the motivational patterns of the North Caucasus’
insurgents does not, however, exclude the possibility that the worldview of individual
(not necessarily ideologically or politically motivated) avengers will be inﬂuenced over
time by the ideology of militant Islam with regional, if not worldwide objectives. In
fact, in combination with the pace of the conﬂict’s spread, this may represent a very
dangerous combination that could seriously destabilise the North Caucasus for several
years.
Conclusion
This article has oﬀered a critical reading of representations of conﬂict in the North
Caucasus as a battleﬁeld of the global jihad, pointing to political motives behind such
a rhetorical action. For the Russian government these political motives included a
striving for legitimation of its repressive policies in the North Caucasus, suppression of
dissent, and an assertion of the identity-building process. On the part of the resistance
movement, on the other hand, their self-representation as members of the global
jihadist international has been an instrument in their internal struggles and a means—
at least before the 9/11 attacks and the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns—to secure
support in terms of human and material capital from the Middle East.
An alternative narrative focusing on the spread of the blood feud has been
proposed, arguing that it is necessary to diﬀerentiate between the radicalisation of the
resistance as such and the strengthening of the ideology of regional jihad, tied with it,
nonetheless, in some ways. Radicalisation comes from the grassroots level as an eﬀort
to carry out a (blood) feud by those who feel themselves directly or indirectly aﬀected
by the actions of federal forces of the (pro-Moscow) local political and military
structures. In the North Caucasus, there has occurred over time a mutual intertwining
of these two elements, of (regional) jihadist ideology and the mechanism of blood feud,
which has resulted in an escalation and an expanding circle of persons involved. One
may consider the blood feud as a speciﬁc means of mobilisation for this region, while
local jihadism plays the role of a (supranational) ideology of the resistance. Important
in this context is the turnover of generations, an especially sensitive issue in Chechnya.
It is the young people in particular who are drawn into the cycle of violence, as they
are the ones who are physically able to avenge a murdered father or brother, a raped
mother or sister, bombed villages. Revenge, moreover, has been and remains the
domain of younger men. The new ‘war generation’ was not raised in the established
traditions in these regions of traditionalist Suﬁ Islam and is thus more susceptible to
absorbing the extremist ideologies of jihad—whether global or regional.
There is strong awareness in the region of the common—supranational—and at
times quite successful history of resistance oﬀered against nineteenth-century Russian
colonisation by several North Caucasian nations. That resistance had been conducted
1220 EMIL SOULEIMANOV & ONDREJ DITRYCH
under the green standard of Islam. Also, in view of the fact that the ideas of global
jihad still have not been revived in the North Caucasus and that support from Islamist
(Salaﬁ) funds and individuals fell oﬀ sharply after the 9/11 attacks, it may be expected
that the resistance will continue to spread, yet in regional rather than international
terms. That is because rather than vague ideas of global jihad, the resistance in the
North Caucasus is far more driven by the ideas of North Caucasian, mountain dweller
Muslim solidarity and the necessity of a joint struggle in the name of a common
religion (Islam) and the liberation of holy ground from the yoke of the ‘inﬁdels’.
Charles University, Prague
Institute of Political Studies, Prague
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