NOVOSASITLI, RUSSIA — In 2013, a quiet 23-year-old from Russia named Ahmed decided to travel to Syria to fight with an Islamist battalion against President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
Two years later, now a veteran of Syria’s civil war and on parole from a Russian prison, he looks back on that moment with a kind of dazed regret.
“It was a sickness,” the native of Dagestan, a mostly Muslim region in southern Russia, said in an interview in his home town this month . “It was an epidemic.”
Ahmed is one of at least 20 men to have fought in Syria who came from Novosasitli, a village of 2,000 people in Dagestan where many have embraced Salafism, an ultraconservative form of Sunni Islam that has spread in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Update: Islamic State on recruitment spree in Russia (AP)
WNU Editor: For as long as I can remember, the Soviet Union .... and now Russia .... has always had an Islamic militant problem. This is just a continuation of a centuries old religious conflict .... but with different names.