ISW assessed in early June 2015 that one of ISIS’s most likely courses of action during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan would be to declare a governorate in Russia’s North Caucasus. ISIS indeed announced the creation of a new governorate, called Wilayat Qawqaz (Caucasus) in the region on June 23, 2015, after several senior militants in the area pledged allegiance to ISIS. The announcement pits ISIS against the Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus, an official al-Qaeda affiliate that has operated in the mountainous region of southwestern Russia since 2007. ISIS has been setting conditions to establish this governorate in support of its regional expansion campaign since at least January 2015. ISIS’s statements and actions over the next few weeks will indicate whether the organization intends to launch operations through its new Caucasus affiliate, or whether it simply intends to use the pledge as an opportunity to assert its global vitality and reach.
ISIS’s spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani declared the creation of a new wilayat, or governorate, in the North Caucasus region of Russia on June 23, 2015. Al-Adnani named “Abu Mohammad al-Qadari” the leader of the group, and congratulated “the soldiers of the Islamic State” in the Caucasus. Adnani’s statement followed the circulation of a Russian-language audio statement on Twitter on June 21, in which supporters of ISIS in the regions of “Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, and KBK (Kabarda, Balkaria and Karachay)” pledged allegiance to ISIS’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. These areas represent four of the six subdivisions that constitute the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus (IEC) militant group. Militants in these four most frequently conducted domestic attacks in support of the IEC’s stated goals of establishing a Caucasus emirate under sharia law and waging global jihad. The two IEC subdivisions where supporters have not formally pledged to ISIS are Cherkessia and Nogay steppe, which have claimed few attacks since the IEC’s founding.
ISIS’s announcement is especially damaging in light of the IEC’s current leadership vacuum. Russian security forces killed the IEC’s leader, Aliaskhab Kebekov, in April 2015 and it is unclear whether Kebekov’s rumored successor, Magomed Suleymanov, retains popular support within the Caucasus. ISIS’s declaration may catalyze the disintegration of the IEC, giving ISIS new opportunities to launch operations in the region.
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