Washington Post
November 10
AMANGAN, Uzbekistan -- His mother's house is watched by spies and cameras. His old mosque is
closed to the public. People in his home town shift their eyes and mumble that they really didn't know Juma
Namangani.
They have good reason. The government of this former Soviet republic considers this crony of Osama bin Laden to be the country's number one terrorist threat, and any hint of association with him can land a person in prison.
The stocky, bearded man with the crooked nose is now a top officer in Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia, and one of its most feared, according to commanders with the Northern Alliance, the Afghan rebel coalition fighting the Taliban. He has a reputation for cruelty -- if any soldier defies his orders, the whole squad is shot, according to one story -- and he is a wanted man with almost no place to go.
Namangani, 32, has been fighting to defend the pivotal northern city of Mazar-e Sharif from the alliance, according to alliance commanders. The alliance claimed to have taken the city yesterday, and the fate of Namangani and his men was unknown.
Namangani got his start in Afghanistan 14 years ago -- fighting on the other side. As an 18-year-old conscript, he was brought from his native Uzbekistan to fight with the Soviets as a paratrooper during their occupation of Afghanistan.
After his two-year military stint, he returned home to this city in Uzbekistan's conservative Fergana Valley, embraced religion and eventually founded the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), considered by the government, and now by Washington, to be a terrorist organization.
When President Bush mentioned the IMU in his Sept. 20 speech to a joint session of Congress, it was a nod to Uzbekistan to help gain its cooperation in the campaign against accused terrorist bin Laden and the Taliban movement that shelters him. But the IMU has the credentials to earn a mention on its own merits.
In 1997, members of the group assassinated regional Uzbek officials, leaving the head of one on the gate of the home of the Namangan internal affairs chief. In 1999 and 2000, armed IMU squads made foraysfrom Tajikistan into Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, vowing to try to replace the governments with Islamic authorities.
On Feb. 16, 1999, the Uzbek government says, the group set off bombs in Tashkent that killed 16 people and narrowly missed President Islam Karimov. In August 1999, the IMU kidnapped four Japanese geologists, reportedly receiving several million dollars for their return two months later. The next year, they seized four American mountain climbers in Kyrgyzstan, though the hostages escaped after six days.
There is much debate about the size of the IMU and the extent of the threat it poses to the Uzbek government. But it is clear that Namangani has spooked the authorities here. The government has vowed to keep closed its Friendship Bridge into Afghanistan, largely out of fear that Namangani will try to cross it. And it unexpectedly allowed U.S. troops to use a base in Uzbekistan in hopes the Americans would demolish the IMU.
The man who heads the group remains largely a mystery. There are only a few blurry photos of him. Like his patron, bin Laden, he doesn't give interviews. Even here, his home town, the few stories about him seem a mix of fact and legend.
Namangani was born Jumaboy Admadjonovich Khojiyev and graduated from agricultural vocational school before he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1987. His service in the airborne corps in Afghanistan produced little of note, but it gave him a tough-man image when he returned in 1989.
This is a hard, rural place, with cotton fields worked with sweat and picked by hand. The people are poor. They see little that the government has done to help their lives. Dissatisfaction is high; for some, the lure of Islam as an answer to their dreary existence is strong.
Namangani was drawn to that. Once out of the army, he studied with an Islamic scholar and took on radical Islam as his politics. With a like-minded partner, Takhir Yuldash, and a nom de guerre taken from his home town, Namangani began working to replace the government's rule in the Fergana Valley with law based on one interpretation of the Koran, the Islamic holy book.
To the government, that is simple treason. Some here in Namangan don't see it that way. When Uzbekistan was surprised by the collapse of Soviet authority in 1991, lawlessness filled the void. Assaults and robberies became rampant. Namangani and his companions became vigilantes, collaring crooks and administering beatings as punishment, according to local residents.
"I'm not saying I support them," said a 31-year-old Namangan teacher. "But when they were here, they were disciplined, and they kept peace in the streets."
It was in this period that Namangani and the man who would become his chief nemesis met, probably for the only time. Karimov, Soviet Uzbekistan's Kremlin-appointed chief, was campaigning for president in this country's first post-independence election. It was a brief period of political freedoms, which were crushed by Karimov after he won.
On the stump in the fall of 1991, he came to Namangan. Told there would be a march of opponents, Karimov agreed to meet them. He was joined on the speakers' platform by Namangani. The young radical challenged the country's boss, an unnerving experience for an iron-fisted leader. Someone videotaped the session.
"Karimov was treated fairly respectfully. But he had to pray with them, and they made demands about imposing Islamic law," said a Western analyst who has seen the tape. "At one point, you could see Karimov blanch. The crowd was clearly hostile, and Namangani could have done anything he wanted with Karimov at that moment."
Karimov stood his ground. But the encounter apparently did not sit well with him. After his election in December 1991, doubly alarmed by the Islamic-fed civil war breaking out in neighboring Tajikistan and student demonstrations at home, he cracked down on political opponents and those he deemed Islamic radicals.
Namangani and Yuldash left town, and Namangani fought for some time with Islamic groups in Tajikistan. He reportedly passed through Iran, back through Afghanistan, and then stayed for a while in Peshawar, Pakistan. There, analysts say, he is believed to have made lasting connections with both bin Laden and the Pakistani intelligence service.
"His funding comes from bin Laden," the Western analyst said. "But the connections [with Pakistan's intelligence service] have continued."
Uzbek authorities also said the IMU is deeply involved in heroin and arms smuggling. Some say the group's forays in the Fergana Valley were partly to secure a smuggling route.
Those attacks have been cited by the Uzbek government as justification for a crackdown that has jailed an estimated 7,000 prisoners, many guilty only of being devout Muslims.
"Is the government really threatened? No," said a Middle Eastern diplomat here. "But are they scared? Yes. They don't really know how to fight terrorists."
"Even if they tripled their forces, the IMU is not going to sweep through the streets of Tashkent," agreed a Western diplomat. "But what traumatized the government was that they were able to get the bombs and carry out the bombings. When you've invested so much into control of the society, that's pretty upsetting."
In Namangan, more conspiratorial theories reign. "The government uses the threat of the Islamic fighters just to keep their power and keep the people under pressure," said an unemployed brick maker. "The government has made them into extremists."
Whatever the strategy on either side, the Sept. 11 attacks dealt a new hand. Namangani became firmly entrenched with the Taliban, reportedly with a high rank. Estimates of the number of fighters aligned with him at Mazar-e Sharif vary widely, from a few hundred to several thousand. With the apparent fall of the city, his own prospects would seem to be just as uncertain.
"If we capture him, we will take him to the Uzbek border, turn him over and say, 'Do with him what you want,' " Mohammed Hasham Saad, the top Northern Alliance official in Tashkent, said. There's little mystery in what his fate would be then: Namangani has been sentenced to death in absentia by the Uzbek courts, and Karimov is widely quoted as having his own plan for dealing with IMU members, offering to "shoot them in the head" himself.