On May 26, the beheaded body of Shamil Jikayev, a venerated Ossetian poet and dean of the Department of Ossetian Philology of the North Ossetian State University was found in a village near the republic’s capital city of Vladikavkaz.  Three days later, in a fierce shootout with North Ossetian police forces, Jikayev’s alleged murderer, David Murashev, was shot dead. As Murashev, himself an Ossetian, is said by authorities to have turned to “radical Islam” few years earlier, this incident stirred up talks about the increasingly uncomfortable coexistence of Christian and Muslim communities within North Ossetia, renewing fears of the “jihadization” of a part of North Ossetian Muslims.   

BACKGROUND: Common wisdom has it that North Ossetians have historically made up the last bastion of Christendom in the predominantly Islamic North Caucasus. In fact, back in the 18^th century when the Russian advance into the Caucasus began, the shares of Sunni Muslims and Orthodox Christians are believed to be roughly equal among North Ossetians, even though the religious divide had long been rather formal due to the strong prevalence of the local pagan cults among Ossetians, just as is the case among the vast majority of their neighbors across the North Caucasus. Nevertheless, the concentrated efforts of Russian Orthodox missionaries supported by colonial authorities proved successful as increasingly large numbers of Ossetians occupying the strategically important crossroads of the North Caucasus linking the region to Georgia and the South Caucasus converted to Christianity. This fact ensured Ossetians’ generally neutral or even positive stance to Russia’s often ruthless incursion into the area, turning masses of Ossetians into the agents of Russian colonial rule and gradually alienating them from some of their neighbors, mainly the Ingush, as well as Kabardey Circassians.

Yet as of today, around one fifth of this 500,000 strong people still remain formally Muslims, Islam being the predominant religion of the Digoron, one of three sub-ethnic groups of Ossetians inhabiting the republic’s western areas. The religious split ensured that religion was never historically emphasized by Ossetian intellectuals as the cornerstone of national identity, the bloody conflict with the neighboring Ingush over the Prigorodny rayon in 1992 and subsequent local warfare and terrorist acts widely associated with Islam contributed to an increasingly negative attitude toward the Muslim religion and its adherents among many Ossetians. This gradually led to equaling Ossetian Muslims to the Ingush, with the latter being often represented as the Ossetians’ main ethnic adversary. Moreover, in the internal North Ossetian post-Soviet discourse, Islam was considered alien to the fundamentals of a “civilized”, Christian, and liberal Ossetian society as it started to view itself in stiff distinction to the highly traditionalist areas of the Muslim Northeast Caucasus.  The 2004 attack at a school in Beslan, by an irony of fate a Muslim village historically, was another turning point in this regard as Islam began to be identified as a direct existential threat. Subsequent years boosted that self-perception of a frontline of “civilized” Christianity vis-à-vis “backward” Islam as North Ossetia, being regarded as the ideological, military and political holdout of Russia in the North Caucasus, became a frequent target of indiscriminate and highly lethal terrorist attacks carried out by Islamist insurgents. 

IMPLICATIONS: According to North Ossetian authorities, the reason for Jikayev’s murder was his recent poem entitled “Wolf cubs go to hajj”; prior to being assassinated, Jikayev is said by the investigators to have received threats from local Muslims who found the poem to be insulting to Islam. Whatever the cause of the murder, soon after the tragic incident, a massive crackdown on the parishioners of the Vladikavkaz mosque was carried out by members of local security forces, and 18 people were detained as a result. One detainee was released, while the rest of the predominantly young males including the imam of the mosque were taken away to jails scattered across North Ossetia. Similar processes are said to be underway in other parts of the republic where the hunt for alleged “Wahhabis” often identified as observant Muslims is gaining momentum.  According to some eyewitnesses, drugs and bullets have been planted to the houses of the suspicious Muslims to allow for their detention, which is a widespread practice used by local police both in North Ossetia and throughout the region as part of the regional campaign of fighting “radical Muslims”.

In this context, the case of the once-famous Ossetian jamaat as part of the Caucasus Emirate-led Islamist insurgency is being increasingly emphasized. Qataib al-Khoul (Battalions of Power in Arabic) was the name of an organization that is believed to have established itself back in 2005-2006 by North Ossetian Muslims as part of the regional jihad. Some claim the group never existed while others argue its members were primarily recruited from among ethnic Ingush as part of their anti-Ossetian strategy. This unit was reportedly led by prominent Jihadi fighter Aslan Digorsky, and  gained publicity in the 2005-2008 when it attacked casinos and gambling houses in Vladikavkaz, and engaged in a series of assassinations of high-ranking military and state officials, reaching a peak in 2008 with the murder of the mayor of Vladikavkaz, Vitaly Karayev, who was accused of harassing Ossetian women wearing the hijab in public.  However, following Karayev’s murder, for reasons that are not entirely clear, the activities of the Ossetian Jamaat came to nothing. This likely served as a ground for Doku Umarov, head of the Caucasus Emirate, to abolish  the “vilayet of Iriston (Ossetia)” and to formally incorporate it into the Emirate’s “vilayet of Galgaychö (Ingushetia)” in May 2009.

CONCLUSIONS: Given the religious composition of North Ossetia, this North Caucasian republic has with some remarkable exceptions been regarded as rather immune to the manifestations of homegrown militant Islam.  Facing an increasingly negative attitude of their fellow countrymen toward the religion of their forefathers that has being associated with their ethnic adversaries, some Ossetian Muslims have recently choose to convert to Orthodoxy with others stressing their general indifference to religion.

Yet for a demographically smaller, yet politically significant portion of local Muslims their religious identity gained in importance in the decades following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, even though their ethnic identity still prevailed. Insensitive attacks against observant Muslims coupled with a generally negative stance of mainstream North Ossetian society to observant Muslims as a fifth column of the Ingush and a culturally alien element to Ossetians enhanced the feeling of isolation to which Ossetian Muslims have been exposed. Over time, a small group of them, influenced by the developments to the west and east of North Ossetia’s borders, came under the influence of Jihadi ideology, and increasingly began to see themselves as part of the ongoing jihad. Yet as their numbers were low and – unlike in neighboring republics of the North Caucasus – they lacked popular support, tackling them proved to be easier for Ossetian authorities compared to Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria. Yet the wave of indiscriminate and large-scale reprisals directed at in practice against the republic’s Islamic community that is now underway in North Ossetia seems to be breaking the elusive balance of recent years. This development may lead the republic along the path of Kabardino-Balkaria, where a massive crackdown on observant Muslims largely contributed to the jihadization of a portion of the population.

The potential danger of radicalization of the North Ossetian Muslims is all the more tangible given the fact that they would not have to necessarily look back to retaining – and obtaining – supporters in their homeland, unlike Dagestani and Ingush insurgents who have been generally cautious to avoid civil casualties among their ethnic and religious kin. Importantly, according to some sources, a sort of cooperation between cells of Digoron-based insurgency in North Ossetia and the Kabardino-Balkaria-Karachay jamaat has been established in recent years. From the insurgents’ perspective, North Ossetia is presently a wedge breaking down the North Caucasus insurgency into two parts; spreading the insurgency to the republic would restore the link. That could lead to a much more difficult task for both local authorities and Moscow to tackle the unified North Caucasian Islamist insurgency.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Dr. Emil Souleimanov is assistant professor at the Department of Russian and East European Studies, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of An Endless War: The Russian-Chechen Conflict in Perspective (Peter Lang, 2007).