19 people die in attacks in the Russian region of Dagestan

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At least 15 police officers and four civilians, including an Orthodox priest, were killed in the southern Russian region of Dagestan when gunmen attacked churches and synagogues in two cities, officials said.

Russian authorities described the shootings as terrorist attacks and said the situation was under control on Monday. They said six of the attackers were killed.

Dagestan is a predominantly Muslim region in the North Caucasus that has long struggled with an Islamist insurgency. The shootings in the regional capital Makhachkala and in Derbent on Sunday night were the worst terrorist attack in Russia since militants killed 145 people and injured another 180 at a Moscow concert hall in March.

The shootings appear to be part of a rise in Islamist violence in Russia in recent months. State news service Tass cited sources in Russian law enforcement agencies as saying the attackers were “supporters of an international terrorist organization.”

In a video message on the social media app Telegram, the region’s governor, Sergei Melikov, claimed the attacks were partly directed “from abroad” and said authorities would continue to hunt down “all members of sleeper cells” active in the region.

“This is a tragic day for Dagestan and the whole country,” Melikov added.

Tass said the attackers included two sons and the nephew of Magomed Omarov, a local official who was later arrested and expelled from President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party.

The attackers threw Molotov cocktails at a synagogue and a Russian Orthodox church in Derbent and then attacked police officers guarding the religious sites, according to Baza, a news portal on Telegram close to law enforcement.

According to Melikov, among the victims was an Orthodox priest who had served the church for more than 40 years.

Half an hour later, another group of attackers opened fire on police officers guarding a church in Makhachkala, threw a Molotov cocktail at a nearby synagogue and attacked traffic police officers.

Melikov declared three days of national mourning in Dagestan and visited the synagogue and church in Derbent on Monday.

Dagestan was frequently the target of terrorist attacks in the 2000s after a separatist insurgency from neighboring Chechnya spread to the region.

Russian authorities cracked down brutally on the insurgents, some of whom had pledged allegiance to international Islamist groups. Russia claimed to have crushed the uprising in 2017.

Russia blamed Ukraine for the attack on the concert hall in March without providing any evidence and accused unnamed Western countries of helping the insurgents, but acknowledged that the United States had warned its intelligence services about the attack.

Isis-K, an Afghanistan-based offshoot of the militant group Isis, claimed responsibility for the attack. Earlier this month, six prisoners, some of whom had been convicted of terrorism, temporarily took two prison officers hostage in Rostov, another city in southern Russia. Special forces stormed the prison and killed all six attackers, some of whom were carrying knives, headscarves and flags bearing the Isis logo.

Last October, Russian police arrested 60 people after an anti-Semitic mob angry about Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip stormed the airport in Makhachkala. The Kremlin blamed “external interference” for the offensive.

Some security experts believe that Putin’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and his crackdown on civil liberties have shifted security agencies’ priorities and drained them of resources, making Russia more vulnerable to Islamist attacks.

Dmitry Rogozin, a hard-line Russian senator, warned on Sunday against blaming Kyiv and its Western allies for the attack. “If we attribute every terrorist attack marked by ethnic and religious intolerance, hatred and Russophobia to Ukraine and NATO’s intrigues, then this red fog will cause us big problems,” Rogozin wrote on social media. “We can see the speck in our brother’s eye, but not the beam in ours.”