The Asian Prairie
The links between Central Asia and radical Islamist terrorism started growing stronger following the collapse of the USSR. The young countries that emerged back then are forced to deal with the threat of terrorism and with thousands of youngsters who were brainwashed by radical organizations that had established their bases in neighboring countries
Dr. Hayim Iserovich
| 27/04/2018
Pakistani tribal people rally against the US (Photo: AP)
On October 31 last, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, an Uzbek national, drove into Manhattan in a rented pickup truck and ran over passers-by along the Hudson River, until he was forced to stop after colliding with a school bus. He subsequently dismounted, brandishing a toy gun and an air rifle and shouting "Allah Hua Akbar!" and was eventually shot by policemen and wounded. Eight persons were killed in the attack, including five Argentinians and a Belgian, and 12 more were wounded. According to the severe federal indictment filed against Saipov, which could send him to Death Row, he executed the attack in order to join ISIS.
Saipov is the last name in a steadily growing list of terrorists from Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries, who were involved in terrorist activity over the last eighteen months, including severe terrorist attacks perpetrated in ISIS' name. In June 2016, forty-five people were murdered when three terrorists from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and the northern Caucasus staged a combined suicide bombing and shooting attack at Istanbul's first international airport. An Uzbekistani terrorist executed the shooting attack at the Istanbul nightclub on New Year's Eve 2017, in which thirty-nine people were murdered, including one Israeli citizen.
The month of April 2017 provided two notable examples. On April 3, fifteen people were killed in the blast of an explosive charge planted on board an underground train in St. Petersburg by a Russian citizen of Uzbekistani origin who was born in Kyrgyzstan. Four days later, four people were killed in a car ramming attack in Stockholm, executed by an Uzbekistani asylum seeker. A few days before the attack in Manhattan, a court in Brooklyn sentenced an Uzbekistani national convicted of providing material support to ISIS and, among other things, threatening to harm former US President Barack Obama, to sixteen years' imprisonment.
The presence of citizens from Central Asian countries was prominent in the war zones of Syria and Iraq, too, as most of them had joined the ranks of ISIS, in some cases even providing the manpower for complete brigades made up exclusively of citizens of the Islamic republics. According to a report by the International Crisis Group dated January 2015, some 2,000 to 4,000 individuals from Central Asian countries arrived in both theaters during the three years prior to the report, while a report by the Soufan Center, dated October 2017, placed that number at about 5,000 (by February 2017). Uzbekistan took the lead with about 1,500 foreign warfighters, followed by Tajikistan with about 1,300 warfighters, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan with about 500 warfighters each, and Turkmenistan with about 400 warfighters.
Fateful Links
The links between Central Asia and radical Islamist terrorism date back nearly three decades, to the final days of the USSR. Throughout its existence, the communist regime in Moscow allowed Muslims to practice their faith, albeit subject to government-party supervision over Muslim religious leaders.
Only Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika reformation, in the second half of the 1980s, brought a certain relief and Muslims were allowed to establish religious societies and receive donations from Islamic countries. This led to a religious awakening in the Islamic republics, and one of the most active areas was the Ferghana valley in Eastern Uzbekistan, near the border with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
After Uzbekistan had become an independent country following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the Adolat (= justice) movement established in the Ferghana valley began protesting against the secular nature of the country, demanding the establishment of an Islamic State in Uzbekistan. When Adolat activists seized the offices of the communist party in the city of Namangan, owing to the Mayor's refusal to build a mosque there, President Islam Karimov responded by outlawing the movement and violently oppressing Islamist activists.
Following that affair, both founders of the Adolat Movement, spiritual leader Tohir Yuldashev and military leader Jumaboi Khodjiyev (aka Juma Namangani) – a former Red Army paratrooper who had fought against the Mujahedin in Afghanistan, where he was introduced to Islamic concepts and ideology – fled, along with many of their supporters, to Kyrgyzstan. Khodjiyev remained in Kyrgyzstan and took part in the civil war that broke out in that country alongside Islamist and nationalist forces against the regime, and lasted until 1997. Yuldashev moved to Afghanistan and established preliminary contacts with the Taliban Movement, which had started to develop in the southern part of the country.
