The Caucasus Emirate

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May 201 1

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STRATFOR 700 Lavaca Street, Suite 900 Austin, TX 78701 Tel: 1-512-744-4300 www.stratfor.com The Caucasus Emirate

Part 1: Origin of an Islamist Movement

Editor’s Note: This is a three-part series on the origin and future of the Caucasus Emirate, a consolidation of anti-Russian rebels into a singular, pan-Muslim resistance in the region.

The continued success of Russian operations against the so-called Caucasus Emirate (CE) demonstrates that the Russians, for whom control of the Caucasus is a strategic imperative, have no intention of scaling back their counterinsurgency in an area that has long been a problem for the Kremlin. Even after suffering sustained leadership losses, however, the CE still is able to recruit men and women to carry out terrorist operations inside and outside of the region.

The CE was created and is led by Doku Umarov, a seasoned veteran of both the first and second Chechen wars in which he was in charge of his own Chechen battalion. By 2006, Umarov had become the self-proclaimed president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, an unrecognized secessionist government of Chechnya, and in October 2007 he announced the founding of the Caucasus Emirate, an Islamist movement of which he was emir. In the years since, Umarov has been declared dead numerous times by fellow militants as well as Chechen and Russian authorities, most recently in March 2011. Yet he continues to appear in videos claiming attacks against Russian targets, including videos in which he claimed responsibility for the Moscow metro attacks in March 2010 and the Domodedovo airport bombing in January 2011.

Umarov addressed the recent losses in an interview with the pro-CE Kavkaz Center website May 17, stating that losses sustained by the Caucasus Emirate would not weaken the group. “Since 1999, we have lost many of our emirs and leaders, but jihad has not stopped,” he said. “On the contrary, it expanded and intensified.” CE militants remain a tactical threat to Russian security, carrying out low- level attacks inside the Caucasus and in the Russian heartland. The question is: With an ever-vigilant Russia planning and acting against it, will the CE be able to continue pulling off small but effective attacks or consolidate into a more powerful threat to Moscow?

The Caucasus Region

The root of today’s struggle in the North Caucasus is the geography of the region, a natural borderland that separates the European steppe from Asia Minor with the high mountains of the Greater Caucasus range running from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. The North Caucasus historically has been a mountainous borderland and front line of empires, surrounded or occupied by three major ones — Ottoman (Turkey), Persian (Iran) and Russian. The Russian Empire expanded south into the North Caucasus over the centuries, beginning in 1556, and achieved primacy in the region in the mid-1800s. It took Russia decades after defeating the Ottoman Turks and the Persians to militarily subjugate many of the region’s inhabitants.

Indeed, the Caucasus is home to many small and fiercely proud ethno-national groups scattered across the strategic terrain, including the Chechens, Ossetians, Adyghe, Cherkess, Kabardin, Avars and Ingush, as well as a substantial number of Russians. The region is Russia’s southern defensive buffer and has been since 1864, when Russia took full control of it, finally crushing local resistance in what Russians call the Caucasian War. For Russia, control of the Caucasus, and especially the Greater Caucasus range, means control of a better part of the Black and Caspian sea coastlines, which is vital for both trade and security.

© 2011 STRATFOR Austin, TX 78701 Tel: 1-512-744-4300 www.stratfor.com The territory between the Caucasus and the Russian city of Volgograd to the north has no natural defensive barrier and its population is sparse. Thus, the loss of the Caucasus would leave Volgograd exposed, the loss of Volgograd would leave the Volga exposed, and the loss of the Volga would essentially cut Moscow off from Siberia. As the Chechens and Ingush learned in World War II, when Stalin and the Communists suspected them of “collaborating” with the Nazis and eventually deported them en masse to Siberia, Russia has not allowed, nor will it ever allow, any attempt to divide or push back its southern frontier.

By the late 1980s, the Soviet Union was crumbling from within due to a floundering economy and a collapsing political system. This led to a weakening of the security apparatus — a major problem for Russia, since one of its geopolitical imperatives is to maintain a strong, centralized state through a robust military and intelligence apparatus, especially on its borders and in areas with non-Russian populations. The North Caucasus is one of these border areas.

The First Chechen War

By 1991, with the Soviet Union disintegrating, many Chechen nationalists saw their opportunity to finally achieve independence. At the time, Chechnya was part of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which was part of the larger Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia, one of the 15 states that constituted the Soviet Union. The first Chechen war was the inevitable consequence of the Chechen nationalist goal, which was to establish an independent Chechen nation-state. After Chechnya declared independence in 1991, Moscow’s fear was that other ethnic minorities, autonomous republics or regions within the Russian Federation would attempt to secede as well, though it would not try to teach the Chechens a lesson until 1994.

