Dozens of suspected members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a group seeking Islamist coups in Central Asian countries, have been arrested in Tajikistan since 2009 on suspicion of terrorism and coup plotting, a senior security official said. "I can't name the exact number of the IMU members who have been arrested, but there are dozens of them," Abdullo Nazarov, deputy chairman of Tajikistan's State Committee for National Security, told reporters.Nazarov said the IMU had split up into three parts - the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Islamic Movement of Turkestan, and a group that allegedly joined Al Qaeda. The latter is led by Tohir Yoldashev, an Uzbek citizen who has taken leadership of the IMU as well and had declared a jihad on the Uzbek government, the official said. "IMU members whom we have arrested claim that Yoldashev is alive," Nazarov said.
The IMU has its headquarters in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and is chiefly active in the Fergana Valley of Uzbekistan but IMU militants are quite often arrested in neighboring Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
A Tajik military training ground 50 kilometers from the capital Dushanbe was the site of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization anti-terrorism military exercise whose final phase ended on Saturday. Uzbekistan, though an SCO member, refused to take part in the exercise, which brought together the organization's other members - Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and China.