Yuldashev and Khodjiyev resumed their cooperative alliance in August 1998, when they established the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which initially aspired to overthrow Karimov's regime and establish an Islamic country governed by Sharia law in Uzbekistan, and subsequently set the goal of establishing an Islamic caliphate throughout Central Asia. The organization was closely associated with Osama Bin-Laden and al-Qaeda – Yuldashev was a member of the Supreme Council of al-Qaeda and operated covert cells in most of the Islamic republics, which consisted of recruits from Central Asian countries, in addition to activists from among the Uyghur minority of Xinjiang province, Western China.
The first surge of terrorist attacks staged by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan took place in February 1999 in the form of six car bomb attacks, one of which was intended to hit Karimov himself. Sixteen people were killed. About six months later, hundreds of armed IMU activists entered Kyrgyzstan, dominated villages, and captured hostages.
In 2000, this terrorist organization started relocating its power base to Afghanistan, where it established bases and training camps and fought alongside the Taliban. After the US invasion that followed the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, IMU became another objective of US attacks and in November 2001, Khodjiyev was killed in a US air strike. Shortly thereafter, Yuldashev and other activists crossed the border into the tribal area of northwestern Pakistan, where they intensified their association with the Taliban and al-Qaeda and became involved in the fighting against the Pakistani security forces. At the same time, they staged terrorist attacks in Kyrgyzstan and were responsible for explosive charge attacks in the Capital Bishkek in December 2002 and in the city of Osh in May 2003 and November 2004.
After Yuldashev had been eliminated in a US air strike in August 2009, IMU continued its terrorist and guerrilla operations inside Pakistan. In June 2014, IMU cooperated with the Taliban in a joint attack against Karachi international airport in which twenty-six people were killed. At the same time, IMU extended their offensive into additional countries and, among other things, staged terrorist attacks against the forces of the international coalition in Afghanistan, in cooperation with the Taliban and the Haqqani network, and were also involved in subversive plotting inside Europe, including a plan for simultaneous shooting attacks at crowded sites in Germany, Britain and France in 2010.
In recent years, IMU has suffered a decline owing to internal conflicts. In September 2014, the leader of the organization, Usman Ghazi, announced that he and his men were to pledge allegiance to ISIS, after he had blamed the Taliban of withholding the truth regarding the time of death of the Movement's founder, Mullah Omar. About a year later, Usman Ghazi was killed by armed Taliban men, and most of the activists of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan renewed their association with the Taliban and al-Qaeda and have recently even presented a training camp in Afghanistan.
A Network of Organizations
In March 2002, a split occurred within IMU against the background of Yuldashev's decision to join al-Qaeda's world Jihad struggle. A group of activists who had supported the continued focusing on the efforts to overthrow the regime in Uzbekistan left IMU and established the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), although they, too, established connections with senior al-Qaeda leaders.
The first attacks were staged by the new organization in March and April 2002 in the form of suicide bomber attacks – the first suicide bomber attacks in Central Asia – at several sites in Uzbekistan, leading to the death of forty-seven people. In July 2004, two individuals were killed when three suicide bombers blew themselves up near the Israeli and US embassies in Tashkent and near the Attorney General's office.
Several organizations based on volunteers from Central Asia were established during the civil war in Syria. The organization "Kata'eb a-Tawhid wal-Jihad" was established in 2014 and incorporated into Jabhat Fatah a-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra – the Syrian arm of al-Qaeda), and was subsequently involved in attacks against Russian forces, in addition to a car bomb attack near the Chinese embassy in Kyrgyzstan in August 2016.
