Mosques that are dangerous to walk

Why the security forces declared war on the Dagestan Salafi. Reporting Daniil Turovsky

In the past few months, Salafi mosques have been closed in Dagestan, whose parishioners profess ultra -conservative Islam. Believers could not defend the largest of them, located in Makhachkala. The security forces believe that in Salafi mosques they recruit recruits to the Islamic State ( the organization is prohibited in the Russian Federation ). Parishioners are massively put on “preventive accounting”, which limits them in movement in the republic, the Salafites are constantly detaining the police. The special correspondent of Medusa Daniil Turovsky went to Dagestan to talk with the security forces and people who are called “potential terrorists”.

Eastern mosque

Imam Muhammad Nabi Sildinsky for almost a month, from January 31, 2016, does not leave his "eastern" mosque, located on the outskirts of Khasavyurt. Here he feels in relative safety - the building is constantly guarded by 20 people.

To go to his office, you need to pass a spacious courtyard with washing shells, cafes, three floors with prayer halls, a corridor with rooms for religious lessons. In the office of Muhammad Nabi on the table is a snow -white monitor (when the computer goes into sleep mode, the background appears on the screen with a rainbow). On the wall near the front door is a frame in which Shahad (the main Islamic prayer) in Arabic is bred in black in black: “I testify that there is no other god except Allah, and I also testify that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.”

“The authorities want to make me a terrorist,” explains Nabi his recluse. “They will substitute me.” My house will be surrounded - and that’s it. I will be here as much as necessary. "

Muhammad Nabi is one of the most respected Salafi preachers in Dagestan. Around the "eastern" mosque, he gathered the Khasavyurt supporters of "pure Islam", denying innovations in this religion, which appeared after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.

The security forces consider the imam to be one of the leaders of local Salafis; And for the police, the Salafites are potential terrorists, Wahhabis: either “forest” militants of the local terrorist organization “Imrat Caucasus”, or soldiers of the “Islamic state”.

On January 31, OMON fighters, operatives of the EE Center and FSB officers and FSB officers came to the Severnaya Salafi Mosque in Khasavyurt. They brewed the front door and announced that the mosque was closed. About 20 men in masks and camouflage, with Kalashnikov assault rifles, remained near her. One of the parishioners was indignant : “The time of the evening prayer! Boss, what is there? Allow the prayer to do! "

The security forces were explained by the closure of the mosque by the fact that there is no imam in it - the previous one was imprisoned for storing a grenade launcher, but they were not appointed new. “If a person interferes, they can find anything from him,” Murad Dibirov, deputy imam of the “eastern” mosque, explains to me. - We often find grenades, cartridges. I won’t be surprised if tanks and planes begin to find in houses soon. ” “It could be planted for a very long time, but we, as we managed, tried to facilitate this matter,” says the imam of the “eastern” Muhammad Nabi. “He was given eight months.” Imam, whose grenade launcher was found, according to Nabi, should soon be released.

The parishioners of the security forces said that the closure of the “North” was also connected with the fact that supporters of the “Islamic state” gather in the mosque. Murad Dibirov denies this: “There are not even Friday sermons there; This is rather a prayer room than a mosque. ”

The next morning, after the closure of the "North" near the "eastern" mosque, thousands of parishioners gathered. Muhhamad Nabi spoke to the audience: “We are not terrorists who kill people by lawlessness, how they accuse us! We do not violate other people's rights, we do not capture other people's mosques! ” After that, three East employees went to the city administration for negotiations. They returned with nothing - they were not accepted. Then Muhammad Nabi called on all supporters to go to the city hall: five thousand people (about 130 thousand live in Khasavyurt) went to the city administration, chanting "Allah Akbar!" And "We will return our mosque!"

One of the parishioners told Medusa that during the procession in the Messengers, Dagestan IG militants allegedly called for the Salafites not to go peacefully, but to pick up weapons and "declare the jihad to the authorities.

“We went so that people standing behind the closure of mosques understand: the crowd, young people should be somewhere. And if they close all the mosques, then other people will open the youth doors and lead their own way. There are a lot of calls to various groups on the Internet, ”explains Dibirov. - The administration [Khasavyurt] is afraid that we can go out onto the streets. But we can easily collect 50 thousand people in two days. We can take and block the railway - here is not far. We have nothing to lose. We can already substitute or shoot us at any time. ”

After the procession of Muhammad Nabi and Murad Dibirov, they missed the administration. Officials and security officials agreed to open the “northern” mosque.