Russian Failure

Russia’s first military intervention in Chechnya was in December 1994, and it failed for a variety of reasons. First, the Russians were not politically united on the logic behind the invasion; no face-to-face discussions between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Chechen President Dzokhar Dudayev ever took place, leading many Russians to resent their government for not holding serious negotiations before the intervention. Second, the Yeltsin administration ensured that officials who doubted the logic of the invasion were either ignored or removed from the government and the military’s general staff.

And the invasion could not have been launched at a worse time of the year — December, when Chechnya’s forests, mountains and undeveloped roads were covered in snow, making it difficult for the Russians to maneuver their ground forces, and the season’s omnipresent fog made air support impossible. Russian forces at the onset of the war were plagued by other problems as well. Some units

© 2011 STRATFOR Austin, TX 78701 Tel: 1-512-744-4300 www.stratfor.com were deployed in the initial invasion without maps of the cities and areas in which they were going to fight, while armored vehicles and columns were left exposed on streets and in alleyways. Also, many of the attacking Russian forces were created from units that had not trained together, which made unit cohesion difficult to establish. Command and control was substandard and combined arms operations were often poorly planned and executed.

Russian forces did not adapt well to the operational requirements of urban terrain, where small-unit leadership is critical to success and which the Chechens were masters of defending. The mountains and forests were also a terrible environment for Russia’s armor-centric military, which had been shaped by Cold War strategy and designed to fight over wide-open spaces on the North European Plain.

Chechen Success

The Chechen weakness was numbers — they simply could not replenish losses the way the Russians could. However, the Chechen insurgency was relatively fluid and could effectively exploit Russian weaknesses. The Russians were fighting the war as a traditional military conflict, whereas the Chechens were not a traditional military force. They may have been led by a military commander — President Dudayev was a former Soviet air force general — but the Chechens were guerrilla fighters with little formal training and only a brute understanding of how to fight an asymmetrical war on their own turf. The Chechens harassed Russia’s long lines of communication, staged hit-and-run attacks and waged pitched battles on their own terms after they took to the mountains and forests in the face of overwhelming Russian strength.

Ends Justifying Means

Instead of trying to woo the population with economic incentives or amnesty while they cracked down on the insurgents, Russians viewed the whole of the Chechen population as suspect. They built internment camps all over Chechnya, and the perceived mistreatment of civilians by Russian forces served as a rallying cry for the Chechens. Indeed, rather than dividing the populace from the insurgents, Russian counterinsurgency tactics, including the large-scale bombardment of villages, towns and cities thought to host Chechen fighters, only united them.

The turning point of the war came in April 1995, when Russian forces killed more than 250 civilians in Samashki. On the verge of collapse in the face of overwhelming Russian numbers, Chechen militants were innervated by the Samashki massacre and determined to seek vengeance. Two months after the massacre, Chechen rebel commander Shamil Basayev and a group of Chechen fighters raided the Russian town of Budennovsk and seized a hospital, taking more than a thousand civilians hostage. More than a hundred civilians were killed during an attempt by Russian forces to raid the hospital and liberate the hostages. The experience showed the Chechens that terror attacks against the Russian heartland could be a very effective tactic.

In January 1996, after a failed raid against a Russian helicopter installation in the Dagestani town of Kizlyar, Chechen fighters under radical rebel leader Salman Raduyev took the town’s hospital, along with more than 2,000 hostages. A failed rescue attempt resulted in numerous executions while the hostage-takers escaped to Chechnya. In June 1996, a Moscow subway station bombing killed four people and injured 12 and a bus bombing in Nalchik killed six and injured 40. On July 11, 1996, a blast on a Moscow bus injured six people, and the next day a bomb on a Moscow trolleybus wounded 28. Among Russians, the new Chechen tactics sowed more fear than rage over the already unpopular war.

