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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Hizb-ut-Tahrir on the rise in Central Asia, Zarqawi and KSM ex-members |
| 2005-05-02 |
| Abdullah Modmarov was in the middle of a soccer game when Uzbek police waving their rifles hauled him off the field and arrested the 33-year-old on charges of belonging to an outlawed radical Islamic party. The crackdown on Hizb ut-Tahrir — or Party of Liberation — has swept through cities and villages across this former Soviet republic, filling prison cells with thousands of observant Muslims or political dissidents imprisoned under the guise of religious extremism. Some belong to the party. Many such as Modmarov say they do not. Either way, the ban on the group that authorities see as a "farm team" for terrorist organizations like al-Qaida hasn't stopped its expansion across volatile Central Asia, where it wants to overthrow secular governments and replace them by Islamic rule, but through nonviolent means. It is not on the U.S. list of terrorist organization because it eschews violence. Yet Hizb ut-Tahrir followers as well as the group's opponents, who were interviewed by The Associated Press in four Central Asian states, say the authorities' heavy-handed approach to quash the movement has actually fueled membership in the group — and accelerated a leap by many to embrace other Islamic groups that are even more militant than Hizb ut-Tahrir. Ibrahim Mirzajanov, a 21-year-old Uzbek who has spent more than three years in jail for religious activity, said he knows Muslims who used to promote the goal of an Islamic state through nonviolent means when they were with Hizb ut-Tahrir, but now have grown angry. "The more there has been a crackdown, (the more) they have joined more violent militant groups because they want things to happen faster," Mirzajanov told AP. "They are fed up with Hizb ut-Tahrir because they say they have not been able to change anything." Mirzajanov says he studied literature distributed by Hizb ut-Tahrir but never joined the movement. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |