Page 66 - bne magazine February 2024_20240206

66 Opinion
bne February 2024
Tajik fighters in Afghanistan
On December 31, Afghanistan’s acting Defence Minister Muhammad Yaqoob said that among the foreign fighters killed or captured in Afghanistan in 2023, the largest groups were citizens of Tajikistan and Pakistan.
Yaqoob said in 2023 more than 20 Pakistanis had been killed “in various security incidents” in Afghanistan, but claimed during this same period “dozens” of Tajik nationals were “killed or arrested”.
The Taliban defence chief did not provide any details about the Tajik citizens killed or captured in Afghanistan, so it was unclear to which group or groups these Tajiks belonged.
Since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, ISKP has expanded its propaganda aimed at recruiting Uzbeks and Tajiks in northern Afghanistan and across the border in Central Asia.
Tajik nationals have carried out several high-profile ISKP attacks in Afghanistan since August 2021.
A Tajik national ISKP identified as Abdul Jabbar took part
in a December 2022 attack on a Kabul hotel where Chinese businessmen regularly stayed, and ISKP said a Tajik citizen using the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Tajiki participated in an attack on the Sikh temple in Kabul in June 2022.
As of mid-January, Tajik authorities had not commented publicly on the recent incidents involving Tajik citizens in Austria, Germany, Iran or Afghanistan.
Why Tajik nationals?
Citizens of all five Central Asian countries are known to have joined Islamic extremist groups in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan.
Most seemed to come from Uzbekistan, which is not surprising since, with nearly 37mn people, Uzbekistan is by some distance the most populous country in Central Asia.
The first Islamic militant group to appear in Central Asia was the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which from 1999- 2001 was active in the area where the borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan meet.
Gulmurod Halimov (Credit: screenshot).
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Uzbek nationals later joined, and in some cases founded, Islamic extremist groups in Syria and Iraq. Some Uzbek citizens, meanwhile, are in the ISKP in Afghanistan.
Tajiks were previously less prominent, with the exception of Gulmurod Halimov, a former commander of special forces in Tajikistan’s Interior Ministry who defected to the Islamic State in 2015 and eventually became the terrorist group’s “minister of war.”
Halimov’s case is interesting since he was not a strongly religious person before joining IS.
In a video released shortly after he joined the terrorist group in Syria, Halimov blamed the injustice and corruption of the Tajik government for his decision to join IS.
There are many reasons an individual might join an extremist group.
But it might be more than a coincidence that when Uzbek citizens were prominent among Islamic extremist groups, Islam Karimov was Uzbekistan’s president.
Karimov was Uzbekistan’s first president, and his government was increasingly repressive until his death in the late summer of 2016. In the last years before Karimov died, there was no hope there would be any changes for the better in Uzbekistan.
Karimov’s successor, Uzbekistan’s current president Shavkat Mirziyoyev, entered office promising real change.
Mirziyoyev has, for example, eased the tight control over religion imposed by Karimov.
Since 2015, Tajikistan’s government has increasingly resembled the Karimov government that existed during the dark final years of the strongman’s life.
In late 2015, it banned the country’s largest opposition party – the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan – and, since then, it has cracked down on any group that could potentially offer any challenge to the current government.
In Tajikistan today, the majority of people have no hope that changes for the better are on the way.
Worse, it has become clear in the last decade that Tajik President Emomali Rahmon, in power since 1992, is grooming his eldest son Rustam, 36, to be the next president, so there
is next to no optimism that positive change will be seen in coming years.
And faced by this realisation that Tajikistan is almost sure to continue on its current path for possibly decades to come, Tajik citizens are playing roles in militant groups, just as Uzbek nationals did when Karimov was in power exercising an iron grip.