Preventive accounting

“We were given a condition for us to find there [in the“ northern ”mosque] Imam, not registered with the police,” says Dibirov. - We found this. But now, ten minutes before our meeting, he called me and said that he was called to the police department. He is now registered. "

The security forces are suspicious of all local Salafites: most of the parishioners of the Salafi mosques are listed in the lists of preventive accounting, among the people “WHH-OKE” (that is, “taking into account the Wahhabis”). Employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs began to actively replenish them in mid -2013, shortly before the Olympics in Sochi. Not only the parishioners of mosques, but also any Dagestanis who are similar to the Salafis (following the Qur'an, go in trousers tucked above the ankles and with a long beard) are put on preventive records. According to the "Caucasian Knot", about 100 thousand people are already registered with the police (the population of the entire republic is 3.01 million people)

Law enforcement agencies do not just consider the Salafites potential terrorists. Among the adherents of “pure Islam” (they are also called Wahhabis, “fundamentalists”) there are many supporters of jihad. They learned the idea of ​​the ideologist of the radical wing of the Muslim Brothers Said Kutba about the division of mankind into “the world of Islam” and “the world of Jahilia” (the world of ignorant, which must be conquered and correct). The same idea is the basis of the “Imrat Caucasus”, “Taliban”, “Al-Kedi” and “Islamic State”.

The jihad of the Dagestan “forest militants” throughout the zero was directed, first of all, against the police who personify state power for them (they are now attacking them several times a month).

“We are persecuted for following the Qur'an, that is, for faith,” the parishioner of one of the mosques tells me. “Only those who have real suspicions of the gang underground are on preventive records,” objects my interlocutor in the Khasavyurt department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

In their struggle against terrorists, the authorities practice a “wide approach”, actually equating to the suspects of all followers of Salafi Islam, the authors of the report “War without war. Violations of human rights during the struggle of the Russian authorities with armed underground in Dagestan ”released by human rights activists from Human Rights Watch in June 2015.

“Everyone who is registered passes through the same procedure: they take fingerprints, saliva, blood, take a gait, write a voice, ask to write an essay and read on the camera,” says Gasan Gadzhiev, head of the Makhachkala movement “For Muslim Rights”. The data is collected so that later - in the event that the “potential terrorist” becomes a real action movie - it was easier to identify.

For those who refuse to participate in the registration procedure, problems begin. The report of Human Rights Watch tell the story of Shamsutdin Magomedov from Shamkhal, a suburbs of Makhachkala. In January 2014, he refused to hand over DNA samples. A month later, a group of policemen came to his house, he was accused of aiding an armed underground. According to the official version, during the search they found explosives. He was detained, tortured - beaten and made a “swallow” (they tied the wrists and ankles behind his back). During torture, the police informed him that all this was due to the refusal to "participate in the collection of samples of DNA of Wahhabis." A few months later, the court gave Magomedov six months for storing weapons, which he had already spent in jail; After the release, he immediately handed over DNA samples.

Those who have fallen on the “WHA-lecture” are under constant supervision, says the representative of the Makhachkala Salafi mosque, Muhammad Abu Hamza Magomedov. “Three people call several times a week,” he says. - First, the district police officer asks where you are. Then the inspector calls the district police officer, asks if the district police officer called. And on the inspector there is still an inspector. He checks if two others called. ”

“All this is“ feeding ”for them [police],” says Imam Muhammad Nabi. “To be excluded from the list, you need to pay eight to ten thousand rubles.”

My interlocutors from the leadership of the Salafi mosques believe that the "vocational school" pushes moderate believers to radicalization. “Imagine the life of a young man put on a preventive record,” says Murad Dibirov, deputy imam of the East Mosque in Khasavyurt. -He can be stopped at the post on the road, taken to the police department for two to three hours, and sometimes for half a day. They come to him with searches. They constantly call him. If he is going to leave for another city, he must report this to the district police officer. And you take into account the Caucasian temperament or imagine that all these inconvenience deliver to a man when his wife is nearby. And then you can understand what a young man feels when he sees a fellow villager on the Internet, who has left for Syria, sitting in a large car with a large automatic and telling that he has complete freedom - without humiliation. ”

Some suspects of complication are simply killed by militants. “They announce who [counter -terrorist operation], surround the house, explode, and they themselves receive stars,” says a representative of one of the Salafi mosques. Such special operations take place in Dagestan every three to four days.

