Word: islamists
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...fighting in Somalia took an even deadlier turn on Thursday when a suicide bomber drove a car full of explosives into the front of a hotel in the west of the country, killing Somalia's National Security Minister, a former ambassador and at least 20 others. Somalia's extremist Islamist militia, al-Shabaab, said it carried out the attack...
...past, the SCO has worked to stave off the threat of Islamist militancy in Central Asia, but it declared in 2005 that all U.S. military bases in the region's post-Soviet republics must have a timeline for withdrawal - a move on both Beijing and Moscow's part to stymie U.S. influence. Already, the U.S.'s pivotal Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan has been ordered to cease operations...
...pummel Taliban positions in the Swat Valley last month, there were other military advances against insurgent outposts - barely noticed by the global media - taking place in valleys not so far away. In late May, Uzbek soldiers and tanks patrolled parts of the troubled Ferghana Valley following shootouts with suspected Islamist extremists and a suicide bombing in the valley's main city of Andijan. In neighboring Tajikistan, government forces fanned out across the remote Rasht Valley in a supposed attempt to hunt down a notorious militant commander named Abdullo Rakhimov. The veteran jihadi, according to some local reports, had recently abandoned...
...atop a significant chunk of the world's untapped oil and natural gas reserves, assets that are eyed covetously by both neighboring Russia and China, as well as the West. Yet the region - dominated by corrupt and repressive regimes - is itself precariously poised, home to its own native Islamist insurgencies vulnerable to domestic upheaval. "There is the possibility for really unpredictable change," says Jeffrey Mankoff, a fellow for Russian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. And it's change few Central Asia watchers expect to be positive. While great powers vie for resources and influence, countries...
...specter of an Islamist threat has often worked in favor of the region's governments. After 9/11, U.S. Central Asian strategy was dictated largely by the Department of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld. Uzbekistan, ruled its entire independent life by the iron-fisted Islam Karimov, was brought into the fold as a staging ground for American operations in Afghanistan, as well as a willing accomplice in the renditions of suspected terrorists. That cozy partnership ended in 2005 when the Uzbek army gunned down hundreds of civilians protesting for reform in the Ferghana Valley under the pretense that it was curbing...