UZBEKISTAN

The first signs of Islamic fundamentalism appeared in Uzbekistan  in December 1991, when some unemployed  Muslim youth  seized the Communist Party headquarters in the eastern city of Namangan, to protest against the refusal of the local Mayor to permit the construction of a mosque. The protest was organised by Tohir Abdouhalilovitch Yuldeshev, a 24-year-old college drop-out, who had become a Mulla, and Jumaboi Ahmadzhanovitch Khojaev, a former Soviet paratrooper who had served in Afghanistan and returned from there totally converted to Wahabism.
31.Yuldeshev and Khojaev, who later adopted the alias Juma Namangani, after his hometown, became  members of the  Uzbekistan branch of the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP). Following the IRP's reported refusal to support their demand for the establishment of an Islamic State in Uzbekistan, they formed their own party called the Adolat (Justice) Party, which was banned by President Islam Karimov. They then fled to Tajikistan. While Namangani fought in the local civil war, Yuldeshev went to Chechnya to participate in the jihad there. In 1995,he went to Pakistan, where the jihadi organisations gave him shelter in Peshawar. From there, he  re-named the Adolat Party as the IMU and was  allegedly in receipt of funds from the intelligence agencies of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. After Osama bin Laden shifted to Jalalabad from Khartoum in Sudan in 1996,he  crossed over into Afghanistan.
32.After the end of the civil war in Tajikistan,  Namangani settled down for a while as a road transport operator. He was also allegedly involved in heroin smuggling from Afghanistan. Subsequently, he too crossed over into Afghanistan and joined the IMU and became its leader. The IMU allegedly earns a major part of its revenue from heroin smuggling.
33.After the Taliban captured Kabul in September,1996, Namangani and Yuldeshev  held a press conference at Kabul at which they announced the formation of the IMU with Namangani as the Amir and Yuldeshev as its military commander. In 1998, the IMU joined the International Islamic Front (IIF). bin Laden was reportedly greatly interested in the IMU because he was hoping to use it for getting nuclear material and know-how from Russia and other constituent States of the erstwhile USSR.
34.The IMU's initial goal was described as the overthrow of  Uzbek President Islam Karimov and the establishment of an Islamic State in Uzbekistan. It  reportedly changed  its name to the Islamic Party of Turkestan (IPT) in June 2001, and called for the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate in Central Asia consisting of   Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and China's Xinxiang province. It has been recruiting members from all these areas, including Uighurs from Xinjiang. Initially, its recruits were trained by the Arab instructors of Al Qaeda in the training camps in Afghan territory and after 9/11 by Chechen and Pashtun instructors  of the Taliban in the South Waziristan area of Pakistan. Despite its 2001 change of name as IPT, it continues to be known in Uzbekistan as the IMU.  The name IPT is not widely known.
35.After the reported death of Namangani in a US air strike in Afghanistan post-9/11, Yuldeshev took over the leadership of the IMU and crossed over with the surviving members of the IMU into South Waziristan where he and his Uzbek/Chechen instructors were reported to have set up a training camp for training jihadi terrorists. In an operation launched by the Pakistani security forces in South Waziristan in March-April, 2004, to smoke out the dregs of  Al Qaeda, Yuldeshev was reported to have been injured, but he managed to escape. His present whereabouts are not known. It is not even known whether he is alive or succumbed to the injuries subsequently.
36.There are also reports about the presence of many Uzbek women in South Waziristan. Many of them are the wives of  local Pashtuns, Chechens and Arabs. It is not known how and when they came there. Some reports allege that in addition to heroin smuggling, the IMU also indulges in human trafficking, particularly of women.
37.Jihadi terrorism made its first major appearance in Uzbekistan on February 16,1999, when there were   six car bomb explosions in Tashkent, the capital, killing, according to official accounts, 16 persons and injuring  130 others. The explosions took place near the headquarters of the Council of Ministers where President  Islam Karimov was to preside over a Cabinet meeting, outside a nearby cinema hall, near the office of the Interior Ministry, outside the Traffic Police headquarters and a building owned by the national bank.
38.While no organisation claimed responsibility for the explosions, the Uzbek authorities, including President  Karimov himself, projected the explosions as an abortive attempt by Islamic extremist elements to assassinate the President. However, Russian experts, including  Dr.Sergei Abashin, an expert on Uzbekistan  at the Anthropology and Ethnology Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, while not ruling out the involvement of Islamic fanatics, drew attention also to the possibility of the political opponents of  Karimov hiring local mafia groups to eliminate the President due to personal and political grudge.