Are Terror Groups Faked? Does the IJU Even Exist?

When it comes to talking about the prospects of terrorism in Central Asia, it seems, the way to make a name for yourself is to identify the Next Big Threat. Ahmed Rashid was probably the most important (and successful) of these types, as his book about the Taliban—published a year and a half before September 11—seemed eerily prescient. That is, if you ignore the other books written by scholars before him.

The problem is, aside from keeping attention focused on al Qaeda and the Taliban, it’s difficult to really say how “true” all the talk of other terror groups actually is. Rashid, for example, has a pretty solid record of hyping the panoply of supposed Uzbek terror groups wildly out of proportion to their actual size, influence, and capabilities (like in 2002 predicting the IMU would sweep across all of Central Asia, collapsing each country like a flan in a cupboard, right after Juma Namangani died a fiery death outside of Kunduz).

Indeed, Uzbek-hatred seems an uncomfortably common theme in much of the discussion about the “threat” they supposedly pose to world peace. Other regional al Qaeda-linked terror groups, like Abu Sayyaf or Islamic Maghreb, don’t seem to elicit nearly the same apocalyptic assessments the Uzbeks do, even if they’ve killed scores more people. Rashid wrote in Jihad that the dirty Uzbeks eat the meat of innocent baby Kyrgyz; Barnett Rubin’s seminal 1999 report, Calming the Ferghana Valley, claims “Central Asia is potentially one of the most explosive and certainly one of the least understood” regions of the former Soviet Union, despite a good solid decade of ethnic cleansing in the FSU countries of the Caucasus on a scale never matched by the relatively minor incidents in Central Asia (that tract was cleverly picked apart by an actual expert); and then there are the myriad—and quite uncountable—pop columnists who seem to blame Uzbeks for both sunshine and rain… when they even know what an Uzbek is.

Similar, rather fundamental problems can be found in the infinity of shoddy punditry about Afghanistan, though not quite to the same degree, as it is, after all, an actual war. It is only recently, with the strange insistence that Turkic Muslims cleared of any crime were in fact hardened terrorists unworthy of our apology or assistance for years of unjust imprisonment, that Central Asian Muslims have faced such a bizarre array of race- and religion-based bias.

With the Uzbeks, however, there always seems to be a new terror group just around the bend. Part of the challenge is the (minor) existence of a very real Uzbek terror group in the tatters of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, now dwindling in numbers and importance in Waziristan. Part of the challenge is the presence of ethnic Uzbeks in Afghanistan itself, stretching from ethnically Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum’s fiefdom in the north near (ahem) Uzbekistan to surprisingly large (though still overall very small) pockets of Uzbeks in southern Kandahar and Zabul… some of whom just may have collaborated with the Taliban.

But what of other groups? There remains a great deal of fear and confusion over what a potential increase in religiosity in the Ferghana Valley might mean for Islam in Central Asia—even if the discussion happens to center only around Uzbeks and not Tajiks or Kyrgyz. Much of that confusion is in fact driven by the government of Uzbekistan itself, whether pushing a mythical organization like Akromiya to justify the wholesale slaughter of unarmed people in Andijon, or the Islamic Movement of Turkistan for… well who really knows why? The thing is, there is almost no evidence these groups exist… and curiously they all seem focused on resisting Islam Karimov’s violently oppressive regime and the countries that enable it.

The latest terror incarnation to garner serious global attention is the so-called Islamic Jihad Group. A recent post at Jihadica explains:

The Turkic peoples have until now played a fairly peripheral role in global jihadism. They have not attracted much academic attention, and apart from the 2003 Istanbul bombings and the 2008 American Consulate attacks, operations carried out by Turkics have gained little attention. The Waziristan-based group Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) seems to be trying to change this (as Jihadica has suggested before).

