October 22, 2015

Putin’s Syria Adventure May Backfire at Home

By Marc Bennetts
October 19, 2015 9:50 AM EDT

It’s hard to say what most of Russia’s estimated 20 million Muslims—around 14 percent of the country’s population—think about President Vladimir Putin’s decision to take military action against Islamic State militants (ISIS) and other opposition groups in Syria, but the move is fraught with dangers. The history of Islam in Russia is one of frequent confrontation, from the 19th-century uprising by Muslim rebels in the country’s North Caucasus region to the separatist and then Islamist wars that devastated Chechnya in the mid-1990s and early 2000s.

Unlike Assad, who hails from the minority Alawite sect, Russia’s Muslims overwhelmingly belong to Islam's dominant Sunni branch. This is something they have in common with the myriad opposition forces battling for control of Syria’s war-torn cities. Putin may have been applauded by some for seizing the initiative in Syria, but by backing Assad’s mainly Alawite army, as well as its Shiite allies, who include Hezbollah and elite Iranian troops, he risks inflaming Sunni passions at home.

The Kremlin is deeply suspicious of independent Muslim organizations, and security services carried out a sweeping crackdown ahead of last year’s Winter Olympics in southern Russia. “They consider everything and everyone that they do not control to be an extremist,” says Harun Sidorov, head of the National Organization of Russian Muslims, an independent Islamic movement whose members have faced police pressure, including raids and arrests.

ISIS has mounted a slick Russian-language recruitment campaign that includes a magazine, Istok, and a dedicated propaganda channel, Furat Media. According to Putin, 5,000 to 7,000 people from Russia and other former Soviet states, many of the Chechens, are fighting for ISIS in Syria. Earlier this year, Islamist militants in the mainly Muslim North Caucasus pledged their allegiance to ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In response, Chechnya’s pro-Kremlin leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, appealed to Putin to send Chechen fighters to Syria to “destroy” what he called ISIS “devils.”

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