As Russia continues to pummel ISIS targets in Syria, Russian special forces on Sunday wiped out a cell of militants in one of its own republics — a cell that, reports out of Russia say , had sworn allegiance to the Syria-based terrorist group and was instrumental in recruiting Russian Muslims to travel to Syria and join ISIS as fighters in the conflict there.
“The gang had organized channels for sending local residents to Syria to fight alongside terror groups,” the Anti-Terrorist agency said in a statement following the raid, which it said caused no civilian casualties.
The special forces personnel who carried out the raid in a rural, hilly area outside the city of Nalchik, the capital of the Kabardino-Balkaria Republic in southern Russia, emerged without taking any casualties, the agency said.
The ISIS-linked terror cell in the mountainous North Caucasus region also appeared to be in the process of planning attacks of its own inside Russia. The special forces troops operating on behalf of Russia’s National Anti-Terrorist Committee found at least two improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and a large arsenal of automatic weapons and ammunition.
According to one report, counter-terrorism authorities in Russia believed the ISIS affiliate group was plotting significant terror attacks to be carried out in “busy public places” in Nalchik, a city of about 240,000.
The operation against the ISIS cell in Russia was carries out in two parts, with 11 militants killed in the first phase of the operation, and three more early in the evening, in a separate shootout in the city.
Video of the aftermath of the raids can be viewed above, on this page, courtesy of RT .
The first raid began at about 8 a.m. on Sunday — midnight United States Eastern Time — when the special forces troops tracked 11 militants to an underground bunker in a wooded area outside of Nalchik. The troops had first spotted the local militants during a patrol of the area.
According to a report on the Kremlin-owned English language news agency RT , the anti-terrorism troops surrounded the bunker and ordered the holed-up militants to surrender peacefully. Instead, the group responded with gunfire and grenades.
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A sequence of firefights ensued, lasting until about 1 p.m. local time. By then, all 11 ISIS-connected militants in the bunker were dead.
The troops found that the bunker was equipped for the militants to live there for an extended period, and that the area around the hideout was booby-trapped with land mines, according to a report by the Russian news agency Interfax .
The North Caucasus region, home to a large segment of the Russian Muslim community, has long been known as a hotbed of Islamic extremist activity. About 3,000 Russians are believed to be in Syria fighting for ISIS, with the majority of them hailing from the North Caucasus area.
In addition to Kabardino-Balkaria, the North Caucasus also include the republics of Chechnya and Dagestan.
One of the 2013 Boston Marathon terrorist bombers , Tamerlan Tsarnaev, spent about six months in Dagestan, where his family still lives, in the year before he and his younger brother, Dzhokar Tsarnaev, carried out the Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three and injured more than 260 others.
Sunday’s raids on the terror cell allied with ISIS were the second in the past two weeks in Nalchik.
On November 10, anti-terror special forces troops stormed a high-rise building in Nalchik where they had information that 27-year-old Robert Zankishiev was hiding. Zankishiev was the leader of Vilayat KBK, a militant Islamic group allied with ISIS and part of a web of local terror groups known as the Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus .
Zankishiev was killed in the November 10 raid. He was wanted in connection wit the murders of several area law enforcement and political officials — one of whom was gunned down with his 10-year-old son looking on, according to a report in The Moscow Times .
According to an Associated Press report , the entire region where the Russian special forces carried out their raid is “fertile ground” for ISIS recruiting.
[Featured Photo via RT YouTube Screen Capture]