Then on Aug. 6, 1996, an estimated 1,500 Chechen fighters under Dzokhar Maskhadov attacked Grozny and laid siege to some 12,000 Russian troops occupying the city. The siege finally prompted a tired Russia to negotiate a cease-fire. On Aug. 30, Russian Lt. Gen. Alexander Lebed and then-Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov signed the Khasavyurt accords, ending the hostilities. The Chechens had fought Russia to a standstill, though the end of the fighting did not stop the terror attacks against Russia. On Nov. 10, 1996, an explosion in a Moscow cemetery killed 13 people and injured 70. 4

© 2011 STRATFOR Austin, TX 78701 Tel: 1-512-744-4300 www.stratfor.com The Khasavyurt accords tabled a final decision on Chechnya’s status within the Russian Federation until Dec. 31, 2001, leaving Chechnya with de facto independence but completely isolated in the region. The accords stipulated a humiliating Russian pullout but also gave Russia years to determine what went wrong with the invasion and to come up with a new plan while leaving the Chechens to their own devices. Chechnya found itself spurned by its neighbors on all sides (with the exception of the impoverished country of Georgia), with no sustainable economy or foreign patron to assist it. The isolation and destitution led to further destabilization, crime and other social maladies for the war- ravaged republic.

Part 2: Division and Reversal

In 1994, before the first Chechen war broke out, Shamil Basayev went to Afghanistan, where he trained briefly with Islamists in the town of Khost. His Islamist instructors were “Afghan Arabs,” mujahideen volunteers from Arab countries who had fought the Russians in Afghanistan. Basayev returned to Chechnya, where he would lead Chechen rebels in the retaliatory raid on the Russian town of Budennovsk following the Samashki massacre. Some of the Afghan Arabs also came to Chechnya to join the fight against the Russians in the first Chechen war, and many did not leave when the fighting ended. These fighters included Omar Ibn al Khattab, who went by the nom de guerre “Khattab” and was reportedly close to, and financed by, al Qaeda.

Instead of consolidating their strength after the Russian withdrawal from Chechnya, the Chechens found themselves divided along clan, secular-nationalist and Islamist lines. Islamism was one of the consequences of the first Chechen war, which saw an influx of veteran foreign Islamist fighters to the rebel side. These fighters brought their radical beliefs as well as their guerrilla expertise and began to spread those beliefs in Chechnya and in neighboring republics, along with a small number of proselytizing Chechens of the Wahhabi sect of Islam who had studied in Saudi Arabia. The Wahhabi sect practices a very strict interpretation of Islam based on the teachings of the 18th century Islamic scholar Muhammad Ibn Abdel-Wahhab. While many Wahhabis practice their religion peacefully, there is an undercurrent in the sect of extremism and ties to terrorism.

The Chechen town of Urus-Martan became a center for hundreds of foreign Wahhabi arrivals from across the Middle East. These Wahhabis would recruit young Chechens to fight for Islam — a prospect that seemed better than remaining unemployed — training them at the Serzhen-Yurt camp, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Urus-Martan. In May 1997, Wahhabis took control of several villages in neighboring Dagestan, prompting Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov to denounce them, along with Saudi Arabia, which was seen as a significant foreign-Wahhabi financier. In December 1998, Wahhabi fighters staged a surprise attack against Russian forces in Buynaksk, and the Chechen war with Russia would resume in August 1999.

The interregnum proved advantageous for Russia. Rival factions weakened the Chechen government of Maskhadov, who was elected in January 1997. With various groups vying for power, a more pronounced split arose between the secular nationalists and the Islamists. This, coupled with traditional clan and business rivalries (the two frequently overlapped), pushed Chechnya slowly toward anarchy. Many Chechens resorted to crime, and kidnapping became a cottage industry. With the proliferation of weapons into the region during the first war with Russia, violence was rampant. All the while, Chechen Islamists and their foreign counterparts grew stronger as they spread their jihadist message to neighboring republics.

Ideologically, the struggle in Chechnya was between two competing political currents — secular nationalism and Islamism. Maskhadov wanted to integrate Chechnya into the region economically and rebuild economic relations with Russia. The Islamists in Chechnya dreamed of an enlarged Islamic confederation in the Caucasus, a vision shared by most of Chechnya’s anti-government opposition groups, which wanted to eradicate Russia’s presence in the region once and for all.

The Second Chechen War

In 1999, the instability in Chechnya was Russia’s justification to reassert its force in the region. Watching the internal conflict, and with greater military, economic and political strength, Russia had a renewed confidence in its ability to shape events in Chechnya. It began by increasing the number of troops in Dagestan and the wider region, using the rampant crime, violence and growth of Wahhabi groups as justification. By the onset of the second Chechen war in August 1999, Russia was far more ready for a fight than it was in December 1994.

