By Leon AronIn June, three suicide bombers entered Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, where they killed 45 people and wounded 229. Although only one of the terrorist was from Russia (the other two were Uzbek and Kyrgyz), it is almost certain that that their last words to one another were in Russian. It is estimated that between 5,000 to 7,000 Russian-speaking jihadists have made Russian the second most popular language of Daesh, after Arabic.
That Russia is becoming widely-spoken is indicative of the explosive internationalization and the vastly expanded recruitment patterns of jihad based in Russia and former Soviet Central Asia. Behind this development is a confluence of broad demographic, religious, and political trends that have swept across Russia and post-Soviet space in the past two and a half decades — and that continue to be present today.