The "Imam Bukhari Battalion" is made up of hundreds of Uzbekistanis, some of whom had previously fought in Afghanistan. This organization cooperates with Jabhat Fatah a-Sham. The organization "Junud al Chalifa" ("Soldiers of the Caliphate") was established in 2010 by three Kazakhstan nationals. It operates in the tribal area of Pakistan alongside the Taliban and even assumed responsibility for the attacks by terrorist Mohammed Merah, who committed the massacre at the Jewish school in Toulouse, France in 2012.
Another organization is "Jama'at Ansarullah," which is made up primarily of Tajikistani nationals and operates mainly in Afghanistan. Uzbekistani activists were also incorporated into the ranks of the "Turkistan Islamic Party," an organization affiliated with al-Qaeda and consisting primarily of Uyghurs from Western China. This organization has been active in northwestern Syria since 2012, in addition to operations in China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
Although the volunteers from the Islamic republics of Central Asia cooperate mainly with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the ISIS propaganda machine also succeeded in attracting numerous volunteers, primarily owing to the propaganda clips that addressed potential volunteers in their native language. One of the most prominent individuals who joined the ranks of ISIS was Colonel Golmorad Halimov (42), formerly the commander of the Special Forces of the Federal Police of Tajikistan who had been trained in the USA and eventually became one of the senior commanders of the terrorist organization.
Most of the terrorist attacks in Central Asia attributed to Islamist radicals were staged in Uzbekistan and in Kyrgyzstan, but in recent years Kazakhstan has also become the objective of terrorist attacks. In May 2011, after the local parliament had sanctioned the dispatching of troops to Afghanistan, suicide attacks were staged near the HQ of the security services in the Capital Astana and in the city of Aktobe, and it was suspected that the perpetrators were terrorists associated with the Taliban. In June 2016, five civilians were killed along with three members of the security services when armed terrorists attacked a gun shop and attempted to break into an armory of the National Guard in the city of Aktobe. A month later, a lone terrorist killed eight members of the security services and two civilians in an attack on a police station and the HQ of the Security Agency in Astana.
Between Poverty and Oppression
A combination of factors, which have been exploited by radical Islamist propaganda, has contributed to the emergence of extremist tendencies, especially among the young generation in the Islamic republics.
Firstly, most of those republics suffer from economic difficulties – according to data published by the World Bank for 2016, the Gross National Product (GNP) of Kazakhstan was about US$ 133,000, but in Uzbekistan it amounted to one half of that figure (about US$ 67,000), in Turkmenistan it was US$ 36,000 and in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan it was less than US$ 7,000.
Secondly, the Islamic republics regard themselves as secular countries where religious and state affairs are kept separate, but the activities of religious institutions and societies are supervised and they are required to register and maintain records. Organizations that are inconsistent with the official line and regarded as radical, or individuals who publicly display their Islamic religious affiliation could face persecution under such pretexts as suspected involvement in terrorist activity and posing a threat to national stability.
Additionally, most of these countries are governed by corrupt regimes that possess authoritarian characteristics. The annual reports published by the US State Department regarding the state of human rights around the world normally note the Islamic republics in a negative context, owing to their systematic violation of human rights, including arbitrary arrests, the use of torture and restricting even basic human and civil rights, along with the ethnic tensions between communities that are not cared for by the authorities.
These factors have a dual effect. On the one hand, they lead to agitation and unrest within those countries, particularly in more backward areas or among those trying to practice their Muslim faith independently of the state line, thereby being forced underground, and their sense of frustration is occasionally reflected in terrorist attacks or in violent clashes with the security forces. On the other hand, many youngsters fail to find a future in their homeland and migrate to other countries, seeking employment and a more secure future. However, in those new countries, they are introduced even more intensively to radical propaganda, as was the case of the terrorist from Manhattan, or become easy prey for the recruiting agents of the terrorist organizations.
