But it’s also where younger Chechens started to radicalize. Meantime, Wahhabi clerics and emirs from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other Islamic countries poured into the Caucasus in the mid-1990s and set up Salafi mosques, which were often funded by Saudi Arabia. Saudi has funded extremist mosques all over the world, but the message to take up the jihadist path was particular powerful in these regions, where Muslims were poor, unemployed and facing continued persecution by the Russian state.

Instead, he and his 18-year-old friend Ramona Bagakashvili took a taxi, first to Akhmeta and then to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, where he waited to catch a plane to Turkey.