Tag Archives: Islamic extremism

Tajik mullahs worry about young fighters in Syria

APRIL 5 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Local mullahs in Tajikistan are worried about the increasing number of young men heading off to Syria to join radical Islamist groups fighting against Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad.

Officials in Tajikistan, both government and religious, fear that the young men will return from Syria radicalised and ferment anti-government feelings.

Tajik president Emomali Rakhmon speaks out regularly against the potential drift north of the Taliban once NATO leaves Afghanistan.

Media quoted one mullah in a regional town besmirching anybody who moved to Syria to fight for the rebels.

“Such behaviour is “the way of lost souls and the way of the devil,” said Haidar Sharifzoda, head of the main mosque in the city of Kulyab.

Kulyab is in Khatlon province, Mr Rakhmon’s home region and power-base. It has also previously been considered a bastion of secular thinking. Last month, a 26-year-old man from Kulyab was reported killed in Syria.

The number of Central Asians currently fighting in Syria has been placed at anywhere between several hundred and several thousand. Many are disillusioned migrants working in Russian cities.

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(News report from Issue No. 179, published on April 9 2014)

Uzbek internet cafes install surveillance cameras

APRIL 1 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Under new rules designed to quash Islamic radicals, internet cafes in Uzbekistan will have to install surveillance cameras. The order was signed into law on March 19. Uzbekistan has increased surveillance generally, angering human rights campaigners.

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(News report from Issue No. 178, published on April 2 2014)

Radical Islamists attack Armenians in Syria

MARCH 25 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Radical Islamists fighting government forces in Syria’s civil war have attacked and killed people living in a predominantly ethnic Armenian town, news reports have said.

An estimated 2,000 Christian Armenians have fled the city of Kesab in western Syria for Latakia, a nearby town, reports said.

Syria has been home to a large Armenian minority for the past hundred years but thousands have fled to Yerevan since the start of Syria’s civil war in 2011.

The civil war in Syria presents president Serzh Sargsyan and his government a major headache both externally and domestically.

On a pre-planned trip to a conference in Brussels, Mr Sargsyan voiced his concern and offered help.

The attack is blamed on the Nursa Front, affiliated to Al Qaeda.

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(News report from Issue No. 177, published on March 26 2014)

Court in Kazakhstan jails Islamic radicals

MARCH 20 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Pavlodar, north Kazakhstan, jailed four Kazakhs who had trained with Islamic radicals in Syria, media reported. The Kazakhs were arrested in Turkey after crossing from Syria. Governments in Central Asia and the South Caucasus are increasingly concerned about people becoming radicalised in Syria.

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(News report from Issue No. 177, published on March 26 2014)

Row over Islam in Kyrgyzstan heats up

MARCH 21 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Disagreements over the pagan Nowruz celebration, marking the beginning of spring have highlighted fault lines in Kyrgyz society.

While the state-affiliated Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Kyrgyzstan (SAMK) views celebrating Nowruz as an acceptable part of pre-Islamic Kyrgyz tradition, more hard-line clerics, perhaps with a more Arab influence, called on believers to ignore the holiday completely in the run up to March 21.

The debate brings into focus the sharp rise of nontraditional Islam, imported from the Arab world, in Central Asia.

Nowruz — a key event in the calendar of all five Central Asian states and also Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey — is not celebrated in other parts of the Muslim world.

In February, Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev expressed alarm at signs of “Arab culture, including the appearance of women wearing hijab, something alien to the gentler Kyrgyz traditional Islam.

As well as a gulf between the views of secularists like Mr Atambayev and practicing Muslims, Kyrgyzstan is also witnessing what a local religion expert called a “battle for control of mosques between different Jamaats.

As if to illustrate the point, last month the deputy Imam of a mosque in Kara-Suu, a southern city, was arrested for organising radical activity.

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(News report from Issue No. 177, published on March 26 2014)

Kazakhstan builds up military forces

MARCH 7 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev has ordered his military commanders to build up their forces in the south and west of the country to counter any territorial disputes in the Caspian Sea and guard against the spread north of Islamic extremists from Afghanistan, media reported.

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(News report from Issue No. 175, published on March 12 2014)

Azerbaijan tightens anti-terror laws

MARCH 7 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan wants to impose harsher penalties on people who break its anti-terrorism laws, media quoted the head of the Azerbaijani parliament’s security committee, Ziyafat Asgarov, as saying. Azerbaijani officials have said they are worried about radicalised Islamists returning to Azerbaijan from Syria’s civil war.

(News report from Issue No. 175, published on March 12 2014)

Turkmenistan suffers Taliban attack

FEB. 28 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in Turkmenistan accused Taliban fighters of killing three border guards on the Turkmen-Afghan border, media reported. The Taliban later denied the accusation. Central Asian states are concerned about the spread north of the Taliban once NATO forces leave Afghanistan in 2014.

(News report from Issue No. 174, published on March 5 2014)

Kyrgyz police detains Syria-linked extremists

FEB. 17 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — The governments of Central Asia and the South Caucasus have been warning for months that their own security is being compromised by the civil war in Syria.

Local Islamic radicals travel to Syria for training and combat experience, they have said, and then return home eager to attack and bomb government targets.

Now Kyrgyzstan, which has been fighting an increase in attacks by the Taliban-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) over the past few years, has said it captured six radicals who had recently returned from Syria.

The Kyrgyz National Security Council said that the six men were arrested in Osh in the south of the country and had been planning a series of attacks.

Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan have also recently raised serious concerns about the flow of extremists into and out of Syria, and Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have said they are concerned about radicals linked to Afghanistan.

A few days earlier, the Kyrgyz national security council said five Kyrgyz men had been killed in Syria and that 50 or so were based in Syria full time. The inference from the Kyrgyz Security Council is that they may be dealing with this problem for some time to come.

(News report from Issue No. 172, published on Feb. 19 2014)

Kazakhstan jails Syria fighters

FEB. 4 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Kazakhstan started the trial of four Kazakh men who travelled to Syria to fight alongside Islamic extremists, media reported. Media reports said the men were captured in Syria and sent back to Kazakhstan. Regional leaders worry that young men will head to Syria and return with increasingly extremist views and hardened with battle experience.

(News report from Issue No. 170, published on Feb. 5 2014)