Networked Insurgencies and Foreign Fighters in Eurasia

Jean-Francois Ratelle, Laurence Broers, Jean-Francois Ratelle, Laurence Broers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138296978
• eBook ISBN: 9781351583534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Recent wars in Eurasia have foregrounded the flows of foreign fighters between distinct insurgent battlefronts. Since 2011 thousands of individuals have travelled from the Caucasus and Central Asia to fight in Syria and Iraq. Caucasians have also appeared in the fighting that followed Ukraine's Euromaidan Revolution in 2014. Resolutions of these conflicts promise further movements as foreign fighters return home. This collection of articles presents for the first time in one volume a cross-regional comparative perspective on the trajectories of foreign fighters between the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Ukraine. Drawing on extensive primary sources, contributors theorize the life cycles of foreign fighter waves and the respective roles played by pre-existing insurgent networks, transnational ideologies such as "global jihad" and "Eurasianism", and propaganda framing by insurgent groups such as the Islamic State. They examine regional state responses to the security threat posed by foreign fighters, showing how current security governance regimes can reinforce insurgent ideologies attracting violent militants. Finally they investigate the motivations for foreign fighters to return to their home states in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Arguing for the networked character of insurgencies in Eurasia, this book offers a unique overview of the foreign fighter phenomenon across the continent. It was originally published as various special issues of Caucasus Survey, Terrorism and Political Violence and Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.

Introduction: Networked Insurgencies and Foreign Fighters in Eurasia

JEAN-FRANÇOIS RATELLE
LAURENCE BROERS

For more than 30 years flows of transnational militants, commonly referred to as foreign fighters, have connected insurgent fronts across Eurasia. Geographical location between Central Asia and the Middle East, turmoil following the Soviet dissolution, repeated violent fractures along its peripheries and new technologies of transnational activism have all contributed to the continent’s emergence as a hub of transnational militancy. The encounter between an atheist superpower and local resistance in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 led within a few years to the arrival of hundreds of Middle Eastern foreign fighters, inspired by a new vision of Islamic activism. The internal wars in Chechnya, Tajikistan (and to a lesser extent the South Caucasus) accompanying the collapse of the Soviet Union not long after subsequently attracted many of these militants and their ideologies, sometimes with transformative effects for what had begun as nationalist-secular causes. New networks emerging from the military victory of the Chechen resistance over the Russian army in 1994 led to the spillover of the conflict to the wider North Caucasus in the 2000s (Campana and Ratelle 2014) and the establishment of an insurgent Caucasus Emirate (Imarat Kavkaz, IK). From the mid–2000s foreign involvement diminished as Russia regained the upper hand over the North Caucasus insurgency. But since 2011 conflict in Syria and Iraq associated with the rise of the Islamic State (IS) and other insurgent groups breathed new life into Eurasian trans­­national militancy. Reversing the direction of travel, Eurasia became a significant exporter of foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq. Although it is its Islamist, and specifically jihadi, element that has attracted the most international attention, the foreign fighter phenomenon embraces a wide range of insurgent ideologies and motivations. Caucasian foreign fighters also appeared in Ukraine in the fighting following the Euromaidan events of 2013–2014.

In the light of these successive movements it has become increasingly clear that behind the flattening, homogenizing trope of “global jihad”, the transnational terrain of insurgency is highly diverse, factionalized and uneven. It is vital to understand the individual circumstances of distinct insurgent fronts, and their interactions through both the circulation and transformation of ideas, goals and individual human experiences among them. Several critical dimensions of diversity emerging from interactions among Eurasian insurgent battlefronts demand attention. There is first the diversity of ideological frames deployed to define and legitimate insurgency. Parochial ideologies and transnational “power ideas” (Hughes and Sasse 2016) have interacted in far more complex ways than reified understandings of global jihad as ideologically unified allow for. There is then diversity in the viability and opportunity structures available in different theatres of insurgency. Insurgent fronts have withered and bloomed, which in combination with transformations in their ideological foundations, has allowed the possibility of substitution when one particular front becomes untenable and another appears. Yet mutual reinforcement is not the automatic outcome: fungibility between insurgencies can breathe new life into depleted fronts, or further divide and fragment them. And there is diversity in the ever-shifting constellations of the human workforce of insurgency, who in moving between different theatres can consolidate, destabilize or transform them with new ideas, motivations and skills.

