The Caucasus ISIS threaten Europe and Russia

— A handsome, new, white brick house, still lacking windows, sits deserted in the middle of this quiet agricultural village in Dagestan, the homeowner having slipped away misconstruction with his wife and three small children to join the Islamic State.

He was not the first. That came in January, soon after leaders of the long-running Islamist insurgency here in Dagestan, Russia’s southernmost republic, began pledging allegiance to the self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Around 30 men and women, townspeople say, have melted away this year.

“When they lived here they were all followers of one extremist line of Islam, so when one left, he became an example and the others left, too,” said Capt. Abbas Karaev, 27, the village policeman, sitting in Berekei’s squat municipal building, a structure so dilapidated and dusty it appeared abandoned. “They were told it was a jihad in Syria, and they would go to paradise if they died in this war. That is all they had in their heads.”

Much like the disaffected Muslim communities in Europe, the Caucasus region and the swath of former Soviet republics across Central Asia have become a vital recruiting ground for the Islamic State. Law enforcement officials estimate that there are at least 2,000 fighters from the Caucasus among up to 7,000 recruits from Russia and the former Soviet Union now in Syria and Iraq.

At the same time, the Islamic State is steadily establishing a foothold in the Caucasus. It is tapping into the rage and resentment over Russia’s constant, brutal and arbitrary security presence in order to foster a new crop of homegrown, fanatical opponents to revive the insurgency that the Kremlin suppressed.

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The majority Sunni population in the region has been further inflamed by the Russian military’s intervention in Syria on the side of President Bashar al-Assad, a member of a Shiite sect who has killed tens of thousands of his Sunni opponents.

For the Kremlin, the ever more pronounced links between the Islamic State and the Caucasus provoke anxiety.

More than a decade ago, Russians were terrorized by a devastating series of attacks on schools, airplanes, a theater, the Moscow Metro and other public targets mostly at the hands of Chechens. The prospect of thousands of battle-hardened, Russia-hating jihadists returning under the banner of the Islamic State, or of a new group of native, fanatical fighters fanning out across Russia, is alarming.

To date, with what radicalized Muslims view as jihad still raging in Syria and Iraq, there is scarce evidence of blowback in the Caucasus. In Dagestan in 2015, for example, only 95 people died violently through September, compared with 208 in 2014 and 413 in 2011, according to the Caucasian Knot website, which tracks the conflict.

Nevertheless, the Islamic State is known for biding its time, carefully building local structures and military ability before striking. It remains active in the Caucasus region, releasing a stream of sophisticated propaganda videos and promising to return to exact revenge for Russia’s actions.

Certainly, President Vladimir V. Putin is concerned. When he announced in September that he would deploy the Russian Air Force in Syria, part of his stated rationale was to destroy the militants there before they could strike at home. Then just weeks later, on Oct. 31, a bomb exploded on a charter jet bringing mostly Russian vacationers back from Egypt, killing all 224 on board, and the Islamic State claimed responsibility.

It is all a far cry from the early days of the Syrian civil war, when Russia welcomed the prospect of its most violent extremists lured away by the seductive buzz of jihad. “This sewer of people flowing from here to Syria means that the threat here has diminished,” said Zubairu Zubairuev, a spokesman for the Dagestan government, who nevertheless denied that the government actively helped young radicals to leave or, as human rights advocates have said, killed those who stayed.

Then in June came the declaration of the so-called Dagestan Governorate of the Islamic State and the start of an almost daily chorus of threats against Russia on social media.

That much was evident in a recruitment video made by a charismatic, young radical imam who appeared on an Islamic State website in August.

Speaking in Russian, the imam, Kamil Sultanakhmedov, called on fellow Muslims to “join the mujahedeen of the Caucasus,” while lauding the benefits of leaving Dagestan.

“Today, the Islamic State is making your jihad easier,” said Mr. Sultanakhmedov, who had been the imam in the village of Novokayakent at a mosque frequented by Salafis, ultraconservative Islamists whose strict interpretation of religious texts has inspired extremism. “Today, you can fearlessly send your family, your parents, to a place where the infidels will never enter their house, never mock them or intimidate them.”

He also threatened Russia, saying the Islamic State would eventually spread from Iraq and Syria to the Caucasus. “We will take this land away from you,” he said. “We will kill you; we will slaughter you, burn you; and, if needed, we will make you sink. You will try on our orange robes and taste the heat of our swords.”

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Spurred in part by repressive measures Moscow ordered to prevent terrorist attacks at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, thousands of insurgents went to Turkey and eventually on to Syria. Once there, the fighters split, with hundreds following Omar al-Shishani, an Arabic pseudonym meaning Omar the Chechen, while the rest allied with the Nusra Front, the branch of Al Qaeda in Syria.

Many of those allied with the Nusra Front remain based in the province of Idlib, which has been the target of ferocious air raids by the Russian military.

It did not take long for the Chechens to distinguish themselves as effective fighters in the often hastily trained ranks of the Islamic State.

Kurdish militia commanders were impressed. At critical points in the fierce fighting in Syria’s Hasaka Province this summer, just when it seemed that the Kurdish forces would overrun a position or gain a foothold in some strategic town, a different breed of enemy materialized.

They were Chechen fighters, some eventually identified by their documents and the Russian on their cellphones. They waged war longer and with more tenacity, and their snipers appeared to use their weapons with greater precision, the Kurdish commanders said.

Derbent, a city in Dagestan with a Salafi mosque that has been raided by the Russian police. Credit James Hill for The New York Times

With their battlefield grit and ever-rising numbers, experts say, the Caucasus fighters have been rising in an Islamic State hierarchy dominated by Iraqis.

Back home, the Caucasian Emirate, a militant group, was in disarray with so many leaders killed. The Islamic State stepped into the vacuum, prompting many field commanders to switch their allegiance.

Not all of the recruitment videos focus on fighting. Some discuss the orderly management of utilities and garbage collection in the Islamic State, for example.

“They offer them some kind of feasible political project,” said Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, who analyzes the Caucasus for the International Crisis Group. In contrast, federal law enforcement agents here have been sweeping up Muslims en masse from Salafi mosques and forcing them to submit repeated DNA samples.

In Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, a lawyer who defends Salafi clients said that the Islamic State has succeeded in Dagestan for three reasons: the simplicity of its message, the fact that it has a tangible achievement in seizing land in Iraq and Syria, and the much-publicized cruelty against its enemies.

“We are going to return soon and we are going to kill everyone — that is a simple message,” said the lawyer, adding that it mirrored local tradition. “It is part of our temperament. If you have a problem with someone, the first reaction is to beat him to a pulp.”

So far there is little sign of Islamic State adherents returning, and Russia has fairly stringent border controls. Even those who make it back face long jail sentences under a new law against joining armed conflicts abroad that contradict Russia’s interests.

A rare family who admitted that their son had joined the Islamic State said he had left his village of about 3,500 people in January, telling them that he was going to Moscow to work. He contacted them about a month ago from Mosul, Iraq, saying he had married a Turkish woman and was working as a medical orderly in a hospital.

Their son, 25, wanted to come back, the family claimed, but the Islamic State had taken his passport. Even if he had his passport, Russia was not likely to welcome him. “It was the best people, the very best people who left this village,” his father said with a groan.