Local elites and law enforcement mounted increasing pressure on militants, with police operations and shootouts in towns and forests eliminating militant leaders and rank-and-file across the region. And the militancy began to be majority of fighting groups had abandoned the organization to follow the apparently rising star of ISIS. A concerted military effort by Moscow to crush the insurgency in advance of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics is thought to have resulted in the killing of hundreds of fighters. At the same time, an apparent policy among authorities in the region proposing and facilitating the exit of radicals and potential militants to Turkey in the run-up to the Olympics is thought to have increased an already busy flow out of the country.

The Caucasus Emirate was effectively replaced by a regional branch of ISIS called ever-decreasing support from outside. And yet attacks have persisted both in the region and further across Russia. 

Since 2015, ISIS has claimed responsibility for around 30 attacks over the region. Most have been small-scale, and in most cases, the militants were killed during or immediately after.

In the same period, ISIS increased its activity outside the North Caucasus region: 

Dec. 27, 2017: A bomb blast in a St. Petersburg shop wounded 27.

May 5, 2018: Gunmen attacked police in Nizhny Novgorod in 2016, wounding three.

April 4, 2017: Gunmen attacked police in Astrakhan, killing two.

Aug. 19, 2018: A knife attack in Surgut, Siberia, wounded seven people. 

In addition, ISIS claimed responsibility for the downing of an airliner flying Russian tourists home from Egypt in October 2015, killing all 224 passengers and crew. 

According to the Russian security forces, these attacks are just the tip of the iceberg. Reports of prevented terrorist attacks, often connected to ISIS, are frequent. In his yearly reports to the media, Caucasus Knot studied the identities of militants who had been wounded or killed in clashes with security forces in the North Caucasus, and found that between 2016 and 2019, almost 90% of militants killed were younger than 35. They also found that the proportion of younger militants is growing: In 2015 70% of fighters wounded or killed were under 35; in 2018, that increased to 95%. In some clashes, for example a series in Grozny in December 2016, all killed were aged 20 or under. 

This shift is significant in that the younger generation represents men shaped by events after the