DUSHANBE, July 14, 2015, Asia-Plus – An article “How Russia’s Labor Migration Policy Is Fueling the Islamic State” by Karoun Demirjian posted on
The Washington Post’s
website on July 11 notes that Tajik migrants and religious advocates say that if the Islamic State (IS) is recruiting from Tajikistan, it is driven more by economics than ideology.
Since the start of the year, a new Russian migration law has required foreign workers from countries outside the Eurasian Economic Union customs bloc to pass Russian language and history tests, acquire expensive permits and pay steep monthly fees to keep the jobs they have been doing for years. The law has reportedly had a particularly severe effect on Tajikistan, where remittances account for almost half the national income. The World Bank expects them to drop by 23 percent this year.
Meanwhile, IS recruiters are at the ready, offering large sums of cash to desperate, unemployed workers to go fight in Syria. And many — given the lack of options in the poorest of the former Soviet republics — are answering the call.
“If our citizens who are without work, who are young, who don’t have a salary, who don’t have a life, are offered a golden city and told ‘you can earn more money, you can improve your conditions’ — naturally he would feel that he would be much better off going to fight in Syria,” Mavjuda Azizova, of the International Organization for Migration’s Tajikistan office, said in an interview recently. “More than 400 of our citizens are in Syria, officially, and it could be even more. Those are just the ones we know by name.”
The extent of the Central Asian recruiting threat is unclear, according to the article. Russian diplomats routinely warn of a pipeline of fighters running from Central Asia to extremist groups in Syria and Iraq, and there is ample anecdotal evidence of Tajiks — from the security officer to university students and migrant workers — joining the Islamic State. But Western academics studying the region say such warnings are overblown — bolstered perhaps by national agendas and global security concerns. The idea that Islamist extremist groups would seek Tajiks as foot soldiers in their armed quest for a caliphate is both obvious and paradoxical.
Tajikistan has a long, largely unsecured border with Afghanistan that could be as open to extremist transit as it has been to an illicit regional drug trade.
“If you can’t find work, if you can’t provide for yourself, and you live in this system with a high level of corruption — a person will either become a criminal or go to support the Islamic State,” said Oinihol Bobonazarova, a well-known human rights activist who ran as the main opposition candidate for president a few years ago.
“In most cases, those people that go are very poor. It’s not about religion, it’s about poverty.”
Bobonazarova likened Tajikistan’s dependence on the Russian market to a “hostage situation.” In fact, Russia’s role in perpetuating the instability roiling Tajikistan goes deeper than this migration law: It’s in Russia, experts say, where Tajiks and other Central Asian migrants are exposed to extremist ideologies, in the mosques they attend alongside Chechens and other Muslim communities with closer ties to the Islamic State.
“If migrants are going to Syria from Russia, nobody will know how they got there,” said Muzaffar Olimov, director of the SHARQ Research Center in Dushanbe, who said that while radicalized Tajiks may head to Syria, they won’t inspire widespread social support for religious fundamentalist groups or an Arab Spring-style social uprising on the home front. “For that you would need different circumstances, different facts — people just don’t want to go for that here.”
