There were three explosions outside the US and Israeli embassies and the local Prosecutor's office in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, on July30, 2004. Two private security guards employed by the Israeli Embassy were killed. An injured police officer, who was on duty outside the US Embassy, died subsequently. Seven people were injured outside the Prosecutor's office.
The local authorities have attributed all the three explosions to suicide bombers. Uzbekistan has been periodically witnessing incidents of violence, including acts of terrorism, by Islamic fundamentalist elements since 1999. There were, however, no acts of suicide terrorism till March-April, 2004, when 42 people were killed in different incidents in Tashkent, Bukhara and other places. The incidents involved use of explosive devices and attacks with hand-held weapons. For the first time since 1999, the local authorities blamed suicide bombers for some of those incidents and depicted them as Wahabis. According to them, two of the suicide bombers were women.
The latest incidents on July 30, 2004, took place four days after the start of the trial of 15 persons, who have been accused by the local police of involvement in the incidents of March-April, 2004. The Prosecutor's Office, outside which one of the explosions took place, has been handling the prosecution of the case.
Thus, there is fairly clear linkage between one of the three explosions and the criminal case against those accused of involvement in the incidents of March-April, 2004.
The explosion outside the US Embassy is attributed to resentment over the use by the US of an airbase in Uzbekistan for its operations against the dregs of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and over the role allegedly by the US Special Forces in assisting the Pakistan Army in its operations in South Waziristan against the dregs of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, many of them Uzbeks, who have taken shelter there. Anger over the continued US occupation of Iraq also seems to have been one of the factors.
The explosion outside the Israeli Embassy is attributed to its alleged suppression of the Palestinians and its alleged assistance to the intelligence and security agencies of Uzbekistan in their operations against the jihadi terrorist elements.
As against this, the terrorist incidents of March-April,2004, were largely motivated by anger over the repressive policies of the Islam Karimov regime and its co-operation with the US in its so-called war against terrorism.
The needle of suspicion in respect of the incidents of this year points towards the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Hizbut Tahrir . An Islamic website has already claimed responsibility in respect of the July 30 blasts on behalf of these two organisations, but the organisations themselves have remained silent so far. The reliability of the web site is not known.
First signs of Islamic fundamentalism appeared in Uzbekistan in December 1991, when some unemployed Muslim youth seized the Communist Party headquarters in the eastern city of Namangan, to protest against the refusal of the local Mayor to permit the construction of a mosque. The protest was organised by Tohir Abdouhalilovitch Yuldeshev, a 24-year-old college drop-out, who had become a Mulla, and Jumaboi Ahmadzhanovitch Khojaev, a former Soviet paratrooper who had served in Afghanistan and returned from there totally converted toWahabism.
Yuldeshev and Khojaev, who later adopted the alias Juma Namangani, after his hometown, became members of the Uzbekistan branch of the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP). Following the IRP's reported refusal to support their demand for the establishment of an Islamic State in Uzbekistan, they formed their own party called the Adolat (Justice) Party, which was banned by Karimov. They then fled to Tajikistan. While Namangani fought in the local civil war, Yuldeshev went to Chechnya to participate in the jihad there. In 1995,he went to Pakistan, where the jihadi organisations gave him shelter in Peshawar. From there, he re-named the Adolat Party as the IMU and was allegedly in receipt of funds from the intelligence agencies of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. After Osama bin Laden shifted to Jalalabad from Khartoum in Sudan in 1996,he crossed over into Afghanistan.
After the end of the civil war in Tajikistan, Namangani settled down for a while as a road transport operator.He was also allegedly involved in heroin smuggling from Afghanistan. Subsequently, he too crossed over into Afghanistan and joined the IMU and became its leader. The IMU allegedly earns a major part of its revenue from heroin smuggling.
After the Taliban captured Kabul in September,1996, Namangani and Yuldeshev held a press conference at Kabul at which they announced the formation of the IMU with Namangani as the Amir and Yuldeshev as its military commander. In 1998, the IMU joined Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front(IIF). bin Laden was reportedly greatly interested in the IMU because he was hoping to use it for getting nuclear material and know-how from Russia and other constituent States of the erstwhile USSR.