“There are ideological guys who say that they want to blow up the state,” Muhammad Abu Hamza Magomedov, deputy imam in the mosque on the Hungarian fighters in Makhachkala, is outraged. - They have few brains, such fools in bulk. But now to kill every fool or what? How is it? He has a brother, son, father. What will happen when they shoot or put someone's son? Will take revenge. They will hate. If possible, they will take revenge. ”

Majachchkala mosques

One of the employees of the Makhachkala Ministry of Internal Affairs told me that the cleansing of the Salafi mosques is connected with the All -Russian campaign against IG - to Dagestan from Moscow, they launched an instruction “restore order”. According to him, if “Wahhabis cannot be reassured and closed, then you need to squeeze out of the country” to the so -called “far forest” - Syria. From Dagestan to IG, from 900 to five thousand people left, according to various sources.

In recent months, employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs have detained the Salafi mosques in Makhachkala (on the streets of Kotrov and Hungarian fighters, in the country village of Palmyra, the village of Shamkhal, Leninkent), in Derbent (Imam was accused of rape, his supporters fought up with the police), Kizilyurt, Buinaksk, and the village of New Kurush. The security forces did not allow parishioners to go on Friday prayer, many were delayed, boarded buses and transported along the police department. These operations always took place unofficially, the Ministry of Internal Affairs refused to somehow comment on what was happening.

The imams of all Salafi mosques during such shares unofficially received an offer from the security forces to leave their posts and transfer the place they approved by the Imam from the spiritual department of Muslims Dagestan (DUMD). Each time, such a proposal was accompanied by phrases: “Otherwise, we will close the mosque at all”, “we will find a grenade launcher”, “You don’t want to finish how Alibekov” (Imama Omarashab Alibekov was found in a car in 2014; the crime was not disclosed).

Like law enforcement officers, DUMD publicly denies his participation in pressure on Salafi mosques. At the same time, the DUMD and the Salafites have an implacable conflict because of the very basics: the Salafites consider the Sufis (mystical direction of Islam, preaching self-improvement) to the DUMD collaborators-for cooperation with secular authorities. Salafites do not support a secular state, but Sufis, on the contrary. “He or Salafit, if a person does not dream of Sharia, he is not a Muslim,” said in 2011, one of the leaders of the Dagestan Salafites Abu Umar Savitlinsky, forced to leave for Lebanon, was accused of financing IG (a revealing plot came out on Ren TV).

By the end of 2015, the security forces drew attention to the Makhachkala mosques "An-Nadiria" and the mosque on the street of the Hungarian fighters. Both were considered the place of recruitment of militants; From the second shortly before, one of the most popular Dagestan preachers Nadir Medetov left for IS. On November 20, the Al-Nadiria mosque was captured by strong young people who introduced themselves as supporters of the DUMD-either athletes, or disguised security officials, their witnesses described . In the brawl, several people were injured. After it, the representative of the DUMD - the imam of the central mosque of Makhachkala Muhammadrasul Saaduev went inside it. He surrounded the guards reassured parishioners. “Everything was done today to prevent the lock on the doors of this mosque,” ​​he said. - The authorities said: go close this mosque ... to get rid of rumor and glory about this mosque, I had to take such a step. But he was made to make the mosque open and people came here. ”

On the same day, the DUMD appointed the Imam of the “An-Nadiria” Davuda-Haji Tumalaev, vice-rector for public relations of the Dagestan Humanitarian Institute. Four days later, another person made an imam. And already on November 29, the doors were closed to the mosque. At the gate they set to be on duty two cars with the police - they are still standing there.

“Closed and will never open,” one of the police officers told me. - This is a recruiting headquarters. We do not let anyone in. Those who come to pray are driving away. ”

Opposite them, Muhammad sits on the sidewalk. He is with a beard, dressed in sports trousers, wrapped above the ankles. The parishioner explains that he came to look at the mosque that he went to for several years.

“This whole situation is very nervous,” says Muhammad. Two to three times a week, the district police officer calls him. At least once every two weeks he is stopped on the street, taken to the police department, checked at the base of extremists, ask the same questions (“Why didn’t you leave for Syria?”, “Why do you have a beard?”). “Since I have a beard, it means that I am a potential terrorist,” he says. - If a potential terrorist, then I can leave for Syria. There was a blow at the post - they immediately called ( this refers to the explosion in Derbent on February 15, 2016 - approx. Medusa ). They asked where I was. And it is always necessary that you have an alibi - otherwise there will be many problems. I would like to hide - at least in the forest, at least in Syria. "

On November 29, 2015, the spiritual administration called to change the imam in the Salafi mosque on the street of the Hungarian fighters; According to the Dagestan newspaper "New Delo" - "In connection with the geopolitical situation in the region."

