New Militant Force in Tajikistan?

As prosecutors in the Soghd region of northern Tajikistan announce a series of arrests in connection with a suicide bombing last month, the identity of those behind the attack remains unclear. 

There are some suggestions they are linked to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, IMU, a guerrilla group formerly active in Central Asia, while a number of analysts believe they are a home-grown group with specific local grievances.

Soghd regional prosecutor Yusuf Rahmonov said 14 suspects were detained in an October 14 raid in the Istaravshan district north of the province’s main town Khujand; three others were arrested in September.

Four people died in the September 3 attack on the organised crime squad’s headquarters in Khujand– three police officers and the driver of the car packed with explosives – and 28 were injured.

It was the first recorded suicide bombing in Tajikistan.

Rahmonov said detonators and other bomb-making components were found when the home of one of those arrested was searched.

The authorities initially attributed the bombing to the IMU, an outlawed group which was carried out attacks in Central Asia in the late 1990s and is currently believed to have forces in northern Afghanistan close to the Tajik border.

The IMU did not claim responsibility for the suicide bombing, although it did so for another recent attack in eastern Tajikistan which left 25 government soldiers dead on September 25. A recent IWPR report, Tajik Authorities Struggle to Quell Militants, assesses the likelihood that the ambush involved local Tajik militants, the IMU, or both.

Meanwhile, an apparently different group calling itself “Jamaat Ansarullah in Tajikistan” claimed responsibility for the suicide attack. The Kavkazcenter.com website, which acts as a mouthpiece for Islamic militants in Chechnya and other parts of the Russian North Caucasus, published a statement it said it received from the group.

In his October 14 briefing to journalists, Rahmonov announced that in the authorities’ view, Jamaat Ansarullah was a real group, and formed part of the IMU.

However, at an October 20 news conference, Tajikistan’s interior minister Abdurahim Kakhorov toned down this view, saying it was possible Jamaat Ansarullah existed, but a full investigation would need to be carried out before anyone could be certain.

The suggestion that two local groups with IMU connections carried out attacks in the north and east of the country raises serious concerns about a possible resurgence in militant violence on a wider scale, 13 years after the end of Tajikistan’s civil war. Given the IMU’s close ties with the Taleban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the risk that conflict could spill over into Central Asia is also one that analysts will be watching.

Another line of inquiry pursued by the Tajik police suggests that even if those behind the suicide attack were Islamic radicals, their immediate motives might have been more prosaic.

The day after the bomb went off, police in Soghd region said they believed it was in revenge for the arrest of four men for the August 30 murder of a local businessman, Homidjon Karimov. He came from the same village as them in the Isfara district and was killed, police said, because he had been funding their IMU cell but had decided to stop.

The suicide attack was intended either to help the five detainees escape or to warn investigators off pursuing the case, the police statement said.

But a police officer who requested anonymity cast doubt on the idea that the attack was merely retaliation or intimidation.

“The level of organisation behind this terrorist attack suggests that it was committed for more serious aims than revenge,” he told IWPR, adding that he had observed the IMU become more active in Kyrgyzstan as well as Tajikistan recently, and a wave off attacks designed to sow panic would fit this pattern.

The lack of publicly-available evidence about the case has resulted in much speculation about the bomber’s motives. A lawyer and a political analyst, for example, both told IWPR separately that the police might have been targeted because of the violence and injustices commonly meted out to people in detention.

Meanwhile, journalist Nurali Davlat, an expert on the 1992-97 civil war, questions whether the suicide bombing was the work of an organised group at all, and wonders whether it might have been carried out by a loner with mental health problems. He argues that it did not bear the usual hallmarks of suicide attacks elsewhere, where a video message recorded by the bomber beforehand is then used for propaganda purposes by the extremist group involved.

Other commentators, however, believe the attack was not isolated, but a sign of things to come. They see it as part of the same broad chain of events that included a mass jailbreak in August of 25 men convicted of various terror charges, and the ambush in the Rasht valley which killed troops sent to hunt down the escapees.

“This is only the beginning,” Bobojon Ikromov, editor-in-chief of the Varorud newspaper said. “If we don’t deal with it, the consequences will be regrettable. The Khujand blast, the Kamarob [ambush] and the Dushanbe escape show that the terrorists have declared war.”

Ikromov said the dire economic situation in Tajikistan created an environment in which such violence was possible. The actual method chosen – a suicide bombing – might have been inspired by media reports on similar attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Europe.

In the end, though, “These terrible acts of terrorism are the work of our own citizens,” he said.

Tilav Rasulzoda is an IWPR-trained journalist. Parvina Hamidova is an IWPR editor in Tajikistan.

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.