DUSHANBE, March 31, 2016, Asia-Plus –
Eurasianet.Org
reported yesterday that Tajikistan’s top prosecutor decided this week to flesh out the official explanation for where the country’s volunteers to militant groups in Middle Eastern war zones are coming from.
As General Prosecutor Yusuf Rahmon explained in an interview to state-owned newspaper
Jumuhuriyat
, some 85 percent of the fighters are former migrant laborers.
Rahmon presented a few anecdotal cases as evidence for his assertion. One story involved a group of Tajik citizens, who the prosecutor named as Abdurasoul Ahmadov, A. Sattarov, an imam at a mosque in the northern Sughd province, and D. Tohirov. All of them are said to have come under the sway of an alleged Islamic State group member in Moscow in May.
The prosecutor said the suspected recruiter, who he identified as Ilyos Malaboyev, was not intent on enlisting people to fight in Syria, but rather to join up with other alleged IS militants already inside Tajikistan.
“They returned to the motherland, and at the Abuzari Ghifori mosque in the Jabborrasoulov district (in Sughd), they tried to lure their countrymen into IS. They were detained and a criminal case has now been initiated against them,” Rahmon said.
The government of Tajikistan says it is undertaking strenuous outreach initiatives to discourage young people from being led astray. Rahmon is particularly concerned about Salafist movements.
Believers in Salafism do not acknowledge the legitimacy of other forms of Islamic worship, including Shi”ism and Sufism. The current first appeared in Tajikistan in the early 2000s, having been brought back to the country by Tajiks that had taken refuge in Pakistan during the civil war.
Rahmon accused Salafist groups of invariably serving as a stepping stone to IS membership, although the authorities’ relationship with this particular current is a curious one.
The movement was banned after a wave of mysterious blasts in Dushanbe in 2009. The Supreme Court decision banning the activities of the Salafist movement led to a sudden drop in the organization’s public profile. The movement was designated as extremist in 2014.
Even so, the recognized leader of Tajikistan’s Salafists, the now-jailed Muhammadi Rahmatullo, was still having articles published in newspapers as recently as last year. One piece was in published in outlets owned by the government, as well as on the website of the ruling National Democratic Party of Tajikistan. It didn’t hurt that the article in question was devoted to slamming the opposition and now-banned Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan.
The government claims it has managed to bring 147 people back home from war zones, although little is known of the fate of these people. Another 34 Tajik citizens seeking to travel abroad and join radical groups were detained at the border, according to Rahmon.
Rahmon said in the interview that foreign religious educational establishments are a primary source of concern and that since 2010, more than 3,000 Tajiks “illegally” studying at religious colleges abroad have been repatriated.
