Sergei Melikov can investigate Dagestan’s officials all he wants, and fire people and hire new ones, but it will be extraordinarily difficult for him to root out all the jihadis and jihad sympathizers in the government and bureaucracy. Why? Because what he is dealing with is not “radical Islam,” but ordinary, mainstream Islam. No one, however, wants to face that fact and its implications.
“Dagestan political elite to be vetted for links to radical Islam after synagogue, church shootings,” Reuters, June 25, 2024:
The Kremlin-backed head of Dagestan on Tuesday ordered background checks to be carried out on the Russian republic’s political elite to make sure nobody had links to radical Islam after a weekend attack on synagogues and churches in which 21 people were killed.
Sergei Melikov, the governor of the majority-Muslim southern region where gunmen attacked churches and synagogues on Sunday evening, said he was also opposed to local women wearing a niqab face veil after reports that one of the gunmen had planned to escape in a niqab disguised as a woman.
The attack, at least the third serious incident inside Russia this year linked to Islamist terrorists, is a headache for President Vladimir Putin, who says the country needs to focus its resources on winning the war in Ukraine, something Moscow calls a special military operation.
“I’ve given an order for the personal affairs of all those who occupy leadership posts in Dagestan to be studied and checked, including deputies of the people’s assembly (local parliament). We’ll do it in several stages,” Melikov told lawmakers.
Melikov’s decision reflects fears that Dagestan’s political elite has been infiltrated by radical Islamists after two of the gunmen were identified as sons of a local official, another as having a past affiliation with a pro-Kremlin party, and another gunman identified as the relative of a former senior official.
Former Kremlin adviser Sergei Markov has alleged that the attack had shown that Dagestan’s elite had been “infected” by radical Islam….
somehistory says
The article says the area is “majority-muslim”….so how is this guy going to root out all “radicals”?
Even if…and there is no real separate ‘radical’ islam…some mozlums are identified as radical, the radicals read the same book, go to the same barracks, listen to the same speeches, are taught the same things at home as all other mozlums.
A mozlum may be going along, not doing any war against others, but then he becomes more interested in taking part in the war of submission to the evil.
kind of like a person who exercises some, and one day decides to run a marathon.
The mozlum may have been enthusiastic his entire life, but has been waiting for the right moment to murder someone. Perhaps he begins listening more intently, along with other mozlums in the barracks, to the “strike the necks,” and “strike terror” parts of the *sermons.*
All true mozlums, every devout adherent, is a murderer-in-waiting. One may die of disease, accident or another cause, but each one may murder before he dies of old age. The devout feel it is their right and obligation to murder others for his false god and fake prophet.
Evidently, this Russian pol is not aware of the fact that his mozlum majority area has way too many possible murderers; or he knows it and is aware that all is actually lost.
He couldn’t say all is lost and stay in office.
The situation is much like the final scene in “The Night of the Living Dead.” All but one guy in the house was a zombie.
somehistory says
I should have written “all but one were zombies.”
SC says
While moslems consume oxygen, terrorists will continue to exist.
Rufolino says
If violent Islam is “mainstream Islam”, it makes you wonder how peaceful, presumably intelligent, Muslims come to terms with this without resorting to denial.
OLD GUY says
Islam equals TERROR. Nothing in the Quran or Islamic books speaks about anything but total islamic rule.
The Quran is nothing but Mohammad’s political manifesto of his desire to rule the world as he knew it.
Islam is a Political Cult.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Why can’t Putin take a page out of the Romanovs? Who completely emasculated islam both in Turkistan (the “-stans”) as well as in Russia itself – Qashliq, Tatarstan, Crimea….
One way in which Russians were way superior to the Brits in the 19th century was their treatment of islam. Consider a few cities that were all part of various Turkic empires in the Middle Ages, but are today parts of different countries – Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Iran & Pakistan. All of these were part of various Turkic empires – the Ghaznavids, Khwarezmids, Timurides and to an extent, even the Mughals. Take their major cities – Buqhara, Samarqand, (in today’s Uzbekistan) Herat, Mazhar-e-Sharief, (in today’s Afghanistan) Merw, Nisa (in today’s Turkmenistan), Nishabour and Mashhed (in today’s Iran) and Peshawar, Quetta (in today’s Pakistan)
In the 19th century, when the Turks would conduct raids on the Kazakh frontiers, capture Russian citizens and sell them in slave markets in Buqhara and Xeva, the Romanovs responded by invading that territory. It took a long campaign but finally, those emirates were either destroyed, or demoted to Khanates. At the end of it, the Russians annexed Turkistan and cracked down hard on jihadist practice, so that it died away
This was also the time that the Brits wanted to ensure that Russia didn’t get a path to the Indian Ocean. So they worked w/ both the Afghan and Iranian rulers to ensure that it didn’t happen. In the meantime, in India, they had destroyed the one Sikh state that had pummeled the muslims in most cities in Punjab – from Lahore to Peshawar, which enabled the place to islamize again, and ultimately become today’s Pakistan
Had the Brits not been around, the Romanovs would probably have done what they did to Turkistan to Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan as well. That might have become a part of the Soviet Union, and later their own independent countries, but w/ islam as diluted as it is in Uzbekistan. Wouldn’t have worked for NATO during the Cold War, but at least today, they’d be functioning countries like Uzbekistan
Putin, who regaled Tucker w/ Russian history when they met some months ago, should re-study what the Romanovs did to Tatarstan, and look at rinsing and repeating in Chechnya and Dagestan