Deadly attacks in Russia’s Dagestan region: What you should know

Two bloody attacks on Sunday in the southern Russian city of Dagestan have reignited fears of extremist violence at home, as the Kremlin pours resources and people into its escalating war in Ukraine.

Gunmen slaughtered at least 20 people and set fire to places of worship. A video of men with rifles standing on a street and firing shots, including at passing vehicles, quickly circulated on social media. Although little else is known about the attacks, they struck a nerve in a region long fraught with separatist and ethnic tensions.

Here’s what we know:

What happened and who is responsible?

Groups of gunmen carried out apparently coordinated attacks on synagogues and Orthodox churches in two cities – Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, and Derbent – ​​more than 110 kilometers apart.

Although Russian authorities described the violence as acts of terrorism, they did not blame any specific person or group for the attacks. No organization has claimed responsibility for the attacks and the motive remains unknown.

The Russian Investigative Committee has launched a terrorism investigation.

Before a deadly attack on a concert hall outside Moscow in March, US intelligence agencies warned of an impending attack by an offshoot of the Islamic State. After the attack, they immediately declared the terrorist group responsible for the attack.

But on Monday, US authorities said they still had no assessment of who was responsible for the shootings in Dagestan.

Where is Dagestan and who lives there?

Dagestan, one of more than 20 republics that are part of the Russian Federation, is located in and near the Caucasus Mountains, on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. Chechnya, another Russian republic, and Georgia lie to the west of Dagestan, and Azerbaijan to the south.

The region, one of Russia’s poorest, is known for its striking mountain scenery. It has long been a crossroads of migration, conquest and great powers, which wrested Russia from Persia in a series of conflicts in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The predominantly Muslim population, about three million people, is ethnically and linguistically diverse; some of its members speak Turkic or Iranian languages ​​in addition to Russian.

What is the recent history of this region?

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been deep unrest in the Caucasus, shaken by wars, separatist movements and extremism.

The bloodiest conflicts, which sometimes spread to Dagestan, took place between 1994 and 2009 in Chechnya, another predominantly Muslim region, where tens of thousands of people lost their lives.

Russia’s brutal repression of Chechen separatists led to the radicalization of a segment of the region’s Muslims, as did the wanton destruction the Russian military caused in Syria while fighting on the side of President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war.

In the mid-2010s, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria took advantage of this underlying sympathy for extremists and recruited massively in the Caucasus. In June 2015, the name “Dagestan Governorate of the Islamic Republic” was proclaimed on social media. Russian-speaking imams threatened Russia and announced the final expansion of the caliphate to the Caucasus. Numerous people from the Caucasus region traveled to the Middle East to take part in what they viewed as a holy war.

In October 2023, shortly after the anti-Israel protests in Dagestan, a mob, including men with Palestinian flags, stormed a plane landing at Makhachkala airport from Tel Aviv, injuring 20 people. Later analysis revealed that in the weeks before the unrest, a false rumor circulated on local Telegram channels that Israeli refugees were being resettled in Dagestan.

In the 1990s, Russian-backed separatists fought against Georgia, a country that was once part of the Soviet Union, laying the groundwork for a Russian invasion in 2008. And two other former Soviet republics, Azerbaijan and Armenia, have also seen repeated territorial disputes.

Is there a recent history of terrorist violence in Russia?

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been a number of serious terrorist attacks in Russia. Many of these have been blamed on Islamist extremists.

A series of residential bombings in 1999, which Russia blamed on Muslims from the Caucasus, served as a justification for the second Chechen war. Some Russian dissidents and others claimed that the bombings were carried out by agents of the Russian government itself to create a pretext for war.

In 2002, Chechen militants seized a Moscow theater and took around 750 people hostage. More than 100 prisoners died when security forces stormed the theater and killed the hostage-takers. Two years later, Chechen militants carried out a similar attack on a school in the Caucasus in Beslan, taking more than 1,000 people hostage. Over 300 of them died when authorities stormed the building.

Members of groups such as the Islamic State or al-Qaeda have claimed responsibility for numerous other deadly bombings and shootings over the past two decades.

By far the worst attack occurred in March this year, when four gunmen killed 145 people at the Crocus City Hall concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow. US intelligence officials said the attack was the work of the Islamic State Khorasan (also known as ISIS-K), which is active in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the group claimed responsibility for the attack.

The Russian government, which had ignored US warnings of an impending attack, blamed Ukraine and the West but provided no evidence. Four men from Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, were arrested and charged.

Experts say Sunday’s attacks in Dagestan could be an indication of a trend.

“There are signs that the situation could escalate even further,” says Jerome Drevon, a senior jihad and modern conflict analyst at the International Crisis Group, especially given that the Kremlin’s intelligence resources are focused abroad.

Julian E. Barnes And Anton Troianovski contributed to the reporting.