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At least 15 policemen and four civilians, including an Orthodox priest, have died in Russia’s southern region of Dagestan after gunmen attacked churches and synagogues in two cities, officials said.
Russian authorities called the shootings terrorist attacks and said the situation was under control on Monday. They said six of the assailants were killed.
Dagestan is a mostly Muslim region in the north Caucasus that has struggled with a long-running Islamist insurgency. The shootings in the regional capital Makhachkala and Derbent on Sunday evening were the worst terror incident in Russia since militants killed 145 people and injured a further 180 at a concert hall in Moscow in March.
The shootings appeared to be part of an increase in Islamist violence in Russia in recent months. State newswire Tass cited Russian law enforcement sources who said the attackers were “adherents of an international terrorist organisation”.
In a video message on social media app Telegram, local governor Sergei Melikov claimed the attacks had partially been directed “from abroad” and said authorities would continue to hunt down “all members of sleeper cells” active in the region.
“This is a day of tragedy for Dagestan and for the whole country,” Melikov added.
Tass said the attackers included two sons and the nephew of Magomed Omarov, a local official who was subsequently arrested and expelled from President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party.
The attackers threw Molotov cocktails into a synagogue and Russian Orthodox Christian church in Derbent, then attacked policemen guarding the religious sites, according to Baza, a news outlet on Telegram close to law enforcement officials.
Melikov said the victims included an Orthodox priest who had served at the church for more than 40 years.
Half an hour later, another group of attackers opened fire on policemen guarding a church in Makhachkala, threw a Molotov cocktail at a nearby synagogue and attacked traffic police.
Melikov declared three days of mourning in Dagestan and visited the synagogue and church in Derbent on Monday.
Dagestan frequently suffered terror attacks in the 2000s after a separatist insurgency in neighbouring Chechnya spilled over into the region.
Russian authorities launched a vicious crackdown on the militants, some of whom pledged allegiance to international Islamist groups. Russia claimed to have defeated the insurgency in 2017.
Russia blamed Ukraine for the attack on the concert hall in March, without providing any evidence, and accused unnamed western countries of helping the militants even while admitting the US had given security services prior warning of the attack.
Isis-K, an Afghanistan-based affiliate of the Isis militant group, claimed responsibility for the attack. Earlier this month, six prisoners, some of whom had been convicted on terrorism charges, briefly took two jail officials hostage in Rostov, another city in southern Russia. Special forces stormed the jail and killed all six attackers, some of whom had knives, bandannas and flags with the Isis logo.
Last October Russian police arrested 60 people after an antisemitic mob angry over Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza stormed an airport in Makhachkala, which the Kremlin blamed on “external interference.”
Some security experts have said Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and crackdown on civil liberties has misplaced the security services’ priorities and deprived them of resources, leaving Russia more vulnerable to Islamist attacks.
Dmitry Rogozin, a hardline Russian senator, warned on Sunday against blaming Kyiv and its western allies for the attack. “If we ascribe every terrorist attack steeped in ethnic and religious intolerance, hatred and Russophobia to Ukraine and Nato’s scheming, then this red mist will cause us major problems,” Rogozin wrote on social media. “We can see the speck in our brother’s eye, but not the log in ours.”
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