An Olympic crackdown? Dagestan’s mayor snatched in Russian military raid

But experts suggest there is also a political background to this story. Dagestan, a mountainous region with dozens of different linguistic and ethnic groups – and at least six major ones, none of which is dominant – is largely beyond the ambit of Kremlin politics, and has been slipping into anarchy for well over a decade.

Best known to Americans as the place the alleged Boston bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers, came from, Dagestan is wracked by a low-level Islamist insurgency which carries out terrorist bombings and assassinations so frequently that even the Russian media scarcely bothers to cover them.

Earlier this year President Vladimir Putin sacked the republic’s leader, Magomedsalam Magomedov, also a Dargan, and replaced him with a veteran Moscow politician, Ramazan Abdulatipov, who has no strong roots in Dagestan’s complex ethnic hierarchy.

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