An Uzbek family survives an unwanted ordeal with a radical Islamic movement

Rustam Temirov 10/22/02

Ziyoda Kuldasheva's marriage started with an escape she thought would last three days. In early March 2000, Kuldasheva and her new husband, Aybek Khojayev, fled Uzbekistan for Tajikistan, forced into exile by the Uzbek government's crackdown on unsanctioned forms of Islamic worship. Kuldasheva returned in September 2002, after months in terrorist camps in Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

The story of their exile and return begins with a visit that Khojayev made to the Gumbaz Mosque in the city of Namangan. At the time, this mosque in the densely populated Ferghana Valley had a reputation for being a center of radical Islamic activity. As the couple tells it, an individual calling himself Abubakir Kenjayev approached Khojayev after he visited the mosque and said that his surname had appeared on a list of people whom the police would soon arrest for maintaining links to religious extremists. [For additional information see the EurasiaNet Human Rights archive]. Abubakir Kenjayev then reportedly helped the couple escape. Another person awaited them at their railroad station; he helped them to board the train and accompanied them to the town of Kanibadam in Tajikistan.

The couple says they ended up in an Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) camp whose members moved to Afghanistan after a month. They stayed in a four-room house where three more families of IMU members were already living. Khojayev says he served under Tahir Yuldash, the IMU's political leader, and Juma Namangani, its military chief. At the time, the IMU was in its fifth year of operations. It had absorbed activists of a number of radical Islamist organizations that Uzbekistan banned in 1992-1993, including Namangan's Adolat Uyushmasi, or Society of Justice. Most of these activists had settled in neighboring Tajikistan. The IMU's so-called Namangan Battalion, led by Namangani, fought for the United Tajik Opposition in Tajikistan's civil war from 1992 to 1997.

The IMU's fervor and roots in Tajikistan did not fill the couple with loyalty, though. "There was no medicine," says Kuldasheva. "It was cold. They gave each of us three kilograms of potatoes and one bar of soap a month. They expected it would be enough for the whole month. When we ran out of the most essential things, they turned a deaf ear to us." Khojayev describes life in the camp as unbearable.

The couple had followed the IMU leadership to Afghanistan at a time when the IMU was deepening links to al Qaeda, the terrorist network that received harbor from Afghanistan's Taliban until late 2001. The IMU had declared that its main goal was to topple the current government in Uzbekistan and establish an Islamic caliphate in the Ferghana Valley, which would then expand to the whole region. In 1999, the IMU fighters mounted an attack on the Batken District in Kyrgyzstan and took a group of Japanese geologists hostage. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. Uzbek authorities also believe that the IMU was behind bombings and a bus hijacking. Namangani may have died in American-led bombing of Afghanistan in late 2001.

Traveling with Namangani, Khojayev says he came to see that the idea of building an Islamic state in Uzbekistan was just a pretext for an attempt to acquire power by force. He concluded that Yuldash and other IMU leaders really wanted political power in the country, without any explicit devotion to the Koran. He says he told Yuldash that he wanted to return to Uzbekistan. But, according to the couple, the IMU politician rebuffed the idea. "He said that they [the Uzbek authorities] would throw me to prison and I would not be able to get out of there alive. He also said if I did not give up the idea of returning home, he himself would shut me in prison. He actually did and I spent 15 days in the local zindan [prison]." He says guards beat and starved him in prison.

On a cold day in December, Kuldasheva gave birth to a child. Mother and daughter often became ill; there was an acute lack of medicines. Kuldasheva says she feared starving to death. Ultimately the allied bombing of Afghanistan, conducted as part of the campaign against terrorism, put an end to the young family's ordeal. Half of the militants were killed; the rest panicked. Many, including Khojayev and Kuldasheva, seized the chance to escape. En route to Kabul they survived bombing by US warplanes. After another narrow escape, they managed to get to Pakistan.

While the Taliban's fall from power had loosened extremism's grip on the region, the young family's life became even harder after their escape and Kuldasheva grew steadily more insistent about returning home. When her husband dared to phone home, his mother, Zamira Temirbayeva, told him that Karimov had declared amnesty for "all Uzbek citizens who, having fallen into deception, found themselves in terrorist groups." IMU training camps forbid watching television, listening to the radio or reading newspapers, so Khojayev and many other IMU members had not known about the presidential amnesty. In early August, Khojayev went to the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Pakistan. He collected documents to enable his family to go back home to Kokand. On 26 August, Aybek, Ziyoda and their daughter Mariam arrived in Uzbekistan.

At present, Khojayev is focused on finding a job that he can do well despite having only studied for five years in school. He wants to go into small business. He is reluctant to recall his past. "It was a big mistake," he says. But others are not so inclined to repudiate the IMU or were not so lucky as to escape; Khojayev says he is the 101st Uzbek citizen who has returned from extremist organizations.

Editor's Note: Rustam Temirov is a pseudonym for a Central Asian journalist.

Posted October 22, 2002 © Eurasianet