While touching on all three parameters of insurgent variation, this collection of essays focuses on the third to offer, for the first time in one volume, a cross-regional comparative perspective on the trajectories of foreign fighters across different insurgent fronts in Eurasia, from the Chechen Wars of 1994–2009 up to the present day movements between the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and, beyond “jihadist” conflict, Ukraine. The collection has its roots in a workshop organized by Cerwyn Moore of the University of Birmingham, a leading scholar of the foreign fighter phenomenon and board member of Caucasus Survey, in September 2015. Entitled “Exporting Jihad: Foreign Fighters from the North Caucasus and Central Asia and the Syrian Civil War”, the workshop brought together several leading researchers working in this field. We express our gratitude to Cerwyn Moore, to the Economic and Social Research Council for supporting this workshop and to the Russia and Eurasia Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House for hosting it.

What became clear at the London workshop was the need for more academic research on the intertwined nature of insurgencies in Eurasia and the Middle East. The importance of the North Caucasus insurgency as a source of fighter flows to Syria and Iraq was evident from the beginning of the insurgency against Bashar al-Assad. If in smaller numbers Central Asians, the vast majority via Moscow, also featured in recruitment processes supporting IS, leading us to include a perspective on a Central Asian case, Tajikistan. Similarly, Georgia and Azerbaijan have also emerged as reservoirs supplying small but consistent flows of foreign fighters to Iraq and Syria, and in the case of Georgia, also to Ukraine. All these Eurasian fighters followed similar networks travelling from Russia to Turkey to Syria, often joining common insurgent factions, and, more recently, joining forces to commit terrorist attacks on foreign soil (for example, the June 2016 Atatürk airport attack in Turkey).

On the basis of the London workshop a subsequent special issue of Caucasus Survey followed in 2016, on which this volume is based. The special issue foregrounded the networked character of insurgencies in Eurasia, in which distinct insurgent fronts borrow, incorporate and transform ideas, goals and human experiences among themselves in a constantly shifting constellation. The high demand for research in this field led us to consider expanding the special issue into a book providing in one volume a longitudinal analysis of the entangled nature of supply and demand for foreign fighters in and from Eurasia. In order to historically and analytically contextualise the more recent research, we decided to include three other articles published by key authors in this field (Cerwyn Moore, Paul Tumelty, Ben Rich, and Dara Conduit), as well as a conceptual and historical discussion of the foreign fighter phenomenon by David Malet. These four articles supply important historical, conceptual and theoretical insights demonstrating the interactive nature of insurgencies, mobilization networks, and foreign fighters in Eurasia over the last 30 years.

The Foreign Fighter: Analytical Elusiveness and Empirical Persistence

In his discussion of foreign fighter mobilization across the world, David Malet highlights the analytical elusiveness of a concept on which there is little terminological or conceptual consensus. He shows how attempts to bring analytical nuance to different categories of transnational militancy have lost out to securitizing generalizations of policy-makers. To maintain rigour Malet proposes four definitional orientations distinguishing: the transnational insurgent; the foreign-trained fighter; the foreign terrorist; and the foreign fighter, defined as a “non-citizen of a state experiencing civil conflict who arrives from an external state to join an insurgency.” Malet shows that several common assumptions about foreign fighters – that their activities owe to singular motives of kinship ties, state support or pecuniary gain – are all problematic in the face of empirical evidence.

Malet argues that contrary to the stereotype of “global jihad” and the ostensible efficacy of Islamist transnational insurgency that this term projects, it is the persistence of jihadis rather than their mobilization or effectiveness that distinguishes this category of foreign fighter. This persistence he attributes to policies in home and host states preventing their (re-)integration and/or promising persecution of returning foreign fighters. This has encouraged many jihadists to remain at large in weakly governed spaces in quest of other “just wars” to protect Muslims. In contradistinction to the policies actually enacted in many Eurasian states (as subsequent contributions explore), Malet argues that assisted integration, or even no programme at all, may be more effective in curtailing transnational jihadist networks by re-absorbing their members into ordinary life.