Between parishioners and employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, who conducted raids in the mosque, there were more than once clashes, sometimes even with shooting . Ibadullo Nabotov found a grenade and drugs from this mosque and drugs from this mosque, he was given six months of a colony.

The mosque itself is located away from the center of Makhachkala. On the fence next to the entrance there is a sign with an advertisement for Hijama (bloodletting treatment), a tent with halal pies is not far open. One of the preachers of the mosque Muhammad Abu Hamza Magomedov arrives at the black tinted Lexus. Without waiting for questions, he begins to make excuses for the Nadir Medetov, who had once led from here, who once led the mosque lessons for children and read the sermons.

“He is a bright preacher, emotionally said that many people like him in Russia,” says Magomedov. “But there is underground propaganda!” At first we did not notice, and then only noticed. Imam warned him several times, and then kicked him out. ”

After the expulsion from the Medetov mosque, he continued to lay out his sermons on Utube. In October 2014, he was detained with a gun, put under house arrest for two months; In May 2015, on his channel, Medetov published a video in which he swore an IG. He was accepted by Abu Jihad, the closest ally of one of the leaders of the Islamic State Umar al-Shishani (Medusa spoke in detail about him).

According to Magomedov, there are still supporters of Medetov among the parishioners of the mosque. “We try to explain everything correctly to them, explain that Nadir made a mistake,” he says.

In addition to pressure on the mosque and mass preventive accounting in Dagestan, the murders of the imams also occur. В декабре 2015 года неизвестные расстреляли имама Сулеймана Сулейманова, ранее, в сентябре 2015-го, застрелили имама суфийской мечети в селе Новый Куруш Магомеда Хидирова. После убийства силовики закрыли в селе салафитскую мечеть — в нее якобы ходили убившие имама боевики.

Имамы стараются максимально обезопасить себя. Например, Мухаммед Наби из Хасавюрта всегда перемещается по городу в сопровождении двух-трех машин сторонников. «Убийства имамов — это акция запугивания, — считает Мухаммед Абу Хамза Магомедов из махачкалинской мечети на улице Венгерских бойцов. — Дают понять: будете сильно рыпаться — мы вас уничтожим. Да и населению это послание»

Пятничный намаз

К полудню 19 февраля 2016 года в молельных залах «Восточной» в Хасавюрте на пятничный намаз собираются около полутора тысяч человек. На улице нет ни одного полицейского — это удивляет и радует прихожан. Ожидая начала проповеди имама Мухаммада Наби, некоторые собравшиеся читают Коран с экранов мобильных телефонов. Многие, заходя в зал, подворачивают брюки — по улице они так не ходят, чтобы не привлекать лишнего внимания.

Заместитель имама Мурад Дибиров протискивается ближе к первому ряду, устанавливает видеокамеру, чтобы записать проповедь и выложить ее потом в социальных сетях.

Во время проповеди Мухаммад Наби призывает собравшихся терпеть. «Люди работают, чтобы мы оставили нашу религию, они 24 часа в сутки ищут наши ошибки, — рассуждает он. — Нам нужно не сомневаться. За религию много чего нужно терпеть».

После намаза несколько прихожан признаются мне, что готовы защищать свою мечеть с оружием в руках. Один из них — серьезный парень лет двадцати — говорит: «Больше всего мы хотим, чтобы нас оставили в покое и дали жить так, как мы хотим — по шариату».

«Ни один человек не ищет войну, но не нужно трогать вопросы, которые нельзя трогать — например веру, — говорит имам Наби. — Они хотят в городе панику, хотят какой-нибудь случай. Но Россия — большая страна, везде есть мусульмане, и когда им тут не оставляют покоя, они могут взорваться в другом регионе».

В России признаны террористическими и запрещены организации: «Братья-мусульмане» (2003), «Талибан» (2003), «Аль-Каеда» (2003), «Имарат Кавказ» (2010), «Исламское государство» (2014)

Daniil Turovsky

Хасавюрт — Махачкала (Дагестан)