Central Asia Is Less Stable Than It Looks

Bloomberg
By: Leonid Bershidsky.

About 3 million Uzbeks work in Russia. In 2015, Uzbekistan was the biggest source of migrant labor for Russia after Ukraine. Most of these workers are honest laborers who just want to send money to their families, but Uzbek radicals have also used Russia as a stop on their path to the fighting in Syria. They can’t go directly, because Karimov has kept Islamic radicalism tightly suppressed. In 1999, there was a major purge of Islamist organizations in which 7,000 people were jailed. At the same time, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a militant group that operated in the south of Central Asia, was squeezed from the mountains there into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last year, it pledged allegiance to Islamic State…

According to The Soufan Group, about 500 Uzbek citizens were fighting with Islamic State in Syria and Iraq late last year…

.

To download a full copy of the “Foreign Fighters: An Updated Assessment of the Flow of Foreign Fighters into Syria and Iraq” report please click here.

.

To read the full article please click on the link below:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-30/central-asia-is-less-stable-than-it-looks