A Firm Hand
The Islamic republics responded to the Jihadist terrorist threat in several different ways. In some of these countries, mainly Uzbekistan, persecution of those identified with radical Islam intensified and expanded to include innocent believers who had only tried to practice their faith. At the same time, counterterrorism legislation grew even more stringent, and after thousands of their citizens had departed for the battlefield of Syria and Iraq, those countries passed legislation ruling that participation in armed conflicts overseas is a criminal offense punishable by extended prison terms. Measures were also taken to improve border control and supervision of airport traffic so as to restrict the movements of radical elements into those countries or to the war zones of other countries.
The USA plays a major role in helping the countries of Central Asia cope with terrorism, despite reservations regarding the systematic infringement of human and civil rights. The main reason for it is the fact that those countries are located very close to the war zones of Afghanistan. In addition to targeted killings of senior officials and activists of the terrorist organizations from Central Asia that had operated in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a dialog has been underway since September 2015 between the C5+1, representatives of the USA and the five Central Asian republics. In this forum, the parties discuss ways to cooperatively cope with the security challenges, among other things – through economic and trade projects and anti-radicalism programs.
Uzbekistan, regarded as the weakest link of the five Islamic countries owing to the combination of a totalitarian regime, a weak economy and violation of human rights, has been undergoing, over the last year, an important process pursuant to the death of longstanding President Karimov and the subsequent election of his successor, Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev, in November 2016. The new President initiated a series of steps intended to improve the country's internal and external state, among other things – through the release of political prisoners, lifting restrictions on media coverage, strengthening the political and economic relations with the neighboring countries after years of tension and inviting foreign investors to Uzbekistan.
Although the changes made in the political field were minor, if Mirziyoyev's initiatives continue and expand, they will constitute a vitally important change of trend, which is expected to help Uzbekistan cope with the issues that encourage Islamic terrorism both domestically and throughout the Central Asian region, especially in view of the expected challenge of thousands of expatriates who may attempt to return to their homelands pursuant to the collapse of ISIS in Syria and in Iraq.
***
Dr. Haim Iserovich is the foreign affairs correspondent of the newspaper Ma'ariv and a research fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at IDC Herzliya
The links between Central Asia and radical Islamist terrorism started growing stronger following the collapse of the USSR. The young countries that emerged back then are forced to deal with the threat of terrorism and with thousands of youngsters who were brainwashed by radical organizations that had established their bases in neighboring countries
Pakistani tribal people rally against the US (Photo: AP)
On October 31 last, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, an Uzbek national, drove into Manhattan in a rented pickup truck and ran over passers-by along the Hudson River, until he was forced to stop after colliding with a school bus. He subsequently dismounted, brandishing a toy gun and an air rifle and shouting "Allah Hua Akbar!" and was eventually shot by policemen and wounded. Eight persons were killed in the attack, including five Argentinians and a Belgian, and 12 more were wounded. According to the severe federal indictment filed against Saipov, which could send him to Death Row, he executed the attack in order to join ISIS.
Saipov is the last name in a steadily growing list of terrorists from Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries, who were involved in terrorist activity over the last eighteen months, including severe terrorist attacks perpetrated in ISIS' name. In June 2016, forty-five people were murdered when three terrorists from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and the northern Caucasus staged a combined suicide bombing and shooting attack at Istanbul's first international airport. An Uzbekistani terrorist executed the shooting attack at the Istanbul nightclub on New Year's Eve 2017, in which thirty-nine people were murdered, including one Israeli citizen.
The month of April 2017 provided two notable examples. On April 3, fifteen people were killed in the blast of an explosive charge planted on board an underground train in St. Petersburg by a Russian citizen of Uzbekistani origin who was born in Kyrgyzstan. Four days later, four people were killed in a car ramming attack in Stockholm, executed by an Uzbekistani asylum seeker. A few days before the attack in Manhattan, a court in Brooklyn sentenced an Uzbekistani national convicted of providing material support to ISIS and, among other things, threatening to harm former US President Barack Obama, to sixteen years' imprisonment.
