Early Islamism and Terrorism in the VFD

For more than two decades the dynamics of the North Caucasus overshadowed the religious situa-tion in the VFD. Yet even in 1999, terrorism was beginning in the Volga region. Terrorists attacked the border of the Republic of Tatarstan and in the Kirov area in 1999, blowing up several branches of the Urengoy–Uzhgorod gas pipeline. The FSB arrested the organizers of this terrorist act, a group of alumni and students of the Yoldyz Madrassa in the city of Naberezhnye Chelny, Tatarstan. Ramazan Ishkildin, a native of the village Old Sibai in the Baimak district of Bashkortostan, who had been trained as an imam in the Vedeno district of Chechnya, led the group.34That year it was also reported that Islamist summer camps were being established in the Chusovoy district of the Perm area. In September 1999, Volgodonsk and Moscow became targets of terrorist bombings in which more than 200 people were killed. The main suspect of the Moscow attack was a native of Uzbekistan, Denis Saytakov, who had been trained at the Yoldyz Madrassa; the second suspect was Ruslan Ahmyarov, an ethnic Tatar born in Mordovia who had studied at the Al-Furqan Madrassa in Buguruslan, in the Orenburg Oblast. Some Salafis attempted to create a “Special Islamic Ter-ritory” in Tatarstan as well as Mordovia, following the example of a similar effort in Dagestan in 1998.35Among so-called Russian Talibs detained in 2002 in the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, some were reportedly from Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. The trial of the Islamic Jamaat, which will be described in detail later, also occurred in Tatarstan, and in 2001–2004 neighboring regions experienced a similar surge of religious fundamentalism.

For the last two years, the Volga region has increasingly been the site of law-enforcement and intelligence operations designed to counter the threat of Islamic terrorism. Probably the most impressive incidents took place in 2010 when special operations troops fought terrorists in the Arkhangelsk district of Bashkortostan and in the Nurlat district of Tatarstan, an area that has one of the largest oil reserves in the country. In both cases terrorists put up fierce resistance to the

33. On May 15, 1992, some members of the Commonwealth of Independent States signed the Treaty on Collective Security, an intergovernmental military-political alliance. The treaty was renamed the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and signed by the presidents of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan on October 7, 2002.

34. Vladislav Mal’tsev, “Bashkirskii Jihad” [The Bashkir jihad], http://www.vahhabizm.ru/stat/ bashjihad_stat.html (undated).

35. Timur Kozayev, “Polzuchii terror” [The creeping terror], August 30, 2010, http://versia.ru/ articles/2010/aug/30/islamskiy_radikalizm. Dagestanis proclaimed the creation of a “Special Islamic Territory” in August 1998. O_cial authorities and law-enforcement forces were withdrawn from three Dagestani villages and shari’a norms were introduced, replacing secular legislation. This territory was liquidated on September 12, 1999, during an operation of the Russian army and troops of the Ministry of Interior. A detailed observation of this topic can be found in S. Markedonov, Ethno-natsionalnyi I religioznyi factor v obschestbvenno-politicheskih protsessah Kavkazskogo regiona [The ethno-national and religious factor in the social-political processes of the Caucasus region] (Moscow: MAKS Press Publishing House, 2005), pp. 130–220.

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law-enforcement agents. In March 2010, authorities arrested Bashir Pliyev, a native of Ingushetia known among Islamists as the Bashkir Emir and considered to be the spiritual leader and orga-nizer of the Islamist underground in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. In the course of the investiga-tion it was proved that an Islamist group he led had perpetrated a number of crimes that, to that point, had remained unsolved, including diverting the route of the gas pipeline in the Birsk district of Bashkortostan. In Nurlat, the special operation was aggravated by the fact that one of the three radicals killed in the operation was 34-year-old Ruslan Spiridonov, son of the former prosecutor for the city of Chistopol. This generational and ideological conflict is quite characteristic of the largest North Caucasus republic of Dagestan, not of the VFD. Similarly unusual, in March 2012 authorities uncovered an underground Salafi network in a jail of the VFD’s Ulyanovsk Oblast.