The IJU broke off from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in 2001, and went for a while under the name Islamic Jihad Group. When the name changed in 2005, the group also assumed a new strategy, one that looked beyond Uzbekistan and focused more on global issues. This may also have involved a merger with other groups, as indicated in the “Union”. What binds the group together appears to be language, and it is primarily made up of Turkic-speaking members.

The number of IJU fighters has been estimated at between 100 and 200, the bulk of which comprises Uzbeks, who remain relatively anonymous compared to the Turks and Germans arriving in the camps. This makes it much smaller than the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which operates in nearby Southern Waziristan and is hosted by Baitullah Mahsud.

I don’t even know what that means. The post is titled “Are the Uzbeks Going Global,” and suggests that 100 to 200 anonymous Uzbeks who are overshadowed by Turks and Germans in the camps of Waziristan are focused on “global issues.” It seems the primary sources for the author’s analysis are news reports in Spiegel and a single Turkish-language website. Speigel is a main source because of three suspects arrested in Frankfurt because of their alleged involvement in a plot to bomb Frankfurt-Main International Airport and connection to the IJU.

The guilt or innocence of those men is immaterial to this discussion—whether or not they actually planned to explode bombs at an airport is not related to their potential involvement in the IJU—because the way the press described their background was deeply problematic. As Ian Chesley noted at the time:

The stated goal of the IMU is (was) to overthrow Karimov. Fine. They probably also don’t like the United States, despite the fact that we have essentially sided with the Ferghana dissidents since 2005. But is that enough of a motivation to undertake a bombing operation in Europe, when there are plenty of targets sitting right there across the border in Afghanistan?

Second, these are German citizens (and one Turk)–not your battle-hardened IMU warriors by any means. The implication in the German federal prosecutor’s statement seems to be that the IMU is running the training camps that the plotters visited. But then, this is linked to assertion that the IMU also attempted to bomb the US and Israeli embassies in Tashkent.

A couple of questions: What motivation do three Germans have to be members of an IMU cell (as opposed to some other organization)? What would be the goal of the attack (other than simply spectacular destruction, which hasn’t been an IMU tactic in the past)? Is there a reason that this new “IJU” splinter group should be associated in our minds with the “IMU,” which has been (aside from its real existence, that I don’t debate) a rhetorical tool for Karimov to prop up his nasty dictatorship?

It is telling that there are really only a few plots attributable to the IJU: the 2007 Frankfurt plot (which is riddled with problems), the 2004 bombing of the Israeli and U.S. embassies in Tashkent, and some bombs that went off in Osh and Bishkek. It’s noteworthy that the latter two have been traditionally blamed on the IMU, while Craig Murray, who was the UK ambassador to Uzbekistan at the time, insists he could not find a single person who had ever heard of the IJU inside Uzbekistan, and that the IMU had never mentioned the IJU anywhere, ever. As with the weird notation of the IJU’s members’ anonymity above, Murray points to the complete inability to actually name a single member of the IJU—aside from those three Germans—as reason to doubt the group’s existence.

Of course, lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. But one of the main challenges we face in determining the reliability of information about these groups is just how little of it there is. The primary source for much of the data we do have is the government of Uzbekistan—which has a compelling interest in clearing itself from any sort of popular resistance to the government and blaming everything on Islamic crazies, which conveniently enough the local super powers all happen to be obsessed with.

None of this means the IJU is an actual hoax. What it does mean, however, is that, especially when you take into account the Uzbek’s history of inventing phantom Islamic resistance movements to justify its police state, the lack of sources actually discussing the group (the sources in that Jihadica post and paper are all secondary and tertiary, and even reposted Wikipedia entries, except for the one website which isn’t even written in Uzbek), and everyone’s inability to name a single member aside from that one guy in the videos who wasn’t around in 2002 when the group was invented… well, it just doesn’t add up. There could very well be an IJU out there, its 200 members secretly plotting scary plots to destroy the universe. But there isn’t any evidence of it actually existing just yet. We need more, please.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust

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