Russian police raids UFC star’s fight club in crackdown on extremism

Police in Russia’s Dagestan region have raided a fight club linked to a star of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) as they hunt for supporters of a terrorist cell that killed 20 people last week.

Video showed three military vehicles, two black unmarked vehicles and more than 20 Russian soldiers on Friday surrounding the club in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan.

Russian news channels said the club was owned by Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov, father of Khabib Nurmagomedov who was the UFC lightweight world champion for three years.

“Security forces have identified three fighters from the school who were in close contact with a participant in the terrorist attacks in Dagestan,” said the Shot Telegram channel, considered close to the Russian authorities.

“The head coach and other athletes were also interviewed.”

Wrestling and ultimate fighting are hugely popular sports in Dagestan and training clubs often form the nucleus of communities. Their champions and trainers are regarded as local leaders and a counterbalance to Kremlin-imposed authority.

Friday’s raid was linked to an attack five days earlier by Islamic gunmen that killed at least 15 Russian security agents and five others in Makhachkala and Derbent, two hours away.

Shootouts are relatively common in Dagestan but Andrei Soldatov, a senior fellow at the centre for European policy analysis, said that these attacks came three months after gunmen killed 150 people at a music concert in Moscow and suggested that Russia’s federal security services (FSB) have become distracted from stopping terrorism, previously a priority.

“The FSB is busying itself with a programme of domestic repression, adding ever-more activists and artists who object to the Ukraine war to its growing list of so-called terrorists,” he said.

Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999 promising to impose control in the North Caucasus where the Russian army had been humiliated in a war against Chechen rebels in 1994-96.

He carpet-bombed Grozny, the Chechen capital, ignored torture and murders by Russian soldiers and paid off local warlords to achieve this stability and, for the past 15 years, Chechnya and neighbouring Ingushetia and Dagestan have been relatively peaceful and terrorist attacks in Moscow limited.

But now even Kremlin loyalist commentators have begun to warn that this control is beginning to slip.

“It is clear that there is a problem with Islamist terrorism, and it is very serious. We need action from the authorities,” said Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser.

Stability in Dagestan has also become more important to Putin since he made a deal with Iran in 2022 to receive drones. Many of these drone shipments are sent across the Caspian Sea to Makhachkala.

Local factors are also at play in the mainly-Muslim Dagestan which has made it more volatile.

While people in most Russian regions are too scared to protest, hundreds of people in Dagestan have demonstrated against power and water cuts and the mobilisation of young men for Putin’s war in Ukraine. In October last year, a mob also briefly captured Dagestan’s only airport and ransacked it looking for Jews to lynch.

Harold Chambers, an analyst focused on the North Caucasus, said that heavy-handed tactics by the Russian security forces could also be worsening security in the region.

“Regional authorities have learned no lessons from decades of counterterrorism efforts. They continue to display gross incompetence and wilful ignorance,” he said.