The Russian Ministry of the Interior had been planning a fight in Chechnya since March 1999, following the abduction of the ministry’s special representative to Chechnya, Maj. Gen. Gennady Shpigun, at Grozny’s airport (his body would be discovered in southern Chechnya a year later). The Russians had studied the mistakes of the first war and were now ready to correct them. Then, in August 1999, 1,200 to 1,600 members of the Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade led by Basayev and Khattab invaded Dagestan, which brought tensions between Moscow and Chechnya once more to the brink. The attack was not exactly greeted with jubilation in Dagestan, but resistance surprised even the Russians, who are suspicious of their country’s growing Muslim population and expected far more Dagestanis to join the Islamists than did. Russian reinforcements were sent in, and Russia and Dagestan closed the borders and began a counteroffensive.

On Aug. 31, an explosion at a Moscow shopping center injured 40 people. This was followed by a rash of bombings across Russia, with four major attacks carried out against housing projects in Buynaksk on Sept. 4, Moscow on Sept. 9, and Volgodonsk on Sept. 13 and Sept. 16, leaving 293 people dead and 651 injured. Former Russian President and new Prime Minister Vladimir Putin declared Maskhadov’s government illegitimate and said Russian forces would advance to the Terek River, which they did by Oct. 5.

Russia’s New Strategy

Before the invasion, Russia made critical adjustments in its strategy and tactics. The number of troops deployed was almost double that of the previous invasion, and these were mainly Ministry of the Interior forces, regular army and marine personnel, and special operations troops, not conscripts. All communications were encrypted, and instead of rolling into Grozny in columns, armored forces took the high ground surrounding the city. Russia created a media blockade and only its version of events was reported within Chechnya and to the outside world. Perhaps the most important difference was the condition of the Russian intelligence and security services (the FSB, SVR and GRU), which were unified and stronger — the fragmentation of the services caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union was no longer a factor. The security services were the ones that not only infiltrated the militant groups but also identified the main Chechen weakness: internal divisions between the secular nationalists and Islamists. Russia’s consolidation of power was finally paying off. In fact, the entire operation was in the hands of the FSB in February 2001.

Moscow’s exploitation of Chechnya’s internal divisions gave it victory in the second war. Moscow was looking far past the Terek River when it invaded, and it was able to widen the divisions through bribery, negotiation and exacerbating the concern among Chechens over the terrible humanitarian conditions they faced. There were also latent fears among moderate Muslims and secular nationalists of an outright Islamic Shariah government actually being imposed. This is not to say that all secular nationalists joined Moscow in 1999, but that a split took place and greatly benefited the Russian effort.

Moscow used Bislan Gantemirov, Grozny’s former mayor, and his militia as scouts inside Grozny to gain critical intelligence on rebels as well as to fight against them. What Russia achieved in Chechnya was to turn the two most powerful nationalist clans — the Kadyrovs and the Yamadayevs — against the

© 2011 STRATFOR Austin, TX 78701 Tel: 1-512-744-4300 www.stratfor.com Islamist insurgents and in favor of Russia, installing Kadyrov clan leader (and imam) Akhmad Kadyrov as head of the new pro-Russian Chechen government.

Like the Kadyrovs, the Yamadayevs had taken part in the first Chechen war against the Russians, then switched sides in 1999 due to the well-laid plans of Putin’s half-Chechen aide, Vladislav Surkov. The Yamadayev brothers were rewarded with Hero of Russia titles, control over certain militias and security — even seats on the Russian Duma in Moscow. Having two strong Chechen clans on the Kremlin bankroll guaranteed that the pro-Moscow Chechens would fight the Islamists but would themselves be divided. This created a balance within the nationalist camp that could prevent them from forming an alliance and one day threatening Moscow.

Moscow’s next move was to create ethnic Chechen military units as part of the Russian armed forces to help fight the war for the Russians. It was these Chechen battalions created in 2003 — Zapad (West) and Vostok (East) — that greatly undermined the anti-Russian insurgents by using Chechen tactics. The Russians still controlled the intelligence flow and ran many military operations, but the Chechen forces allowed the Russian military to start reducing its presence in Chechnya while Ramzan Kadyrov, who succeeded his father’s successor, Alu Alkhanov, removed the Yamadayev threat.

Part 3: Consolidation

Grozny fell to the Russian army on Feb. 2, 2000, and Chechen separatists and Islamist fighters took to the hills and forests. Although the Russians had won on the battlefield, guerrilla die-hards continued their asymmetric resistance while Russian forces began a systematic hunt for Chechen commanders. A sustained guerrilla war and terror campaign would also continue inside and outside of the Caucasus, with 18 major terrorist attacks taking place between August 2000 and January 2011, including the spectacular Beslan school siege in September 2004.

