| Submit your comments on this article |
| Central Asia |
| IMU flunky believes the revolution is right around the corner |
| 2004-04-05 |
| Granted amnesty by the Uzbek government, Uigun Saidov turned in his Kalashnikov and sat back down at his pottery wheel. He was returning to his Central Asian hometown after a year on the run because he was part of an al-Qaida-linked terror organization that joined the fight against U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan that toppled the Taliban regime. Despite the government amnesty, Saidov was unrepentant about the aims of his former comrades-in-arms - hundreds of whom he said still are hiding in Afghanistan and Pakistan. "The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is in opposition to the government and its aim is to create an Islamic state," Saidov told The Associated Press. The swarthy man, who looks younger than his 33 years, said he still believed in that goal. In Tashkent, the capital, Uzbek Foreign Minister Sadyk Safayev told journalists Sunday that he believed "the backbone of the IMU" had been broken during the anti-terror operations in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks. But he said "there might be several remnants of the IMU here." He gave no details. "As a coordinated, centralized structure, I don't see any serious threat," he said. Authorities have kept Saidov and his family under strict surveillance since his December return. After learning of the amnesty offer, he turned himself in at the Uzbek consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, along with his wife and three young children. Saidov's father looked on with distrust as his son spoke to an AP reporter at the gates of the family's old one-story house in the outskirts of Navoi, 310 miles south of Tashkent. Wearing a black-and-green shirt and jogging pants, Saidov began to talk only after a thorough check of his visitors' identification documents. He said he had been trained at an IMU camp in neighboring Tajikistan's Tavildara region - a former stronghold of the Tajik Islamic opposition that fought the secular government in a mid-1990s civil war. Later, he said he was flown to Afghanistan in a military helicopter belonging to Russian troops stationed in Tajikistan. "Our leader Juma Namangani had good ties with Russian military," he says. "They supplied us with weapons, clothes and other things." The U.S. military has said Namangani was killed in Afghanistan in late 2001, but there was no evidence provided. Saidov said he did not know whether Namangani was dead or alive. He said, however, that he believed reports last month that Pakistani troops injured the IMU's other top leader, Tahir Yuldash, in the Waziristan area on the Afghan border. "He is there," Saidov said, adding that some 500 IMU fighters were still on the loose in Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, Saidov denied that the IMU was behind the recent Uzbek attacks. "I don't know whose hand that was. It's somebody new," he said. Nearby, another man recently given amnesty after 3 1/2 years in an Uzbek prison for allegedly being a Wahhabi also denied involvement of that religious sect. "We have nothing to do with this," said Normurod Uroqov, 50, who was freed in January and named on a list of former extremists being carefully watched by a local state-affiliated Muslim leader. "I think it's some political game." The country's top prosecutor said last week that investigators were still determining which extremist group was behind the attacks, but they were linked to "international terrorist organizations." Speaking over tea, bread and sweets laid on a cloth on the floor, Saidov said he decided to return to Uzbekistan because he had tired of fighting. He said he fought on the Taliban side during the late 2001 war in Afghanistan and then fled to Pakistan after their defeat. His wife, cradling a young daughter in her arms and wearing a long flowered dress and white headscarf, entered as Saidov spoke and began to whisper into his ear. He said she was worried about a car parked outside that she feared belonged to intelligence officials. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |