When Abu Omar al-Shishani, one of the organization’s top military leaders, was killed, his place was taken by Gulmurod Khalimov, known also as al-Tajiki. Both men are Russian-speakers and both are related, through their wives, to the governments of their respective post-Soviet regions, Chechnya and Tajikistan.
The enormous number of Russian-speakers in ISIS, both among the regular soldiers and the leadership, is a phenomenon in need of being studied.
There has been some study of it. Some 500 Kyrgyz have gone to Syria to fight with Isis. Basically, neither Soviet style socialism or liberal democratic captialism have managed to solve the basic economic and social problems of the region. So people are increasingly turning to Islam. Those that feel the most desperate (they are usually not the poorest) have become radicalized. Kyrgyzstan is much more Islamic today than it was ten years ago and it is next to Kazakhstan the most secular Muslim nation in the former USSR. In Tajikistan things have been moving in this direction for a much longer time and in a much more extreme form. The same can be said for Chechnya.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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