Assessing Tajikistan's "Mujahedin"
Fast-evolving nature of Islamic militancy needs to be watched, experts say.
Assessing Tajikistan's "Mujahedin"
Fast-evolving nature of Islamic militancy needs to be watched, experts say.
A public statement by a group calling itself the Mujahedin of Tajikistan has set the experts guessing about whether such an organisation really exists. What they do agree on, however, is that Tajikistan is increasingly vulnerable to militant activity from a mix of dissatisfied Islamists at home, and armed groups over the border in Afghanistan.
The Mujahedin of Tajikistan issued a statement posted on Islamist websites on April 24, warning of revenge attacks against the Tajik government for the death of veteran militant leader Mullo Abdullo, killed by the security forces on April 26 during a military operation in the Rasht valley in the eastern mountains.
The statement, in the Tajik language, praised Mullo Abdullo and another militant leader, Aloviddin Davlatov, also known as Ali Bedak, who was killed in a clash in January. It warned the authorities that there were plenty more “brothers ready to sacrifice themselves in the name of Allah”.
The statement mainly attacked Tajikistan’s current leadership, rather than talking the language of global jihad. As well as levelling accusations against Tajik president Imomali Rahmon personally, it condemned winter electricity shortages, unemployment, police corruption and a government campaign to collect public donations for work on a giant hydroelectric scheme. It also called for attacks on police and government officials who carried orders to close mosques and stop women wearing Islamic forms of dress.
This decidedly local message, raising concerns shared by many residents of the country, points to some kind of roots inside Tajikistan.
One possibility raised by security analyst Sulton Hamad is that is that it comes from associates of the late Mullo Abdullo – remnants of the guerrillas who fought a five-year war against the government in the early Nineties.
Mullo Abdullo refused to accept the peace deal signed in 1997 and eventually ended up in Afghanistan, where he may have forged links with al-Qaeda, the Taleban, or the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, IMU, which mounted raids in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in 1999 and 2000. Other civil war-era commanders did renounce violence, and were given local positions of power in return, in their home areas in the eastern mountains where opposition was strongest during the conflicts. Some grew dissatisfied with their position, and are believed to have offered support to Mullo Abdullo when he reappeared in Tajikistan in early 2009. Government troops met considerable resistance when they moved in to clear suspected militants in 2009 and again in autumn last year.
Retired police colonel Colonel Aliakbar Abdulloev agreed that the scattered and leaderless followers of the late Mullo Abdullo might regroup – but to do that they would need financial and other backing from outside.
The danger is that this kind of external support is available, and that the Mujahedin of Tajikistan might be evolving as the kind of “franchise operation” which the al-Qaeda network has used elsewhere – offering technical skills and backing to groups with a more local agenda.
In this context, it is significant that the statement from the Mujahedin of Tajikistan stressed nationwide support rather than solely in the eastern mountain valleys.
According to Abdulloev, not only al-Qaeda but also the IMU is actively seeking to identify individuals who could be recruited domestic insurgency operations.
He pointed to recent incidents that suggested a wider campaign of militant action bringing together more than one group.
If the east is the domain of civil war-era commanders, in northern Tajikistan it is mainly supporters of the IMU and Hizb ut-Tahrir, another banned group, he explained.
In September 2010, four people were killed in an attack on the organised crime squad’s headquarters in Khujand, the main town of the northern Soghd region. It was the first recorded suicide bombing in Tajikistan.
An unknown group called Jamaat Ansorullo claimed responsibility. However, the authorities said that two individuals killed later, including the alleged mastermind of the suicide attack, had IMU connections.
In addition, Abdulloev said, there were plenty of other dissatisfied groups in the north, not so much Islamists as former politicians and businessmen who were out of favour with the current authorities, who might have their own reasons for promoting instability.
As for outside backing, the retired colonel said al-Qaeda had a special Tajik unit called Jamoa-i Nasrullo, based in Pakistan and led by one Mullo Amriddin, which could be running a campaign to sponsor and coordinate disparate groups within Tajikistan.
“There’s very little information available... but I wouldn’t rule out that Mullo Amriddin himself is behind this new organisation,” he said, referring to the Mujahedin of Tajikistan.
As well as local recruits, analysts say it is likely there are groups of Tajiks outside the country who could be sent back in to wage jihad.
Dushanbe-based security expert Abdullo Habibov, a retired police general, believes it is more than possible such a force of émigrés could be trained, armed and funded. For this reason, he believes statements like the one from Mujahedin of Tajikistan cannot be ignored but should put the country’s security forces on their guard.
Habibov warns that the death of Osama bin Laden does not mean the end of al-Qaeda’s role in backing Islamic insurgency in Central Asia.
The IMU, whose members originally came from Uzbekistan and also fought alongside the rebels in the Tajik civil war, is another possible sponsor of the “Tajik mujahedin”. After many years with its al-Qaeda and Taleban allies in northwest Pakistan, the group seems to have shifted many of its combatants to northern Afghanistan, where its proximity to the Tajik border would allow it to infiltrate the region fairly easily.
A new report from the International Crisis Group, Tajikistan: The Changing Insurgent Threats, looks at how the IMU has evolved from an exiled Uzbek militant group into an ethnically diverse movement embracing jihadists from across Central Asia, other former Soviet territories and possibly Xinjiang in western China. That would leave it well placed to act as conduit between home-grown insurgent groups and international terrorist networks.
While not necessarily exerting direct command over such groups, the IMU could provide access to funding, military training and even public relations skills. Noting that many IMU fighters have relocated to northern Afghanistan, the report spoke of “hyphenated Taleban” of Uzbek and Tajik origin in Kunduz.
The ICG report also mentioned a reference by the Kyrgyz security service to a group apparently calling itself the Islamic Movement of Kyrgyzstan, said to have been created from ethnic Uzbeks who left the country following last year’s ethnic violence in the south. The suggestion is that the IMU played a facilitating role to turn a discontented group into a radicalised one ready for militant action.
The Tajik government has not publicly addressed the various permutations of the threat – ranging from insignificant local groups to a coordinated network of local and foreign fighters. One senior official, quoted anonymously by the Regnum news agency, said the threat should not be taken seriously, there was no destabilising force left now that Mullo Abdullo was dead, and the law enforcement forces were in full control of the situation.
A Tajik security source told IWPR, also anonymously, that such statements might well emanate from disgruntled civil war-era commanders now living in Russia – and incapable of doing anything more than make threats. “They’re able to sit and disseminate information via the internet, but they are not capable of fighting against government forces,” he said.
Lola Olimova is IWPR’s Tajikistan editor.
This article was produced jointly under two IWPR projects: Building Central Asian Human Rights Protection & Education Through the Media, funded by the European Commission; and the Human Rights Reporting, Confidence Building and Conflict Information Programme, funded by the Foreign Ministry of Norway.
The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of IWPR and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of either the European Union or the Foreign Ministry of Norway.