Afghan Arabs, the Post-Soviet Wars and Islamist Insurgency

In their contributions, Moore and Moore and Tumelty analyse the involvement of “Afghan Arabs”, Arab mujahedeen who had fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in the Chechen Wars (1994–1996, 1999–2009). They push back against reductive portrayals of the appearance of foreign fighters in Chechnya as evidence of just another jihadi front controlled by Al Qaeda. They point instead to the multiple conjunctures of Soviet dissolution, secular Chechen nationalism, nascent Islamic revival in the North Caucasus, Middle Eastern religious activism and a contingent of young but battle-hardened Afghan Arabs. They highlight the eclectic and contextual motives (religious, kinship-linked and ideological) of foreign fighters arriving in Chechnya.

Building on his earlier work with Tumelty, Moore’s second essay here makes a conceptual contribution by elaborating the notion of “fictive kin” as a form of solidarity beyond classical bonds of blood kinship, ethnicity or nation that mobilizes transnational insurgents. Drawing on a biographical dataset of 164 activists present in the North Caucasus from 1992 to 2013, Moore argues that their profiles, motivations and roles as combatants, trainers, health professionals, financiers and so on, are far more diverse and complex than the catch-all “foreign fighter” term allows for. He suggests that “Volunteers fight for a range of reasons, but the combination of an extant network, an ideological framework, and a mixture of veterans and inexperienced activists” provides a powerful combination driving the mobilization of communities. His analysis points to a consistent tension between affective and ideological appeals to Islam as a binding force, and factional proliferation through ostensibly unified fronts such as the IK. These factional divisions subsequently followed – indeed structured – movements and mobilizations of Caucasians to Syria. The concept of fictive kin and its emphasis on how political engagement generates imagined solidarities shows how problematic the term foreign fighter can be when the analytical emphasis is excessively placed on either “foreign” or “fighter”. Rather, his analysis calls for the foreign fighter phenomenon to be analysed as emerging from different kinds of network operating within wider social movements.

In military terms foreign fighters represented only a small fraction of the forces fighting Russia in Chechnya (between 80 and 100 in the First Chechen War), and their role in the military victory over Russia was peripheral. Yet they had other wide-ranging effects. Foreign fighters played key roles in the recruitment and radicalization of local insurgents, increased local capacities in terms of battle experience and tactical skills, set up training camps, helped to channel local radicalization into more extreme methods such as suicide bombing, and increased resource mobilization in the Middle East. Moore and Tumelty also describe the substantive contribution made by foreign fighters in the promotion of the Chechen struggle through the use of online propaganda. Ibn al-Khattab and his followers revolutionized the use of the internet in the waging of “jihad through the media” capable of reaching Russian public opinion and a new generation of jihadis in Europe and the Middle East. Yet if the foreign fighter experience in Chechnya could be considered a success compared to those in Bosnia-Herzegovina or even Tajikistan, their presence ultimately imperilled the military victory over Russia. Focusing mainly on the interwar period (1996–1999), Moore and Tumelty analyse the generational split inside Chechen society reinforced by foreign fighters leading to the rise of Salafist-jihadist ideologies. This ultimately proved a source of debilitating fracture and enabled Moscow to successfully portray Chechnya as just another front in the “global war on terror” (Mesbahi 2013).

Moore and Tumelty’s work accords with the wider finding that foreign fighters represent a double-edged sword for indigenous insurgent movements (Bakke 2014). This theme is taken up here in Rich and Conduit’s comparison of the impacts of jihadist foreign fighters on secular-nationalist causes in Chechnya and Syria. They argue that the marginal military contribution and attraction of international Islamic solidarity and funds that foreign fighters bring are outweighed by their destructive impacts on indigenous opposition and their alienation of other key international audiences. Indeed, they conclude that for both Chechnya in the 1990s and Syria post–2012 the presence of jihadist foreign fighters resulted in the jihadization of indigenous groups, with “a catastrophic impact on international and domestic perceptions of the opposition.” In Chechnya foreign fighters weakened the secular-nationalist de facto state that emerged from the First Chechen War by challenging its normative structure and polarizing its various factions. This led ultimately to inter-factional civil war severely eroding the credibility of the Chechnya-Ichkeria project and its standing even with sympathetic international audiences. In Syria foreign fighters within the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra proved among the most effective fighting forces challenging the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Yet their presence also damaged oppositional cohesion, accentuating divergence between transnational and national political goals and agendas. They also allowed Assad to portray the civil war as a war of defence against foreign terrorist groups, a narrative playing well to the international community’s entrenched inclination to view Islamist groups as homogenous.