The presence of citizens from Central Asian countries was prominent in the war zones of Syria and Iraq, too, as most of them had joined the ranks of ISIS, in some cases even providing the manpower for complete brigades made up exclusively of citizens of the Islamic republics. According to a report by the International Crisis Group dated January 2015, some 2,000 to 4,000 individuals from Central Asian countries arrived in both theaters during the three years prior to the report, while a report by the Soufan Center, dated October 2017, placed that number at about 5,000 (by February 2017). Uzbekistan took the lead with about 1,500 foreign warfighters, followed by Tajikistan with about 1,300 warfighters, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan with about 500 warfighters each, and Turkmenistan with about 400 warfighters.
Fateful Links
The links between Central Asia and radical Islamist terrorism date back nearly three decades, to the final days of the USSR. Throughout its existence, the communist regime in Moscow allowed Muslims to practice their faith, albeit subject to government-party supervision over Muslim religious leaders.
Only Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika reformation, in the second half of the 1980s, brought a certain relief and Muslims were allowed to establish religious societies and receive donations from Islamic countries. This led to a religious awakening in the Islamic republics, and one of the most active areas was the Ferghana valley in Eastern Uzbekistan, near the border with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
After Uzbekistan had become an independent country following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the Adolat (= justice) movement established in the Ferghana valley began protesting against the secular nature of the country, demanding the establishment of an Islamic State in Uzbekistan. When Adolat activists seized the offices of the communist party in the city of Namangan, owing to the Mayor's refusal to build a mosque there, President Islam Karimov responded by outlawing the movement and violently oppressing Islamist activists.
Following that affair, both founders of the Adolat Movement, spiritual leader Tohir Yuldashev and military leader Jumaboi Khodjiyev (aka Juma Namangani) – a former Red Army paratrooper who had fought against the Mujahedin in Afghanistan, where he was introduced to Islamic concepts and ideology – fled, along with many of their supporters, to Kyrgyzstan. Khodjiyev remained in Kyrgyzstan and took part in the civil war that broke out in that country alongside Islamist and nationalist forces against the regime, and lasted until 1997. Yuldashev moved to Afghanistan and established preliminary contacts with the Taliban Movement, which had started to develop in the southern part of the country.
Yuldashev and Khodjiyev resumed their cooperative alliance in August 1998, when they established the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which initially aspired to overthrow Karimov's regime and establish an Islamic country governed by Sharia law in Uzbekistan, and subsequently set the goal of establishing an Islamic caliphate throughout Central Asia. The organization was closely associated with Osama Bin-Laden and al-Qaeda – Yuldashev was a member of the Supreme Council of al-Qaeda and operated covert cells in most of the Islamic republics, which consisted of recruits from Central Asian countries, in addition to activists from among the Uyghur minority of Xinjiang province, Western China.
The first surge of terrorist attacks staged by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan took place in February 1999 in the form of six car bomb attacks, one of which was intended to hit Karimov himself. Sixteen people were killed. About six months later, hundreds of armed IMU activists entered Kyrgyzstan, dominated villages, and captured hostages.
In 2000, this terrorist organization started relocating its power base to Afghanistan, where it established bases and training camps and fought alongside the Taliban. After the US invasion that followed the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, IMU became another objective of US attacks and in November 2001, Khodjiyev was killed in a US air strike. Shortly thereafter, Yuldashev and other activists crossed the border into the tribal area of northwestern Pakistan, where they intensified their association with the Taliban and al-Qaeda and became involved in the fighting against the Pakistani security forces. At the same time, they staged terrorist attacks in Kyrgyzstan and were responsible for explosive charge attacks in the Capital Bishkek in December 2002 and in the city of Osh in May 2003 and November 2004.
