JAN. 20 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — At a press conference in Dushanbe, the Eurasianet website reported that Tajik interior minister Interior Minister Ramazon Rahimzoda said that the country’s security forces had stopped 36 terrorist attacks in 2016. No independent analysis of the figures was available.
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(News report from Issue No. 314, published on Jan. 27 2017)f
JAN. 20 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — A Kazakh national arrested at New York’s JFK Airport in 2015 admitted in court to being a sympathiser of the radical IS group, US media reported. Ahror Saidahmetov, 21, who was living in New York at the time of his arrest, faces 15 years in jail. Kazakhstan and other countries in the region have been fighting IS recruitment.
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(News report from Issue No. 314, published on Jan. 27 2017)
JAN. 17 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Turkish police captured the main suspect, an Uzbek national called Abdulkadir Masharipov, behind a New Year’s eve attack on an Istanbul nightclub that killed 39 people. Masharipov has, reportedly, already confessed to the killings. The Turkish authorities said that he had received training from the IS radical militant group.
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(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)
JAN. 16 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s National Security Council dropped the threat level of a major terrorist attack from yellow. The Security Committee did not give a reason for dropping the threat from moderate. It was raised to moderate or yellow in June and extended in August. Kazakhstan had always intended to drop the threat level in January.
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(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)
JAN. 6 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Aktobe, north-west Kazakhstan, sentenced seven men to prison for terrorism related offences. The state prosecutors said that the group had been planning a series of attacks against Russia and Russians. Central Asian governments have become increasingly wary of attacks on their territory and of Islamic radicals using the region as a prime recruiting ground.
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(News report from Issue No. 312, published on Jan. 13 2017)
JAN. 9 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in Turkey named the suspected gunman who killed 39 people at a nightclub in Istanbul on New Years Eve as Abdulkadir Masharipov, an Uzbek national. They said that he had links with IS in Iraq and Syria and that he has been living in Turkey since 2011. The accusation once again pulls Central Asia into the spotlight over IS recruitment in the region.
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(News report from Issue No. 312, published on Jan. 13 2017)
JAN. 10 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The suspects behind the attack on the Chinese embassy in Bishkek last year are in hiding in Istanbul, Kyrgyz media quoted Kyrgyzstan’s ambassador to Turkey as saying. A car bomb killed two people working at the embassy on Aug. 30 2016. The authorities have blamed Uighurs from China’s western Xinjiang Province. Turkey has not commented.
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(News report from Issue No. 312, published on Jan. 13 2017)
JAN. 1 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — An ethnic Azerbaijani woman with Russian citizenship, Nurana Hasanova, was killed during an attack by an alleged member of the radical IS group on a nightclub in Istanbul on New Year’s Eve. It’s not clear ifHasanova was working at the nightclub or was visiting. At least 39 people died in the attack.
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(News report from Issue No. 311, published on Jan. 6 2017)
JAN. 2 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Radical Islamist recruitment from Central Asia came under the spot- light after the authorities in Turkey accused a Kyrgyz man of killing at least 39 people at a nightclub in Istanbul on New Year’s Eve. The attack was claimed by the extremist IS group. The Turkish authorities later retracted the accusation and instead said that they were hunting for an ethnic Uighur who may have spent time in Kyrgyzstan. Security experts have said that Central Asia is a prime recruiting group for IS.
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(News report from Issue No. 311, published on Jan. 6 2017)
DEC. 20 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in the United States sentenced Irfan Demirtas, reported to be a joint Dutch and Turkish national, to seven years in prison for raising funds for the radical group Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). Demirtas was arrested in Germany last year and extradited to the US. The IMU is considered a terrorist group and has been fighting US-led forces in Afghanistan. It was formed in the 1990s in Uzbekistan and has previously targeted Tashkent with bombs.
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(News report from Issue No. 310, published on Dec. 23 2016)