For Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, the rise of ISIS presents both opportunity and peril. PHOTOGRAPH BY DMITRY KOSTYUKOV / AFP / Getty

Using methods that were brutal, uncompromising, and at times of dubious legality, Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, largely managed to defeat the last remnants of the militant underground. Last year, just fourteen people were killed in violence related to the lingering insurgency, compared with eighty-two in 2012 and ninety-five in 2011, as I wrote in an article about Kadyrov in the magazine this week. But Chechnya’s homegrown insurgency has been replaced by another pressing security threat. Islamic State propaganda has taken root inside Chechnya, especially among the younger generation.

Chechen law-enforcement agencies estimate that between three and four thousand Chechens have travelled to Iraq or Syria to join the group. Most had fled Chechnya for Europe sometime during the First and Second Chechen Wars, but around four hundred to five hundred are believed to have gone directly from Chechnya to the Middle East. (This, in part, explains the falling levels of violence inside Chechnya, experts on extremism in the Caucasus say: the more hard-core and committed fighters have left.)

For Kadyrov, the rise of ISIS presents both opportunity and peril: the danger posed to Russia by the group again proves his importance to the Kremlin, yet it also calls into question his claim to having built an ideal Chechen state, one to which Chechens from all over the world should return home. On February 7th, he played up the former, portraying the tens of thousands of troops who serve under his informal authority as the Russian force most capable of fighting ISIS. On Russian television, he claimed that the “best fighters” from Chechen special-forces units had infiltrated ISIS in Syria and were supporting the Russian bombing campaign. Kadyrov would like to place himself at the center of Moscow’s efforts to back the government of Bashar al-Assad. Russian planes are bombing rebel positions in Aleppo, setting the stage for Syrian and Iranian ground forces to lay siege to the city—a potentially horrific outcome that has led to a renewed, but so far fruitless, diplomatic push from U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

This fall, I spent several days in a Chechen village of several thousand people, from which a dozen or so young people had left to join ISIS in the past year. “The question of Syria is discussed in every family. What’s happening there is not a secret to anyone,” one man, whose twenty-four-year-old brother travelled to Syria to join ISIS, said. Still, family members asked that I not disclose their identities or the location of their village. The repercussions for having a son or brother leave for Syria can be severe, from losing your job to being harassed and followed by the police.

Before he left, the man’s younger brother read the Koran and believed that the new caliphate held the promise of equality and justice. “I saw blood and murder—but we all have the right to make our choices, and he made his,” his brother recalled. “I couldn’t convince him; he couldn’t convince me.” Once he got to Syria, he wrote infrequently, only to say that he was happy and not coming home. He also sent a few photos. His brother pulled out his phone to show me a photo of him in Syria, dressed in brown camouflage, the contours of his young face partially obscured by a thick goatee.

After two months, the man got a voice message from another teen-ager from the same village, who had also left for ISIS-held territory in Syria. He told of an attempt by ISIS fighters to storm a building. A shell exploded near his brother, killing him instantly, along with another Chechen and a man from the neighboring republic of Ingushetia. The battle was inconclusive. “The Almighty has still not given us victory, probably because of the sins of mine and others,” the message said.

One afternoon in the village, I talked with a woman whose only son had gone to Syria. He had left Chechnya some years ago to study medicine, in Moscow, and when he and his mother spoke on the phone, nearly every evening, he showed more interest in his studies than in religion. The last time they talked, a Saturday, he told her of an upcoming exam; she said she would pray for him, and that it was time to find him a wife. “He was softhearted and kind; in one word, golden,” she told me. He disappeared the next day. Two months later, he wrote her a text message saying he was in Syria. “I am on the path of Allah,” he told her. He got in touch again, in August, to tell her he was off for the front. Some weeks later, another Chechen wrote her to say her son had been killed by rocket fire in Ba’aj, in northwestern Iraq.

His mother told me how her husband, her son’s father, died when the boy was nine, and how the family lived in refugee camps in Ingushetia during the two Chechen wars. “He never saw war. We did everything we could to keep him away from it,” she said. “It turned out he needed to go to Syria to die.” What drew him there, and how he could leave her and his four sisters without a man in the family, seemed beyond her comprehension. “It’s an infection, and all our young people have gotten sick.”

Most of those who left Chechnya to join ISIS were in their twenties, too young to have taken part in the two wars. Their motivations were varied: for some it was a search for justice and religious purity; others simply wanted a way out of a stifling environment. One afternoon in Grozny, I spoke to a professor at a local university who knew of about twenty students, including several young women, who had left for Syria. ISIS is a nihilistic cult that offers a grim future, the professor said, but he could identify the sense of desperation that pushes some toward the group. “Thank God my son is older. He’s in his thirties, already too old for this ideology,” he said. “Because what would I tell him: Everything is great? Look at all these new buildings, all these freshly paved roads? Kadyrov is our national icon? Would that convince him? Of course not.”

One afternoon, I sat in the back room of one of the few shops in the village. The shopkeeper, an educated, thoroughly charming middle-aged man, made me cups of thick coffee and told me of his teen-age son who tried to head to Syria last July. His son was moved to tears by a video he watched online of Syrian Army soldiers beating an old man. He began to talk of Syria, that he had an obligation to help Muslims there. The final push came when his father told him that he couldn’t marry a local girl with whom he had fallen in love. “He wanted to get away from us, to take his quiet revenge,” the shopkeeper said. He got as far as a Russian resort town on the Black Sea, when his father managed to catch up with him. It didn’t take long to convince him to come back home. On the way, his father called an old acquaintance in the local police force in the village, who told him to bring him by the station. “He said, ‘Nothing will happen to him. He’ll sign a statement and be let go.’ ”