DUSHANBE, June 23, 2015, Asia-Plus – A video showing wounded former commander of Tajik OMON (special police unit) who has defected to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militant group has appeared on social networks.
A certain user with Arabic name has posted the video on Facebook. A former commander of Tajik OMON Gulmurod Halimov was reportedly wounded during a recent attack of Syrian government forces.
We will recall that the previous video showing the former commander of Tajik special police unit appeared on social networks on June 18.
In the video, Halimov and other armed men sitting in front of a black IS-style flag try to dispel rumors that he has gone to Syria on a mission to kill a high-profile Tajik militant, Nusrat Nazarov.
Nazarov, who goes by several other names, is a 39-year-old Tajik who has appeared in several IS videos claiming to be the leader of Tajik fighters in Raqqa.
Nazarov was reportedly killed recently in Syria.
Pointing to his gun, Halimov says he uses his weapon only to kill infidels: “If my own older brother or younger brother became an infidel, I would cut off his head. I would kill him if he fought against us.”
We will recall that the former special police unit commander Gulmurod Halimov who has been missing for weeks reappeared on the Internet in late May, claiming that he has joined ISIL militants in protest at official restrictions on religious observance back home.
In his first ISIL video, posted on YouTube on May 27, Gulmurod Halimov says that Tajik labor migrants “must stop serving infidels” in Russia and join ISIL in Syria and Iraq in order to establish Shari”a law in other countries, including Tajikistan. Wielding a gun, Halimov also threatened to bring holy war to Russia and the United States.
