This is a Horror!

Coordinated attacks in the two largest cities of Dagestan, with synagogues and churches as targets, the beheading of a priest, the taking of hostages, and among the five attackers were the sons of a local official and an MMA fighter - that's what we saw, reports Index.

The videos showed, it is recalled, the police reaction and their chase through the streets of Makhachkala while darkness slowly fell. The number of police casualties is significantly higher than that of civilians, which suggests that even worse news about civilian deaths could come to the public, writes CNN.

Only partial information is available, which is done quite deliberately. For decades, Moscow has been trying to maintain control over Islamist extremism, which it has fueled throughout the North Caucasus through brutal repression and poverty.

This attack - almost three months after attackers stormed Moscow's Crocus City Hall and killed 133 people - confirms the uncomfortable fact that the Islamic threat to Russia has metastasized, as it has around the world, and that the younger generation harbors the same terrible hatred according to the past and present of the Kremlin.

As stated, now the key will be the reaction of the judiciary. More deaths among police officers suggest they were prime targets or faced strong resistance when intervening. However, the Russian judiciary is already overburdened by the war in Ukraine because many employees in that sector ended up on the battlefield.

But the situation is bad in Dagestan, where protests took place in the first months of the war because the men there were disproportionately mobilized.

"Dead and absent Dagestani sons are a special problem for Moscow, and when they come home from the front to an unstable environment, it is even critical," the text states.

Extreme Islamism has become a curse for Russia after the brutality of the two wars in Chechnya. Putin came to power in 1999, promising to crack down on the extremists allegedly responsible for the bombings in Moscow.

Chechen separatist militants like Shamil Basayev became increasingly radical in their ideology as Moscow's "cleansing" campaigns rampaged through Chechen villages in the early 2000s, often shooting men of military age at random.

Attacks on Christians in Dagestan on Sunday are reminiscent of the most serious crimes committed by militants - the siege of a school in Beslan in 2004, where 300 people, most of them children, died in an attack on the mostly Orthodox population.

The response of the security forces was flawed until special forces arrived and broke the siege, suffering heavy casualties.

Russian President Vladimir Putin secretly came to the area to visit the wounded in the hospital in the middle of the night. Beslan was a manifestation of the wound he promised to heal when he came to power. His visit was not recorded photographically at all, and it is clear why, he points out further.

The perpetrators of the crimes in Beslan had a complex history that spoke to the fact that the Chechen wars had ignited the entire region.

They were mostly not Chechens, but from nearby Ingushetia, another Russian region hit hard by the brutal war against extremism and separatists. Their decision to launch such a horrific attack - and there could only be one real outcome of planting explosives in basketball hoops above the heads of children in the gym on the first day of school - came, they later said, because of the brutality they had seen and experienced.

The North Caucasus came back into focus when two of its former residents committed a bombing in Boston in 2013.

Their connections with Dagestani extremism turned out to be insignificant. Most reports suggested that the older brother had tried to be recruited by local jihadists and had been hanging around Makhachkala for weeks, hoping to get an invitation.

But then Dagestani extremists were very selective. The recruits would be expected to sit in isolation for months, without the use of telephones or other contact, before the jihadists would release them for their training in dense forests among zealous militants eager to take innocent lives.

Since then, nothing has improved, and the younger generation listened to the propaganda of the Islamic State, the failed caliphate of 2014, which reinforced their fantasies. They are fueled more powerfully by the preaching and branding of ID-K, the Middle Eastern branch of the group in South and Central Asia, which is growing.

The Kremlin thought it could defeat that horror, but it only intensified it with brutality. It is about a place that Moscow holds dear but will never allow to secede. This is a furious wound for the Kremlin and a reminder of how Putin came to power.