Violence Shatters Uzbeks' Security; After several years of relative calm, brought on by a government offensive against terrorists, Islamist suicide bombers have been plaguing the Central Asian nation

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 27, 2004

Byline: Douglas Burton, INSIGHT

The terror war has returned to Central Asia. For five years, after car bombings in Tashkent that killed 16 people in 1999, the heavy-handed crackdown ordered by Uzbek President Islam Karimov seemed to have worked. Apart from isolated firefights with armed fighters in 2000, a reassuring air of peace and order reigned in this republic of 25 million people.

Human-rights groups railed for years against the police and prison policies of Uzbekistan, and some charged that Karimov had used the 1999 bombings as a catchall excuse for suppressing any and all opposition. But the deadly reality of the underground terror network resurfaced on the evening of March 28. A covert bomb factory in a private residence in the Bukhara region of Central Uzbekistan exploded by accident around 10 p.m., killing 10 people. Police arrived on the scene to find a large cache of ammonium-nitrate powder for homemade bombs. That discovery may have triggered a series of suicide bombings and shootings of Uzbek police in Tashkent, the capital, in the following four days that left more than 47 people dead, including 33 terrorists who died from their own bombs, according to Uzbek authorities.

The Uzbek prosecutor general says 19 suspected terrorists were arrested, all of whom carried false documents. At press time no known terrorist group had claimed responsibility for the bombings, but Central Asian experts contacted by Insight say the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which works closely with al-Qaeda, is the most likely group behind the attacks. The government has pointed the finger at the Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Party of Liberation) group and the Wahhabi sect of Islam.

"It's clear that this is a jihadi organization," says Ariel Cohen, a Central Asia expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. "Whether it's al-Qaeda is irrelevant because they [the jihadists] share information and personnel all around the world."

And while police were scrambling to meet the threat in Tashkent, the Uzbeks were contending with a public relations war in Washington and New York City. The New York-based Human Rights Watch dropped a 300-page report March 30 decrying Uzbekistan's "systematic torture, ill-treatment, public degradation and denial of due process," according to press reports.

The attention of the prestige media and of some nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is misplaced, Cohen tells Insight: "There is a campaign by some NGOs and some media to create a distance between the perpetrators of the massacres and the global jihadi organizations. The purpose of the distinction is to shift blame onto the Karimov government, thus creating a rift between the U.S. government and the Uzbek government."

Such a rift would endanger the U.S.-Uzbek military alliance, the strongest in Central Asia. More than 1,000 U.S. troops are based in Khanabad in the southern part of the country.

The suicide bombers were the first in Uzbek history, and even more shocking to the Uzbeks, most were women. That's an ominous new twist, says Zeyno Baran, a Central Asia expert at the Nixon Center in Washington. "Things are getting much more complicated; my sources indicate that the next set of attacks in the United States will use blond, blue-eyed women," she says. According to Baran, Uzbek sources report that the IMU is active once again in Tashkent and that the ideological recruitment is being done by an underground group known as Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), radicalizing small groups even while eschewing violence publicly. "HT increasingly looks like an ideological launching pad for Muslim believers toward terrorist organizations such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan," Baran said.

"Were it not for the accidental discovery of the bomb factory in Bukhara, there would have been many, and very deadly, bombings in Tashkent," Furkat Sidikov, the press attache at the Uzbek Embassy in Washington tells Insight. But the striking fact remains that most of the people killed to date by the bombs have been the bombers themselves. Stephen Schwartz, author of The Two Faces of Islam, has observed that the behavior of the terrorists disclosed their political and psychological weakness. "The signs are that the bombers were confused and disoriented," he said. "They are isolated and out of touch with the main population. Remember what Mao [Tse-tung] said: 'A guerrilla is a fish swimming in the sea of the people'; these people were flapping around on dry land."

Douglas Burton is an associate editor for Insight magazine.