Tajikistan has extradited Madina Bandarenko, the Ossetian wife of a notorious recruiter for the Islamic State extremist group in Tajikistan, to Russia along with her four children.
Bandarenko is accused by Russia of cooperating with and belonging to the Islamic State group and is being held in a prison in Russia's North Ossetia region, according to her mother, Oksana Jeylieva.
Bandarenko is the wife of Parviz Saidrahmonov (aka Abu Dovud), who was sentenced to 21 years in prison in November on terrorism charges in Dushanbe.
Saidrahmonov, who was extradited to Tajikistan from Turkey, was accused of recruiting more than 200 people to fight in Syria and Iraq and was alleged to be behind multiple terrorist activities in Tajikistan, Russia, and Sweden.
He was sentenced on charges of organizing a terrorist group, extremism, and recruiting mercenaries to fight in a foreign country. Saidrahmonov was a migrant worker in Russia when he left in 2014 for Iraq, where he joined the ranks of the Islamic State group.
Swedish investigators say Saidrahmonov was an accomplice of Rakhmat Akilov, an Uzbek man who drove a hijacked truck down a busy pedestrian street in Stockholm on April 7, 2017, killing five people and injuring 10 others.
Akilov, a rejected asylum seeker in Sweden before the attack, was sentenced to life in prison in June 2018.
Saidrahmonov was later captured by Syrian authorities and in mid-2020 disappeared from a prison in the Syrian town of Afrin when Tajikistan was working on his extradition to Dushanbe.
Tajik authorities, who took Saidrahmonov into custody in September, consider him to be "one of the most dangerous recruiters of the Islamic State."
Dushanbe estimates that about 2,000 Tajik citizens joined Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2013-15. Hundreds of them were killed in clashes in the Middle East. Some of those who returned to Tajikistan were either sentenced to lengthy prison terms or received amnesty.