In the early hours of a recent Sunday, plans for the later arrival of an international flight from Tel Aviv began circulating on a popular Dagestani platform on the social media juggernaut, Telegram. The rallying cry, amplified through a channel called Morning Dagestan, implored its followers to converge at Dagestan’s principal airport in Makhachkala to greet the inbound passengers.
The flight’s scheduled arrival at 19:00 hours was met with an astounding turnout, as hundreds of youthful men flooded the airport’s perimeters, overpowering the security personnel. A spontaneous mob made its way onto the runway, and an audacious few even clambered onto the roof. Their intentions centred on a singular objective: to identify and confront Jewish passengers.
Videos capturing the chaos vividly portray a canvas of waved Palestinian flags and the echo of antisemitic choruses. The local police labored for hours to dissolve the anarchic crowd. Subsequent reports from Russian news outlets reveal around 60 arrests from the incident.
The swift and surprisingly foul tide caught the security forces off guard. The question, then, is how the rioters orchestrated their actions so cohesively. The BBC followed an investigative crumb trail of the shared communications on Morning Dagestan and discovered additional local Telegram chats permeated with similar antisemitic sentiments and the pursuit of violence.
Morning Dagestan, a public channel of notable influence, was noted for its anti-Russian and Islamist tenor, advocating for the cessation of what it terms Moscow’s oppressive presence in the Caucasus. Strangely enough, the channels’ subscriber base had witnessed a drastic escalation from 50,000 to over 65,000 within days.
Sharing daily posts about regional events, Russia’s incursions into Ukraine, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the channel’s diverse content offering appealed to a wide range of viewers. Explicit support for Hamas — designated as a terrorist group by the UK and numerous other countries but not by Russia — featured prominently in this content.
On the appointed Sunday, detailed posts offering instructions to protesters intending to gather at the airport could be found on the channel’s feed. These plans included the formation of a block at the exit to confront individual passengers disembarking from Israeli flights.
What is the identity of the entity behind Morning Dagestan? Recent findings have linked the channel to Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian parliamentarian who sought refuge in Ukraine in 2016 and subsequently obtained Ukrainian citizenship. Although Ponomarev claimed that his support for the channel was ceased in September 2022, he seems to have contradicted himself, referring to the channel as “our channel” as recently as August 2023.
Dagestan’s governor Sergey Melikov and Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova utilized Ponomarev’s connection to levy accusations of the Makhachkala airport riots against Ukraine. However, the channel has since refuted any associations with Ponomarev or Ukraine.
The outbreak of antisemitic violence calls attention to the cultural diversity in Dagestan, home to many ethnic groups including a predominant Muslim population and a longstanding Jewish community. Sociologist Rasul Abdulkhalikov ascribes the catalyst of the violence to the regional authorities, who have suppressed pro-Palestinian rallies despite the widespread support for the Palestinian cause among Dagestan’s youth. According to him, the persistent spread of hate speech and misinformation on online platforms like Telegram, WhatsApp, and Instagram only helped sow deep-seated prejudices and harden attitudes.