After Yuldashev had been eliminated in a US air strike in August 2009, IMU continued its terrorist and guerrilla operations inside Pakistan. In June 2014, IMU cooperated with the Taliban in a joint attack against Karachi international airport in which twenty-six people were killed. At the same time, IMU extended their offensive into additional countries and, among other things, staged terrorist attacks against the forces of the international coalition in Afghanistan, in cooperation with the Taliban and the Haqqani network, and were also involved in subversive plotting inside Europe, including a plan for simultaneous shooting attacks at crowded sites in Germany, Britain and France in 2010.
In recent years, IMU has suffered a decline owing to internal conflicts. In September 2014, the leader of the organization, Usman Ghazi, announced that he and his men were to pledge allegiance to ISIS, after he had blamed the Taliban of withholding the truth regarding the time of death of the Movement's founder, Mullah Omar. About a year later, Usman Ghazi was killed by armed Taliban men, and most of the activists of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan renewed their association with the Taliban and al-Qaeda and have recently even presented a training camp in Afghanistan.
A Network of Organizations
In March 2002, a split occurred within IMU against the background of Yuldashev's decision to join al-Qaeda's world Jihad struggle. A group of activists who had supported the continued focusing on the efforts to overthrow the regime in Uzbekistan left IMU and established the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), although they, too, established connections with senior al-Qaeda leaders.
The first attacks were staged by the new organization in March and April 2002 in the form of suicide bomber attacks – the first suicide bomber attacks in Central Asia – at several sites in Uzbekistan, leading to the death of forty-seven people. In July 2004, two individuals were killed when three suicide bombers blew themselves up near the Israeli and US embassies in Tashkent and near the Attorney General's office.
Several organizations based on volunteers from Central Asia were established during the civil war in Syria. The organization "Kata'eb a-Tawhid wal-Jihad" was established in 2014 and incorporated into Jabhat Fatah a-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra – the Syrian arm of al-Qaeda), and was subsequently involved in attacks against Russian forces, in addition to a car bomb attack near the Chinese embassy in Kyrgyzstan in August 2016.
The "Imam Bukhari Battalion" is made up of hundreds of Uzbekistanis, some of whom had previously fought in Afghanistan. This organization cooperates with Jabhat Fatah a-Sham. The organization "Junud al Chalifa" ("Soldiers of the Caliphate") was established in 2010 by three Kazakhstan nationals. It operates in the tribal area of Pakistan alongside the Taliban and even assumed responsibility for the attacks by terrorist Mohammed Merah, who committed the massacre at the Jewish school in Toulouse, France in 2012.
Another organization is "Jama'at Ansarullah," which is made up primarily of Tajikistani nationals and operates mainly in Afghanistan. Uzbekistani activists were also incorporated into the ranks of the "Turkistan Islamic Party," an organization affiliated with al-Qaeda and consisting primarily of Uyghurs from Western China. This organization has been active in northwestern Syria since 2012, in addition to operations in China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
Although the volunteers from the Islamic republics of Central Asia cooperate mainly with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the ISIS propaganda machine also succeeded in attracting numerous volunteers, primarily owing to the propaganda clips that addressed potential volunteers in their native language. One of the most prominent individuals who joined the ranks of ISIS was Colonel Golmorad Halimov (42), formerly the commander of the Special Forces of the Federal Police of Tajikistan who had been trained in the USA and eventually became one of the senior commanders of the terrorist organization.
Most of the terrorist attacks in Central Asia attributed to Islamist radicals were staged in Uzbekistan and in Kyrgyzstan, but in recent years Kazakhstan has also become the objective of terrorist attacks. In May 2011, after the local parliament had sanctioned the dispatching of troops to Afghanistan, suicide attacks were staged near the HQ of the security services in the Capital Astana and in the city of Aktobe, and it was suspected that the perpetrators were terrorists associated with the Taliban. In June 2016, five civilians were killed along with three members of the security services when armed terrorists attacked a gun shop and attempted to break into an armory of the National Guard in the city of Aktobe. A month later, a lone terrorist killed eight members of the security services and two civilians in an attack on a police station and the HQ of the Security Agency in Astana.