All of the above essays underscore the complex relationship between the positive outcomes of enhanced military and international fund-raising capacities that foreign fighters are presumed to bring and a host of contingent factors, including the existence of supportive networks, authoritative leadership figures, and understandings of local dynamics allowing foreign fighters to combine effectively with indigenous actors. Where foreign fighters were able to win local acceptance and blend (or at least not interfere) with local power structures, they were able to record significant successes. This, as Moore and Tumelty observe, appears to have been the case for Ibn al-Khattab in Chechnya in the late 1990s. But as they then show, the Chechen case provides clear demonstration that the “help” that foreign fighters bring often comes at heavy, even crippling, cost for indigenous insurgents.

Reverse Flows: Eurasia as an Exporter of Foreign Fighters

The remaining essays are all focused on contemporary issues associated with waves of foreign fighters travelling from post-Soviet Eurasia to the Middle East, and intra-continental movements to the Russia-backed insurgency in eastern Ukraine. Since the onset of large-scale insurgency in Syria, the Caucasus has emerged as a consistent source of foreign fighters migrating to fight there and in Iraq. Caucasian foreign fighters have also appeared in Ukraine in the fighting following the Euromaidan events of 2013–2014. Yet few scholarly works have actively addressed the theme of Caucasian foreign fighters (for exceptions see Souleimanov 2014 and Moore’s 2015 essay reproduced here). Most of what we know has been generated by governmental reports (Europol 2015), research conducted by think-tanks and NGOs (The Soufan Group 2015, ICG 2016), and contributions from journalism and the blogosphere.¹ What commonalities and differences characterize the motivations, pathways and insurgent careers once in situ in Iraq, Syria or Ukraine of these foreign fighter flows from the Caucasus and Central Asia?

The following five articles address this question through empirically innovative materials on Caucasian and Central Asian foreign fighters which can be used by researchers building cross-regional comparative studies. Edward Lemon and Jean-François Ratelle base their analyses on extended ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Islamists in Moscow and in the North Caucasus. Michael Cecire’s article is inspired by several field research trips in Georgia and interviews conducted in that country. All three authors offer unique insider perspectives that move beyond the more common reliance on secondary sources. At the same time, the foreign fighter phenomenon in Syria and Iraq has taken on a historically unique online aspect. Mark Youngman’s contribution examining the split within the North Caucasus insurgency makes ample use of rich primary sources, collected online, including communiqués of North Caucasus rebel leaders. In his examination of jihadi networks in Azerbaijan, David Lonardo also makes use of extensive online material published and disseminated by Azerbaijani fighters and insurgent groups.

Although a wide array of issues as well as different regional dynamics are covered here, we identify three major cross-cutting themes shared across most of these five essays. First, several contributions stress the uneven interactions between networks and ideologies across space and time in facilitating the movement of foreign fighters abroad. If pre-existing networks played key roles in the initial movement of foreign fighters to wage war abroad, transnational ideology inspired by IS’s spectacular successes on the battlefield subsequently took their place. Paradoxically, however, the refraction of this transnational ideology back into local contexts only exposed the contours of competing networked factions in their domestic contexts. Secondly, the articles here discuss in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Networked Insurgencies and Foreign Fighters in Eurasia
• 2. Foreign Fighter Mobilization and Persistence in a Global Context
• 3. Foreign Fighters and the Case of Chechnya: A Critical Assessment
• 4. Foreign Bodies: Transnational Activism, the Insurgency in the North Caucasus and “Beyond”
• 5. The Impact of Jihadist Foreign Fighters on Indigenous Secular-Nationalist Causes: Contrasting Chechnya and Syria
• 6. Between Caucasus and caliphate: the splintering of the North Caucasus insurgency
• 7. North Caucasian foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq: assessing the threat of returnees to the Russian Federation
• 8. The Islamic State and the connections to historical networks of Jihadism in Azerbaijan
• 9. Building resilient secular citizens: Tajikistan’s response to the Islamic State
• 10. Same sides of different coins: contrasting militant activisms between Georgian fighters in Syria and Ukraine
• Index