A Dagestani counterterrorism op illustrates the challenges of researching violence in the North Caucasus

One story has been bothering me all week. It concerns a recent counterterrorism operation in Dagestan, where the authorities claimed to have killed four suspected terrorists and arrested a fifth.

The biggest problem with the incident is the lack of any verifiable information that would allow us to judge whether the claimed terrorist threat was genuine. This is an extreme version of a problem that is common to reporting on insurgency and terrorism in the North Caucasus. So I thought it worthwhile to unpack the event and its implications

Here’s how I’ll tackle this story:

• What the authorities claim happened
• The gaps and contradictions in the official account
• The problems this incident pose for assessing instability

What the authorities claim happened

According to the National Antiterrorism Committee (NAK), on 5 March the security services imposed a counterterrorism operation (KTO). The incident, in which four alleged militants were killed, took place in the settlement of Semender, in Makhachkala’s Kirovskiy Rayon. No one from the security services or the civilian population was hurt.

NAK alleged that the group were planning a terrorist attack on an Interior Ministry facility in Kaspiysk, and were acting on instructions from the Islamic State. Dagestan’s operational headquarters, meanwhile, reported that the authorities were acting on intelligence about a planned terrorist attack and that the suspects had resisted arrest.

The authorities also reported that they had found a cache near the scene of the incident containing grenades, grenade launchers, improvised explosive devices, automatic weapons, a pistol, and cartridges.

A two-minute video shot at night accompanied the NAK report, showing a traffic police car and another car, which presumably belonged to the suspects. The bodies and windows of both vehicles were riddled with bullet holes. The video also showed various members of the security services milling around the scene with their faces concealed, as well as weapons and other items.

The KTO — the first to be imposed in Dagestan since last June’s terrorist attacks in Makhachkala and Derbent — was lifted several hours later.

A few days later, Dagestan’s operational headquarters reported that, no later than June 2024, two of the suspects had joined together to try and form an armed group, and they had been joined by three more people no later than November 2024. It claimed the fifth member of the group had been arrested, but offered no details as to when and where he had been detained — although the implication from the statement was that it was part of the same operation in which the others had been killed.

Unverifiable information and gaps in the story

Imagine a detective walking onto a crime scene. They can see the story that the scene is supposed to tell. But something just doesn’t look right. It looks staged. From experience, they can tell something is amiss, but it’s hard to say what exactly it is.

This report is a little like that.

On the surface, the story isn’t that unusual. Media outlets often rely exclusively on official sources. Incidents like this happen on a regular basis in the region.

Look a little longer, however, and there are things that just don’t sit right. There is the lack of names or verifiable details. More often than not, the authorities at least mention the names of the suspects. Here, they’ve provided nothing that could be checked or followed up on. The video accompanying the official statement deliberately conceals any vehicle identifiers: These are always out of shot in the video, which again makes it hard to check.

Then, there are the gaps and contradictions in the story. The written statement from the authorities makes no mention of vehicles being involved, or even where exactly the incident took place. Local media suggested that the operation was intelligence-led: They said that the authorities discovered the terrorist plot and imposed the KTO. But they also said that the police tried to check the documents of the group, who then opened fire on them and were killed in response. These two parts of the story are unlikely to both be true. If the security services had precise information on the group and its plans, then the traffic police would not take the lead and conduct broad sweeps. If they were conducting random "document checks" and came across the group by chance, then they authorities learned about the planned attacks suspiciously quickly: The sun had barely risen before the media “knew” about the Islamic State links. The fifth suspect appears from absolutely nowhere, after the fact. And so on.

Something, in other words, just doesn’t sit right. And it prompted several commentators to raise questions about how closely aligned the official narrative was with reality.

The consequences of unanswered questions

It would be great to offer a solution to this problem. There are a variety of OSINT techniques that can be used to find and verify information, and they can serve us well in many cases.

The problem, in this case, is more fundamental: it’s only possible to find and verify information if the information exists in the first place.

But it’s worth reflecting how incidents like this can distort our interpretations of the security environment. When statistics are compiled, this will look like every other incident. Triangulation – the claimed solution of many incident tracking projects, like the Global Terrorism Database – is nothing more than a mirage when all of the information circulating traces back to the same source, i.e. the security services.

On the other hand, the doubts can fuel suspicion of the authorities. It is well known that the security services inflate their figures, and disguising rights violations and extrajudicial killings as counterterrorism operations is established practice. One public figure noted that the operation occurred on the same day as an expanded meeting of the Interior Ministry, attended by President Vladimir Putin — giving the security services a success to report on.

Cynical? Undoubtedly. But the problem with the official approach to terrorism in the region is that such cynicism can often be well-founded.