In the North Caucasus 'a near total breakdown of the state has led to the ascendancy of Salafism, an extremist strain of political Islam with roots in Saudi Arabia,'

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"Salafism offers an alternative to being an idle spectator of your own misfortune."...
 
4/20/13, "Chechnya and the bombs in Boston," The Economist, JY, Moscow

"The Tsarnaev family, like many families from Chechnya, were part of a diaspora that had scattered all over the globe: Turkey, Syria, Poland, and Austria, and, apparently, suburban Massachusetts. Displaced first by Stalin, who was as distrustful as he was vengeful, and then driven out by the indiscriminate violence of two wars since the fall of the Soviet Union, modern-day Chechens are a people that live outside their homeland as much as inside it. Before 19-year-old Dzhokhar and 26-year-old Tamarlan (pictured above) ended up in Watertown, they traveled a long, searching route familiar to many Chechens, passing through Kyrgyzstan, a mountainous country in Central Asia, and Dagestan, a Muslim republic in Russia that borders Chechnya....

What began as a war of national separatism in Chechnya in the mid-1990s has metastasised into an Islamist-inspired insurgency spread throughout the other republics of the Russian North Caucasus: Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and especially Dagestan, where Dzhokhar attended school for some years.

Over the last decade, the more moderate, secular figures in the original Chechen resistance were purposefully ignored by Moscow and pushed aside by more extremist fighters. Today’s conflict is a grinding civil war fueled in equal parts by the more violent strains of Salafi Islam and a toxic cycle of never-ending revenge killing. Across the whole of the North Caucasus, the police battle militants that are organised into jamaats, local cells that range in size and sophistication from a few teenagers watching jihadi videos at home to organised and hierarchical militias.

A cocktail of violence, poverty, and in some places, a near total breakdown of the state, has led to the ascendancy of Salafism, an extremist strain of political Islam with roots in Saudi Arabia. If nothing else, the sense of order and self-organisation offered by Salafism offers an alternative to being an idle spectator of your own misfortune. Many Salafis in the North Caucasus are outwardly peaceful, if wholly illiberal. They speak of wanting to be left alone to live in autonomous communities governed by Sharia law; the more militant ones who have fled “to the forest” dream of creating a pan-Caucasus Islamic emirate.

Most of those who live in the North Caucasus are caught somewhere in the middle: between a perpetually fearful state that is wary of the independent power base even peaceful Salafism represents and the Islamist rebels who, by simply asking for a package of bandages or a piece of stale bread before they return to the mountains, make them a target for the police. Local authorities have responded with paranoid and indiscriminate crackdowns, treating every Salafist as a potential terrorist. Moscow is largely out of energy and ideas; the conflict may have crossed into a state of intractability.

Chechnya itself, the site of two wars and the historic homeland of the Tsarnaev family, has, at least on the surface, been pacified under the eccentric and brutal rule of Ramzan Kadyrov, the republic’s 36 year-old president. Funded by billions of dollars sent from Moscow, Grozny has undergone a startling reconstruction. The Chechen capital is now intersected by wide, grassy boulevards (especially the main thoroughfare, now called Prospect Putin) and fountains spray arcs of water lit by colored lamps, making it a surreally pleasant place to take a stroll. There is a whiff of Las Vegas in the air, cut by the odor of Pyongyang. 

The rise of Mr Kadyrov has unleashed an ironic, if not nightmarish, turn of events for the republic: in a desperate bargain to fend off the separatists of the 1990s, the Kremlin has allowed Chechnya to become a kind of self-ruled and foreign territory of which the original separatists could only have dreamed.It remains unclear how much of this history had to do with the bombs in Boston. The fact that two young men of Chechen origin committed an act of terror is not the same as saying Chechen terrorism has come to United States."...



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