The explosions and gunfire that have shaken this Central Asian nation this week appear to signal the return of a once-crippled radical group closely affiliated with al Qaeda that is devoted to toppling the secular government, Uzbek security officials and foreign diplomats said Thursday.
| "Can't twist turbans in South Wazoo anymore. Let's go home and blow something up!" |
Although President Islam Karimov initially attributed the unrest to Hizb ut-Tahrir, investigators have backed away from that theory. Instead, they increasingly are focusing on the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan or IMU, a paramilitary force that fought alongside the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2001 only to be devastated by a U.S. bombing campaign that killed its military commander, Juma Namangani.
| That was my thought from the first. Hizb was my second. They try and stay away from overt violence, merely calling for it. |
If the IMU did orchestrate this week's attacks, it would indicate the group has managed to reconstitute itself into a dangerous force, despite initial claims by Karimov and U.S. officials that it had been destroyed. A non-American diplomat in Tashkent estimated Thursday that the IMU has 800 active members in Uzbekistan enlisted from the ranks of Muslims bristling at the repression of Karimov's authoritarian government. "I'm almost certain it's the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan," said the diplomat, who declined to be identified to avoid offending the government. "They're regrouping and restrengthening. They have a lot of young male recruits who weren't part of the organization at the time of Afghanistan. And the recruiting ground is the people who have been tortured and abused."
The wave of violence that has left at least 44 people dead extended to a fifth day Thursday when a female bomber killed one person in the ancient city of Bukhara. Attackers, many of them women, have largely concentrated on police rather than civilian or foreign targets. Uzbek security officials said they believe the militants had been preparing for the assaults for six months or longer, but their plan was put in motion prematurely when they accidentally set off a bomb in a hide-out in Bukhara on Sunday, killing at least eight members of their cell and an infant. "They used the same explosives they used in '99," said one security official who declined to be named out of concern for his safety. "They haven't invented anything new."
What is new is the use of suicide bombings. "It's the first time this has happened in Central Asia," said a terrorism investigator at Uzbekistan's National Security Service who also spoke on condition of anonymity. Such tactics, he noted, were previously restricted to such places as Israel and Russia. "Now we face it." And never in modern times has this former Soviet republic and newly minted U.S. ally experienced a week quite like this one. No sooner was the blood washed away from one scene of carnage than ambulances were rushing to another. "Absolutely innocent people died there," Narmat Karayev,58, a retired aviation police officer, said outside Children's World store in Tashkent, where a suicide bomber killed herself and two police officers Monday. "What they've done here, I consider it fascism."
Uzbek officials said they saw no direct link between the events in Pakistan and the violence here this week, adding that the regenerating IMU retains its base either in Pakistan or Afghanistan. The diplomat said it appeared the IMU might be trying to kindle a revolution. Asked if Tashkent were akin to Iran's capital just before the 1979 Islamic revolution, he said, "No, but we might be in Tehran 1977." Unlike in Iran, Islam in Uzbekistan after seven decades of Communist rule has largely been a moderate force. Few women in cities wear head scarves, mosques do not broadcast the call to prayer, beards are rare and alcohol is plentiful. But discontent has spread in this land of 25 million people along with economic hardship. Some specialists estimate that urban unemployment exceeds 40 percent, and possibly 60 percent among city dwellers under 30. The Chorsu bazaar near Children's World offers a tableau of the hardscrabble life endured by many Uzbeks. Every day women spread sheets and sit on the asphalt trying to sell disparate goods -- toothpaste, shoes, bras, razors, eggs, pens and a laundry detergent called Barf. "You need to study our economy to understand the place," grumbled one trader who would not give her name. "See how people live?"
| Got somebody managing the economy, don't they? |
The adversity has muted public anger at the terrorist acts, with some Uzbeks suggesting the government had it coming. "Karimov himself is guilty of the whole thing," said Vladimir, 28, who makes $70 a month working in two factories. "He led the country to this point." Uzbeks, Vladimir added, regard the police "with disgust" because "for a little thing they can put you in jail." The suicide bomber outside Children's World on Monday morning apparently targeted patrolling police officers during a shift change. Nilufar Yusumetova and other store clerks were sweeping the sidewalk when the blast occurred a couple of yards away. The sight left her shocked a few days later. "The leg was right there," she said, pointing. "Her head was over there. Her body was here."
Nasiba Djamalova was inside fixing a window display when the glass shattered and something hit her leg. She thought it was a brick. Only later, she said, did she learn that she had been struck by the charred and decapitated head of the suicide bomber. "If I'd known," Djamalova said, "I would have fainted."
| "In fact, I may do it now." |
Across town, at an apartment complex in Yalangacha few miles from Karimov's residence on the city's outskirts, residents said militants who battled police on Tuesday made a point of trying not to target civilians. One resident said a female militant followed her into the apartment building but did not try to chase her into her flat, choosing instead to blow herself up. "She didn't mean harm to the people," said the woman, who like other tenants declined to give her name after police told them to stop speaking to visiting journalists. "She didn't try to open the doors. She didn't do anything to us." But the militants did kill one resident, possibly by accident, a death that the government has not acknowledged. Shakir Muslimov, 34, wearing a new suit, emerged from his door at the wrong moment and was shot to death by a pistol-wielding militant who might have mistaken him for a police officer, according to his brother Shevket. "He ran right into them," Shevket said. "He just came out by accident." Several other women blew themselves up over the course of the next seven or eight hours, neighbors said, while male militants were shot by police. By day's end, 20 suspected militants and three police officers had been killed, the Uzbek Interior Ministry said. "They were shooting back at the military," said a 30-year-old woman wearing a frayed blue robe and worn pink plastic sandals. "This was a real war." |