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 Uzbekistan was among the first countries to offer practical anti-terrorist support to the United States in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Indeed, it became the first of Central Asia's former Soviet republics to permit U.S. troops and aircraft on its territory. To date, around 1, 500 U.S. Air Force and Special Operations personnel have been deployed to the country's Khanabad Air Base which lies just 90 miles from the Afghan border. Such assistance as the Uzbek President Islam Karimov has extended has been motivated less by altruism than by the fact that America represents a powerful new ally in his ongoing counterinsurgency campaign against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU).
The unrest that led to the formation of the IMU began in December 1991, when some unemployed young Muslims seized the Communist Party headquarters in the eastern city of Namangan, incensed at the mayor's refusal to give them land on which to build a mosque. The men were led by Tohir Abdouhalilovitch Yuldeshev, and Jumaboi Ahmadzhanovitch Khojaev. Yuldeshev, a 24-year-old college drop-out, was a well-known mullah in the Islamic underground movement, while Khojaev was a former Soviet paratrooper who had served in Afghanistan where he was said to have developed a high regard for the mujahidin against whom he fought and revitalized his Muslim faith.
The group led by Yuldeshev and Khojaev, who later adopted the alias Juma Namangani, after his hometown, were members of the recently formed Uzbekistan branch of the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP). Disillusioned at the IRP's refusal to demand the establishment of a Muslim state, these men set up their own splinter movement, Adolat (or Justice) which called for an Islamic revolution in Uzbekistan. Karimov banned Adolat in March 1992, arresting 27 of its members. The group's leadership fled to Tajikistan, enlisting with the IRP there. With the outbreak of that country's civil war, Yuldeshev moved to Afghanistan, later beginning a networking odyssey around the world's Islamic states, visiting Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. He also met with various intelligence agencies, requesting funds and sanctuary. He received both from Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence, and was based in Peshawar from 1995 to 1998. It has been claimed Yuldeshev was also funded by intelligence services and Islamic charities in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. He also met with Chechen rebel leaders during the first Chechen war of 1994-96, as well as establishing underground cells of the Adolat party across Central Asia which would be crucial in the IMU's campaigns five years later.
Meanwhile, Namangani fought in the Tajik civil war, establishing a reputation for himself as a daring fighter and becoming a revered and charismatic leader. When the war ended, Namangani at first refused to accept the cease-fire. Eventually he was persuaded to do so, settling with his family and some fifty of his men at a farm in the village of Hoit. Here he began working in the transportation business and, it has been alleged, first became involved in heroin smuggling as a way of feeding his growing camp of followers, which attracted many of Central Asia's Islamic radicals, disaffected at the ceasefire in Tajikistan which many viewed as a sell-out. Proceedings from drug smuggling were also used to finance the group which, in 1998, became known as the IMU. This connection with drug trafficking has continued, and the organization reportedly handles 70 percent of the heroin and opium traffic through Central Asia.
The IMU's creation was announced from Kabul by Namangani and Yuldeshev, the latter having settled here by this time as a guest of the Taliban. Yuldeshev was also given a residence in Kandahar, where Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban's spiritual leader, and Osama bin Laden also lived. By now Yuldeshev had met bin Laden, who recognized the Uzbek as a potential ally in Central Asia, a region where al Qaeda had few contacts and cultivated him as such. Namangani and Yuldeshev decided to move their operations to Afghanistan in 1997 in the face of fresh crackdowns in Uzbekistan, provoked by a series of bloody murders attributed to the Uzbek Islamic extremists. Moreover, the ceasefire in Tajikistan made it an unreliable sanctuary, while the Taliban made natural allies for Yuldeshev and Namangani, not least in that Karimov was supporting the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan.
The United States believe bin Laden supplied most of the funding for setting up the IMU, with some Uzbek and Tajik officials saying the al Qaeda leader encouraged Yuldeshev and Namangani to organize such a the group in the first place, which declared a jihad against the Uzbek government and sought to establish an Islamic state in Uzbekistan. The organization is also believed to have received funding from Saudi sources, including some close to Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence. According to Ahmed Rashid, the IMU, like the Taliban and al Qaeda has no overarching political manifesto, being more interested in implementing sharia "not as a way of creating just society but simply as a means to regulate personal behavior and dress code for Muslims - a concept that distorts centuries of tradition, culture, history, and even the religion of Islam itself." The organization also lacks the "legitimacy" of the Tajik Islamicists, drawing its idea of Islamism from foreign sources, namely, Saudi Wahhabism and the Taliban's version of Deobandism.
Central Asia's Ferghana Valley, where the Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Tajik borders converge, has been the main area for IMU operations, and the organization has launched punitive campaigns here in 1999, 2000 and 2001, which have affected all three countries and disrupted relations between them. In addition, the IMU was responsible for a series of car bombings in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent which killed 16 people in 1999, as well as numerous kidnappings, including that of four American mountaineers who escaped after being held for six days in August 2000. The group also fought in the civil war in Afghanistan, and is currently fighting alongside Taliban and al Qaeda forces. Pakistani sources claim that the IMU may have supplied bin Laden with fissile material for manufacturing an improvised nuclear explosive device.
More recently, significant numbers of IMU fighters were involved in the battle in the Shah-I-Kot valley, and there is little doubt that the organization has suffered heavy losses at the hands of U.S. and coalition forces. There has also been speculation that Namangani was killed in earlier U.S. air raids. If so, his death did not stop his men putting up fierce resistance at Shah-I-Kot. Moreover, the IMU's power base lies not in Afghanistan, but in the Ferghana Valley itself, a region the organization has found to be a fertile recruiting ground, largely due to the brutal and counterproductive reprisals of the Karimov regime. It may well be there that any final show-down with the remnants of the group that poses the greatest threat to Central Asia's security will take place.
Sources:
Rashid, Ahmed. Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 2002.
Peter Baker, "Pakistani Scientist Who Met Bin Laden Failed Polygraphs, Renewing Suspicions," Washington Post, March 3, 2002.
Adrian Karatnycky, "Bush's Uzbekistan Test," Christian Science Monitor, March 13, 2002.
David Rhode and C. J. Chivers, "Qaeda's Grocery Lists and Manuals of Killing," New York Times, March 17, 2002.
April 2001, "Patterns of Global Terrorism, 2000," United States Department of State.
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