Despite the wave of terrorist attacks, key militant leaders were being killed, including Aslan Maskhadov in March 2005 and Shamil Basayev in July 2006. Russian and Chechen government counterinsurgency operations also steadily reduced rebel ranks as Chechnya’s militancy changed from being a mixed nationalist-Islamist movement to being an entirely jihadist cause.

As the Russians expanded their operations against them, the Islamists tried to change tactics one more time. The idea was to pool resources and consolidate the various anti-Russian rebels in the region into a singular, pan-Muslim, pan-Caucasus resistance that would centrally coordinate (when possible) its fight against Moscow. On Oct. 31, 2007, approximately a year after the death of Basayev and his Wahhabi successor, Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev, the formation of the Caucasus Emirate (CE) was officially announced by Doku Umarov (nom de guerre “Abu Usman”), the former president of the short-lived and unrecognized Chechnen Republic of Ichkeria.

The Caucasus Emirate’s goal was to create an Islamic emirate in the North Caucasus region, stretching over the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay- Cherkessia and beyond. This emirate would be completely autonomous and independent of Russia and ruled by Shariah. The group carried out several attacks in a very short time, including the Moscow Metro bombing in March 2010.

Organizational Structure

The CE is an umbrella group that oversees a number of smaller regional groups and local subsets. Its central leadership core consists of the emir, currently Doku Umarov, a deputy emir and subordinate commanders leading units organized along vilaiyat (provincial) and jamaat (assembly) lines. There are six designated vilaiyats in the Caucasus Emirate, each with numerous jamaats of fighters assigned to specific zones in varying numbers and with assorted capabilities. The CE vilaiyats currently active are:

© 2011 STRATFOR Austin, TX 78701 Tel: 1-512-744-4300 www.stratfor.com • Nokchicho Vilaiyat, Chechnya • Independent Nokchicho Vilaiyat (INV), Chechnya • Galgaiche Vilaiyat, Ingushetia • Dagestan Vilaiyat, Dagestan • United Vilaiyat of Kabardiya (OVKBK), Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia • Vilaiyat Nogai Steppe, Krasnodar Krai and Stavropol Krai

This organizational structure soon gave way to internal squabbling. In a video posted Aug. 1, 2010, on the Kavkaz Center website, a report indicated that Doku Umarov had resigned, supposedly due to health reasons, and had appointed fellow Chechen Aslambek Vadalov as his successor. The next day, Umarov reneged on his resignation and appointment of Vadalov. Just after the release of the resignation video, some CE leaders renounced their loyalty oath to Umarov and swore loyalty to Vadalov, leading to considerable confusion, conflict and chaos in the ranks. However, Abu Supyan Abdullayev, Umarov’s second in command and the religious leader of the movement, came out in support of Umarov. This crucial support from the revered Abdullayev enabled Umarov to regain most of his followers. A split remained, however. The vilaiyat of Nokchicho was divided, with one part going with the INV under Emir Hussein Gakayev.

Abdullayev’s continued support for Umarov placed the majority of the vilaiyats and their respective jamaats on Umarov’s side, with the INV swearing loyalty only to the CE and not Umarov personally. This shook the already fragile relationships among the various nationalities and ethnicities dispersed across the CE, people who had their own histories of militancy but who answered mainly to a Chechen central leadership. This continued to be managed, but it would soon become a problem for the CE.

Since the high-profile attack at Domodedovo airport in Moscow in January, pieces of the CE have continued their terror operations, including a symbolic attack in February at a ski resort on Mount Elbrus in Kabardino-Balkaria that killed three tourists. The CE was demonstrating that, despite its leadership losses and setbacks, some version of the group could still hit back. And if it could hit Elbrus, it might be able to hit Sochi, 200 kilometers (120 miles) away and the planned site for Russia’s 2014 Winter Olympics.

Russia’s swift and methodical response to the Moscow airport attack accelerated its campaign to take down the CE leadership structure. Among those killed so far in 2011 are Deputy Emir Abu Supyan Abdullayev, Riyadus Salikhin Martyrs’ Brigade commander Aslan Byutukayev (nom de guerre “Khamzat”), Dagestan Vilaiyat commander Israpil Validzhanov (“Hassan”), foreign volunteer Khaled Youssef Mohammad al-Elitat (“Muhannad”), al Qaeda emissary Doger Sevdet (“Abdullah Kurd”) and nearly the entire OVKBK leadership, including Emir Asker Dzhappuyev (“Abdullah”). 8

