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Russia Is a New Front for Militant Islam
(Washington Post) Leon Aron - A new brand of radical Islam is rising in Russia, fueled by Russian fighters eager to perpetrate acts of terror at home. When Moscow declared victory in Chechnya in 2009, it suggested that the threat of radical violence had been largely contained. But militant Islam's fundamentalist teachings have spread throughout central Russia, propagated by Russian imams trained in the Middle East. Today, an estimated 20 million Muslims (including 6.5 million migrants from Azerbaijan and Central Asia) live in Russia, up from 14.5 million in 2002. There are an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Muslims in Moscow alone, making Russia's capital the largest Muslim city in Europe. The Russian Foreign Ministry estimates that there are 5,000 people from Russia and the former Soviet Union fighting alongside the Islamic State. The writer is director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute.