[Central Asians account for a significant portion of the foreign fighters who joined the Islamic State militant group in Syria, making their common language of Russian second only to Arabic in the group’s propaganda and communications. The International Crisis Group, a research organization, has estimated that 2,000 to 4,000 Central Asians have joined the Islamic State and other Islamist groups.]
By
Andrew E. Kramer
 |
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The
apartment block in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where the suspect in Tuesday’s
terrorist
attack
in New York lived from 1996 to 2006, according to police records.
Credit
Timur Karpov/Associated Press
|
KIEV,
Ukraine — The terrorist
attack in New York on Tuesday was carried out by a young man from Central Asia,
a former backyard of the Soviet Union known for poverty, isolation and
repressive governments — all elements in breeding some of the most militant
Islamist activity in the world.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Islamist
insurgencies have erupted throughout the region, most notably in the Caucasus
and the suspect’s native Uzbekistan. While those insurgencies have been mostly
suppressed, often with unflinching brutality, analysts have grown increasingly
concerned about Islamist radicalism spreading out of the region as young men
leave in search of work.
This is particularly true, analysts say, of
Uzbekistan, where a blend of repressive politics and economic failure has
generated a steady outflow of both migrants and militants. Many of the
immigrants have come to the United States — nearly 60,000 as of 2013, the
American Community Survey said, with about half of them going to New York City.
Under a new president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev,
Uzbekistan has recently eased its iron grip over its citizens. Mr. Mirziyoyev
has offered to help the American authorities investigate the attack, and in a
statement offered condolences. “This merciless and very cruel crime cannot have
any justification,” he said.
Central Asians account for a significant
portion of the foreign fighters who joined the Islamic State militant group in
Syria, making their common language of Russian second only to Arabic in the
group’s propaganda and communications. The International Crisis Group, a
research organization, has estimated that 2,000 to 4,000 Central Asians have
joined the Islamic State and other Islamist groups.
While there is no saying, for now, what may
have motivated Sayfullo Saipov, the suspect who is thought to have driven the
truck that plowed through a bike lane in Manhattan on Tuesday, killing eight
people, Central Asia’s troubled politics and economics form a part, at least,
of the back story.
The expanse of desert and mountains north of
Afghanistan has a total population of about 60 million. Uzbekistan, with around
32 million people, is by far the most populous, and has a long history with
Islamist militancy.
A spiral of repression and radicalization
that has spawned three major Islamist groups began soon after the Soviet
breakup, as an Islamic revival filled the vacuum left by Communism.
Proselytizing by Saudi-financed groups
advocated a particularly austere form of Islam, and a renewed interest in Islam
in much of the former Soviet space, sped things along.
“Of course, when one ideology falls, another
one takes over,” Shahida Tulaganova, a former producer with BBC from
Uzbekistan, and a close observer of Islamist movements in the region, said in a
telephone interview.
Alarmed, the country’s president at the time,
Islam Karimov, a former Soviet apparatchik, cracked down, introducing
government-sanctioned mosques that were tightly controlled and banning all
others. Under his nearly three-decade rule, rights groups say, thousands were
imprisoned for worshiping at unsanctioned mosques.
Not surprisingly, underground religious
groups formed. Members of the most prominent organization, the Islamic Movement
of Uzbekistan, were driven out of the country in the late 1990s and were active
in Afghanistan and Pakistan for years, though many of its members have now
joined the Islamic State’s organization in Afghanistan.
In one notorious instance, supporters of a
group known as Akramia — named after its founder, Akram Yuldashev — were
rounded up after an uprising and street protest in the Uzbek city of Andijan in
2005.
The crackdown and mass arrests that swept the
country were so alarming that the United States was prompted to close an air
base in Uzbekistan that had supported operations in Afghanistan. The Uzbek
government announced in 2016 that Mr. Yuldashev had died in prison five years
earlier, from tuberculosis.
Akramia was not clearly militant in nature,
so its dismantling drove home the message that Uzbeks drawn to religion not
sanctioned by the state would have to leave the country.
That in turn has helped create a large
diaspora of labor migrants who represent an attractive pool of potential
recruits for militant groups in other countries, particularly Russia.
Recruitment videos in Uzbek and Russian play up the heroic adventure of
fighting jihad in Syria, drawing an attractive contrast to the drudgery of
migrant labor.
“The propaganda on YouTube is amazing,” said
Ms. Tulaganova, the former television producer. “I wonder why nobody takes it
down.”
The Islamic State’s success in recruiting
Central Asian migrants outside their home countries has already drawn the
attention of researchers. The International Crisis Group, for example, has
examined recruitment among Uzbek and Kyrgyz migrant laborers since 2014, and is
preparing a report on the issue.
“What is a really critical factor, and what
sets the Islamic State apart from others like the Taliban, is its ability to
disseminate propaganda in Russian and Central Asian languages,” Deirdre Tynan,
the Central Asia project director for the International Crisis Group, said in a
telephone interview. “And it is available whether you are watching as an Uzbek
migrant in Russia or on the East Coast of the United States.”
“Young men who left Uzbekistan find
themselves isolated, perhaps not as successful as they wanted to be, or maybe
just lonely,” she said. In Syria, the Islamic State’s Central Asian recruits
are often given menial jobs or used as cannon fodder. She said a
disproportionate number of suicide bombers in Iraq and Syria were Tajiks.
Daniil Kislov, the Moscow-based editor of
Ferghana, a website that tracks developments in Central Asia, said that Uzbek
labor migrants in Russia, and possibly other countries too, had long been of
keen interest to recruiters. He cautioned that Mr. Saipov had lived for many
years in the West and might have become radicalized during that time.
But as many analysts have warned, growing up
under a suffocatingly repressive government, particularly in its treatment of
Muslims, is the sort of searing experience that could make a young man like him
receptive to the militants’ lure.