The IMU's initial goal was described as the overthrow of Uzbek President Islam Karimov and the establishment of an Islamic State in Uzbekistan.It reportedly changed its name to the Islamic Party of Turkestan (IPT) in June 2001, and called for the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate in Central Asia consisting of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and China's Xinxiang province. It has been recruiting members from all these areas, including Uighurs from Xinjiang. Initially, its recruits were trained by the Arab instructors of Al Qaeda in the training camps in Afghan territory and after 9/11 by Chechen and Pushtoon instructors of the Taliban in the South Waziristan area of Pakistan. Despite its 2001 change of name as IPT, it continues to be known in Uzbekistan as the Impute name IPT is not widely known.
After the reported death of Namangani in a US air strike in Afghanistan post-9/11, Yuldeshev took over the leadership of the IMU and crossed over with the surviving members of the IMU into South Waziristan where he and his Uzbek/Chechen instructors were reported to have set up a training camp for training jihadi terrorists. Among those reportedly trained in this camp were the members of the Jundullah (Army of Allah), a newly-formed Pakistani jihadiorganisation.
In an operation launched by the Pakistani security forces in South Waziristan in March-April, 2004, to smoke out the dregs of the Al Qaeda, Yuldeshev was reported to have been injured, but he managed to escape. His present whereabouts are not known. It is not even known whether he is alive or succumbed to the injuries subsequently. An Israeli web site, which focusses on terrorism, had reported that he managed to find his way back to Uzbekistan where, according to it, he orchestrated the incidents of March-April last. This does not appear to be correct. Some unconfirmed reports even say he has been incapacitated by the injuries sustained by him in SouthWaziristan.
There are no reliable reports of the number of Uzbeks, Chechens and Uighurs in South Waziristan. Some Pakistani journalists, who had visited the South Waziristan area in March-April, had estimated the total number of foreigners, who had been given shelter there by the local tribals , as about 600, about 200 of them Uzbeks and the remaining Chechens, Uighurs, Arabs and others. Other reports place the number of Uighurs as about 100. The presence of Uzbeks, Chechens and Uighurs in the Taliban and in Gulbuddin Heckmatyar's Hizbe Islami now operating in Afghanistan has also been reported. Their number is not known.
There are also reports about the presence of many Uzbek women in South Waziristan. Many of them are the wives of the local Pushtoons, Chechens and Arabs. It is not known how and when they came there. Some reports allege that in addition to heroin smuggling, the IMU also indulges in human traffiking, particularly of women.
The Uighurs trained by the IMU were suspected of involvement in the explosion in Gwadar in Balochistan earlier this year in which some Chinese engineers were killed and in the explosions on July 31,2004, at the same town in which no casualties have been reported. An increase in attacks on Chinese lives and interests in Pakistan and the Xinjiang province of China is a possibility.
There is so far no evidence to show that the suicide bombers of July 30 might have gone to Tashkent from South Waziristan. If it is established that they belonged to the IMU, they might have been recruited locally by the local cells and need not have necessarily come from South Waziristan. This would show that despite the strong measures taken by the Karimov regime, secret cells of the IMU have managed to survive in Uzbek territory and that their motivation and capability for action remain unimpaired.
The Hizbut Tahrir of Uzbekistan, led by Vahid Omran, is estimated to have more local support than the IMU. It denies involvement in acts of terrorism. Like the IMU, it advocates the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, but claims that it wants to achieve its objective through political means and not by resorting to terrorism.
Like the Hizbut Tahrir of Pakistan, its Central Asian counterpart is also a highly clandestine organisation, which seeks to achieve its objective not through overt acts of violence, but through covert penetration of the security forces and the intelligence agencies. In the long term, it could be even more dangerous than theIMU.
A third organisation calling itself the Islamic Jihad group of Uzbekistan has also claimed responsibility for the incidents of March-April as well as of July 30, but one does not even know whether such an organisation exists and, if so, what is its background and who are its leaders.
Advertisement
B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Distinguished Fellow and Convenor, Observer Research Foundation, Chennai Chapter.
