About

Send Him 2-3 Years Dagestan and Forget or Send Him To Dagestan is a catchphrase and viral video of Russian MMA fighter Islam Makhachev saying, "If you want your son high-level wrestling, send him 2-3 years Dagestan and forget." The clip comes from a 2024 interview between Makhachev and former professional MMA fighter Daniel Cormier and became the subject of memes throughout 2025 and early 2026 on sites including Instagram Reels and TikTok.

As a meme, the clip is typically used as a reaction, where it is placed after videos of someone, usually a child or teen, acting effeminately, the joke being that sending them to Dagestan for a few years would make them more masculine. Some of the memes are parody "before and after" videos in which someone is shown acting effeminate before spending two to three years in Dagestan and then becoming masculine after.

Origin

On May 30th, 2024, Daniel Cormier posted an interview with MMA fighter Islam Makhachev to YouTube,^[1] garnering over 700,000 views in two years. At one point in the interview, Cormier talks with Makhachev about getting his son trained for wrestling. At the 2:44 timestamp, Makhachev says, "If you want your son high-level wrestling, send him 2-3 years Dagestan and forget."

In early 2025, the clip became the subject of memes on TikTok. One of the earliest known memes was posted by TikToker^[2] @dragomirdemetriusdenis on January 26th, 2025, and shows footage of the user's baby under the caption, "How I explain my wife we need to send him 2-3 years to Dagestan and forget?" garnering over 5 million views in a year.

Spread

The Send Him To Dagestan memes continued to spread through 2025, inspiring a format in which the clip is edited onto the end of other videos where a child is shown acting effeminate.

For example, on February 13th, 2025, TikToker^[3] @gi1hd posted a video captioned, "If your son starts doing this," showing a clip of a young boy in pink dancing, followed by the clip, garnering over 213,000 views in 11 months.

On July 6th, TikToker^[4] @alouche.7 posted a video where he shows an old clip of himself, overweight, under the caption, "send him 2-3 years Dagestan and forget," followed by current-day footage of himself, in shape, doing pushups, garnering over 15 million views in six months.

On December 8th, 2025, TikToker^[5] @xiqizizy posted an AI-generated Pixar movie trailer parody based on the meme, garnering over 15 million views in a month.

On January 3rd, 2026, TikToker^[6] @.a1_wahid posted a video attaching the clip to a video of a child dancing and celebrating after getting a Christmas present, garnering over 63.8 million views in three weeks.

The clip was reuploaded by Instagram^[7] user nasharmma on January 8th, garnering over 2.3 million views and 230,000 likes in roughly the same span of time.

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References