Through the darkness of his prison cell, the deep-orange glow of henna still illuminates Abdul Aziz’s face: The jihadists he once commanded called him Barbarossa, the red beard. From the sweltering back streets of old-city Hyderabad, Aziz had travelled more than 6,000 kilometres, fighting in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bosnia, before arriving in the emerald-green mountains of Chechnya. Lit up by the fire of fanaticism, Aziz had come prepared to die. “We came seeking martyrdom,” he once said. “All we wish for is the bullet that hits our chests.”
Earlier this week, four ethnic Tajik jihadists linked to the Islamic State attacked the Crocus Theatre in Moscow, killing at least 130 people. Even though the savage killing will seem familiar to those who witnessed 26/11, the jihadist campaign in the northern Caucasus and Central Asia has been little noticed in India.
Aziz’s story helps us understand why this battlefield is closer to home than we might imagine. Long before the Islamic State emerged as a platform for jihadists in the region, Islamist ideologues and military commanders shared experiences and resources to spread their movement across borders. The growing influence of the Islamic State in Central Asia could give renewed momentum to the jihadist movement in India, too.
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The Indian roots of Central Asian jihadism
Even as war raged around the world in 1914-1918, a soft-spoken Kokand cleric abandoned his home in Central Asia’s lush Ferghana valley and headed for the bleak desert-scape of Ajmer. Likely recruited by a group of travelling Tablighi Jama’at preachers, scholar Michael Fredholm writes, Muhammadjon Rustamov Hindustani studied for several years at seminaries in India, including the famous Dar-ul-Uloom in Deoband. Then, in 1927, he returned to Central Asia, to preach a new kind of religious ideology that he hoped could catalyse mass resistance against the hardline Soviet policies intended to stamp out Islam.
Less than a decade after his return, though, Rustamov was despatched to a Gulag in Siberia, charged with spreading sedition. Let out of prison to fight alongside Soviet forces, he was wounded near Minsk in 1944. Then, he obtained employment as a state-sanctioned Imam, or prayer leader, in Tajikistan.
Even as he worked for the Tajik Academy of Sciences in Dushanbe Rustamov ran a clandestine Islamic seminary in Andijon and slowly emerged as the most important fundamentalist preacher in Soviet Central Asia. Tapes of his sermons were secretly distributed through cells of followers, inspiring a generation of Islamist activists.
Like India, the northern Caucasus and Central Asia were shaped by complex conflicts between religious identity and imperialism. Eighteenth-century Russia, as it expanded into territories then controlled by Iran and Turkey, faced resistance from local Muslim rulers, historian Igor Lipovsky has recorded. Later Soviet policies including the mass deportation of entire populations, left a deep legacy of bitterness.
In 1940, central Asian Islamists allied with Nazi Germany to gain independence from the Soviet Union, sparking brutal insurgencies. The Central Intelligence Agency funded the remnants of these pro-Nazi jihadist networks, journalist Ian Johnson has written, to undermine Soviet communism.
From 1989, as the Soviet Union imploded, Islamist movements in Central Asia and Chechnya believed the time had come to secure independence. Trained in the course of the long conflict in Afghanistan, and funded by transnational Islamist networks, they would spark what was among the most brutal jihadist campaigns the world has seen.
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An Indian jihadist’s foreign war
The son of a police constable, Aziz’s life was shaped by Hyderabad’s violent and communalised political milieu. Educated at the Anwar-ul-Uloom College in Mallepally, Aziz discontinued his studies in 1984 and apprenticed with an electrician. But he soon fell in with the gang of Mohammad Fasiuddin, from which many jihadists would emerge. The would-be jihadist cut his teeth in an anti-prostitution campaign targeting the Mehboob ki Mandi red light district, led by the neo-fundamentalist Darsgah Jihad-o-Shahadat.
Late in 1989, Aziz got a job in Saudi Arabia, where he worked as an electrician with the construction giant Bemco. There, Aziz would say in an interview with a Pakistani magazine, he encountered the speeches of Osama Bin Laden’s mentor and co-founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Palestinian jihadist Abdullah Azzam. “I heard him rallying the youth to come forth and go to Afghanistan. I decided to go and check the matter for myself. This was the beginning of my jihad.”
Following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, intelligence records seen by ThePrint allege Aziz’s involvement in global jihadist movements deepened. Early in 1994, he volunteered to fight against Serbian forces in Bosnia, together with jihadists from Europe, West Asia and Africa.
Later, in 1996, Aziz travelled to Moscow and on to Shatoy, near Grozny in Chechnya, carrying funds for the Saudi Arabia-born jihadist Samir Saleh Abdullah al-Suwailem. From his interviews and speeches, it seems clear he hoped to leverage these connections to build a jihadist movement within India.
Aziz never did succeed in starting a jihad in his homeland: Arrested in 2001, ahead of a planned bombing of a Ganesh Chaturthi procession, he fled only to be deported from Saudi Arabia in 2016. The Central Asian movements he had become involved in, though, proved far more successful.
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The sunrise of the Russian jihad
From 1991, the Islamist movements birthed by the Deoband-educated Rustamov had reached criticality. Trained alongside ethnic Tajik and ethnic Uzbek jihadists in Afghanistan, the Chechen commander Shamil Basayev led a guerrilla war against Russian troops. Low morale and strained resources compelled Russia to sue for a ceasefire. Basayev was appointed Vice-Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic by President Aslam Maskhadov.
Through the campaign, Basayev repeatedly turned to cold-blooded terrorism. At the town of Budyonnovsk in 1995, scholars Anne Speckhard and Khapta Akhmedova recorded he kidnapped over a thousand civilians and executed over 130. A similar attack took place at Pervomayskaya in 1996.
Late in 1999, riding on the back of the Taliban’s success in Afghanistan, Basayev despatched forces to stage a coup in neighbouring Dagestan. Russian forces intervened, ending the de-facto independence of Chechnya. The country’s capital, Grozny, was levelled in the fighting; thousands of civilians were killed.
To avenge the violence, Chechen jihadists took 800 people hostage at the Nord-Ost theatre in Moscow in 2002, leading to the death of 129 of them. In 2004, the Riyad ul-Saliheen Martyrs Brigade, founded by Basayev, seized control of a school in the town of Beslan, sparking a hostage crisis which ended in the death of 334 people, including 186 children—the most murderous terrorist strike since 9/11.
In 2009, 29 were killed when the group bombed a Moscow-bound high-speed train; in 2010, a similar strike claimed the lives of 39 commuters.
“The mujahid,” Basayev wrote in a book merging jihadism with new-age spiritualism, “never asks anyone for permission to strike with his sword; he just takes the sword in his hand. He will never waste his time explaining his actions; he is faithful to what has been predetermined by god.”
Even though the Chechen jihadist threat was crushed by President Vladimir Putin, with the aid of regional allies, it is now clear that force could not extinguish the threat. For years now, scholars Lucas Webber and Riccardo Valle have noted, the Islamic State has been absorbing regional jihadist forces, like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, as well as Tajik Islamists. Ever since 2022, these jihadists have launched a series of attacks from safe havens inside Afghanistan.
The savage strike in Moscow has allowed the Islamic State to position itself as the inheritor of the transnational jihadist movement once represented by organisations like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and al-Qaeda. As Abdul Aziz did a generation ago, Indian jihadists will almost certainly be looking to it for inspiration and support.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)