Between Poverty and Oppression
A combination of factors, which have been exploited by radical Islamist propaganda, has contributed to the emergence of extremist tendencies, especially among the young generation in the Islamic republics.
Firstly, most of those republics suffer from economic difficulties – according to data published by the World Bank for 2016, the Gross National Product (GNP) of Kazakhstan was about US$ 133,000, but in Uzbekistan it amounted to one half of that figure (about US$ 67,000), in Turkmenistan it was US$ 36,000 and in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan it was less than US$ 7,000.
Secondly, the Islamic republics regard themselves as secular countries where religious and state affairs are kept separate, but the activities of religious institutions and societies are supervised and they are required to register and maintain records. Organizations that are inconsistent with the official line and regarded as radical, or individuals who publicly display their Islamic religious affiliation could face persecution under such pretexts as suspected involvement in terrorist activity and posing a threat to national stability.
Additionally, most of these countries are governed by corrupt regimes that possess authoritarian characteristics. The annual reports published by the US State Department regarding the state of human rights around the world normally note the Islamic republics in a negative context, owing to their systematic violation of human rights, including arbitrary arrests, the use of torture and restricting even basic human and civil rights, along with the ethnic tensions between communities that are not cared for by the authorities.
These factors have a dual effect. On the one hand, they lead to agitation and unrest within those countries, particularly in more backward areas or among those trying to practice their Muslim faith independently of the state line, thereby being forced underground, and their sense of frustration is occasionally reflected in terrorist attacks or in violent clashes with the security forces. On the other hand, many youngsters fail to find a future in their homeland and migrate to other countries, seeking employment and a more secure future. However, in those new countries, they are introduced even more intensively to radical propaganda, as was the case of the terrorist from Manhattan, or become easy prey for the recruiting agents of the terrorist organizations.
A Firm Hand
The Islamic republics responded to the Jihadist terrorist threat in several different ways. In some of these countries, mainly Uzbekistan, persecution of those identified with radical Islam intensified and expanded to include innocent believers who had only tried to practice their faith. At the same time, counterterrorism legislation grew even more stringent, and after thousands of their citizens had departed for the battlefield of Syria and Iraq, those countries passed legislation ruling that participation in armed conflicts overseas is a criminal offense punishable by extended prison terms. Measures were also taken to improve border control and supervision of airport traffic so as to restrict the movements of radical elements into those countries or to the war zones of other countries.
The USA plays a major role in helping the countries of Central Asia cope with terrorism, despite reservations regarding the systematic infringement of human and civil rights. The main reason for it is the fact that those countries are located very close to the war zones of Afghanistan. In addition to targeted killings of senior officials and activists of the terrorist organizations from Central Asia that had operated in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a dialog has been underway since September 2015 between the C5+1, representatives of the USA and the five Central Asian republics. In this forum, the parties discuss ways to cooperatively cope with the security challenges, among other things – through economic and trade projects and anti-radicalism programs.
Uzbekistan, regarded as the weakest link of the five Islamic countries owing to the combination of a totalitarian regime, a weak economy and violation of human rights, has been undergoing, over the last year, an important process pursuant to the death of longstanding President Karimov and the subsequent election of his successor, Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev, in November 2016. The new President initiated a series of steps intended to improve the country's internal and external state, among other things – through the release of political prisoners, lifting restrictions on media coverage, strengthening the political and economic relations with the neighboring countries after years of tension and inviting foreign investors to Uzbekistan.
Although the changes made in the political field were minor, if Mirziyoyev's initiatives continue and expand, they will constitute a vitally important change of trend, which is expected to help Uzbekistan cope with the issues that encourage Islamic terrorism both domestically and throughout the Central Asian region, especially in view of the expected challenge of thousands of expatriates who may attempt to return to their homelands pursuant to the collapse of ISIS in Syria and in Iraq.
***
Dr. Haim Iserovich is the foreign affairs correspondent of the newspaper Ma'ariv and a research fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at IDC Herzliya
