Word: uzbek
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...with the turmoil of Taliban insurgencies further south. In Tajikistan, the fragile status quo that has existed since a civil war between Russian-backed forces and an Islamist opposition ended in 1997 looks to be unraveling. Observers point to a possible influx in recent months of Tajik and Uzbek militants, returning to their homeland after fighting alongside Pakistani and Afghan Taliban. Since May, the Tajik government has locked down the country's Rasht Valley, ostensibly as part of an anti-drugs operation, but also, say experts, in a bid to crack down on local Islamist-leaning warlords. In some parts...
...similar arrangement in 2007 with two different and more powerful militant leaders proved disastrous. When Maulvi Nazir of the rival Ahmedzai Wazir tribe in South Waziristan took on Mehsud and Uzbek groups aligned to al-Qaeda, the Pakistan army backed him. After his men killed 250 Uzbek fighters, the army entered a nonaggression pact with Nazir and his associate Hafiz Gul Bahadur. But Nazir continued to attack U.S. forces across the border, and was targeted in air strikes. Enraged, Nazir and Bahadur shed their differences and formed a new alliance with Mehsud earlier this year. Now, all three groups could...
...Analysts fear that the deteriorating economic climate, a legacy of ineffectual governance, and an increasingly frustrated population may feed into the designs of established militant groups in the region. The Ferghana Valley, the most densely populated pocket of Central Asia, straddles the Uzbek, Tajik and Kyrgyz borders, and is home to the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a State Department listed terror organization. Militants are known to slip easily across the porous 1,300 km boundary between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, which is also a chief thoroughfare for Afghan opium into the markets of the West. According...
...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 an Islamist revolt. U.S. and European condemnation only led the government to turn to Moscow's embrace and throw out numerous international NGOs and foreign aid agencies. The country...
...press tout the advent of the new "Great Game" in a region that for centuries has been at the whim of larger forces. Not many locals are that interested, though. "We waited and hoped for democratic change after the influence of America," says Umida Niyazova, a journalist and prominent Uzbek activist living in exile in Germany. "But the years since have only brought more instability...