© 2011 STRATFOR Austin, TX 78701 Tel: 1-512-744-4300 www.stratfor.com In the first four months of 2011, according to a report by the Monterey Institute of International Studies, the CE carried out 230 attacks in the Caucasus and in Russia, killing 121 Russian government personnel and wounding 208 more and killing 41 civilians and wounding 180 more. In the process, 98 CE fighters were killed. The most active vilaiyat was Dagestan, followed by OVKBK, Galgaiche, Nokchicho and Nogai Steppe. On May 4, Kavkaz Center reported that between April 6 and May 3, CE members carried out a total of 68 attacks, with 30 “enemies of Allah” killed and 45 injured and 34 CE “martyrs.” With a total of 583 CE attacks in 2010, the CE so far appears to be sustaining the same level of violence in 2011, which makes leadership setbacks certainly detrimental but not necessarily fatal for the CE.

The Future

The steady killing of CE leaders does not necessarily spell doom for the movement. Case in point was the death of Abdullayev on March 28, which was a test for the CE — to see just how committed its members were to continuing the fight under the leadership of Umarov, since Abdullayev was seen as the glue that kept the movement from fracturing altogether. The movement appears to have passed the test, as it continues its terror attacks without vilaiyats or their jamaats breaking away from Umarov. Only those that initially broke with Umarov in August 2010 continue to deny him their loyalty.

Clearly, the CE is still capable of killing. On May 9, Krasnodar Krai police released photographs of suspected suicide bombers planning to carry out attacks in the Krasnodar Krai region, where the city of Sochi will host the 2014 Winter Olympics. The suspects are 33-year-old Eldar Bitayev, 21-year-old Viktor Dvorakovsky, 20-year-old Ibragim Torshkhoev and 27-year-old Alexander Dudkin. This suggests that the once docile Nogai Steppe vilaiyat, silent for years, has been able to recruit suicide bombers where upcoming Olympic Games will be held. Then, on May 10, long-sought terrorist suspect Viktor Dvorakovsky, a Russian convert to Islam, was thought to have shown up in Makhachkala, Dagestan, detonating himself during an identification check and killing one police officer and injuring another as well as a number of passers-by. It turned out that the suicide bomber was not Dvorakovsky but a 32- year-old Dagestani and Makhachkala resident named Abakar Aitperov. That same day, in Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, five militants were reportedly killed in a shootout with police. Also on May 10, Doku Umarov appointed a new emir of the Dagestan Vilaiyat and commander of the Dagestani Front, Ibragimkhalil Daudov (“Salikh”), after its emir, Israpil Validzhanov (“Hassan”), was killed by Russian forces on April 17. This means that the most active CE vilaiyat has a new emir to lead it in the jihad against Moscow and that Umarov still commands some authority.

STRATFOR believes that the CE will be able to continue its attacks but will not pose a strategic risk to Russia, nor will the CE evolve into an Islamist uprising across the Caucasus, as it hopes to become. Russia remains in full anti-terror mode, and its leadership decapitation campaign and divide-and- conquer approach appear to be working. The insurgency is sustained but it is not growing, and Russia’s already high level of security will only increase as the Olympic Games in Sochi draw closer.

But Russia is a vast expanse, and the more security that is brought into Sochi, other major population centers and tourist points of entry, the less there will be in other locations. This means that out-of-the- way places, in addition to naturally soft targets such as shopping centers and public transportation, will inevitably be exposed to greater risk. STRATFOR believes that, in addition to the localized, small-scale attacks seen before and since Domodedovo, there will likely be more symbolic attacks such as the one against the Mount Elbrus ski resort in February. These attacks could occur before or after the winter games, depending on Russian countermeasures. Attacks outside the core security ring in Sochi similar to the Centennial Park bombing during the Atlanta Summer Olympics in July 1996 are possible and would achieve the desired effect — making the Russians look unsecure if not weak in front of a global audience.

Kavkaz Center released a statement from Doku Umarov on May 17 in which he portrayed the CE movement as having no shortage of volunteers. “Generations of the Mujahideen replace each other,”

© 2011 STRATFOR Austin, TX 78701 Tel: 1-512-744-4300 www.stratfor.com he said. “New young men take [the] place of the deceased. More and more young men want to join the Mujahideen, but unfortunately we cannot accept all the newcomers.” While exact numbers cannot be verified, the replenishment of the CE leadership and ranks shows that there are still those who are willing to die for the cause, despite the systematic killing of CE emirs. This means that Russia’s struggle to fully subdue and dominate the Caucasus is far from over.

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