Uzbekistan’s security services this week announced the arrest of a 21-year-old on suspicion of belonging to an extremist Islamic group and attempting to recruit others into joining armed militant organizations for combat abroad.

The UzA state news agency reported on February 17 that security services said they had tracked down the suspect, who is from the southern Surkhandaryo region, through his online activities.

UzA cited officials as saying the man, who was identified only with the initials R.I., intended to join the ranks of armed groups in Syria.

This reported arrest marks only the latest in a sustained government campaign against alleged militants. When the detentions occur, officials provide next to no details about the suspects and trials are conducted under conditions of intense secrecy.

In this case, the security services said that they found evidence on the suspect’s telephone indicating that he had been communicating with other people promoting violent jihadism. He also had recordings of sermons by alleged extremist preachers.

Some of the content the man was allegedly sharing had been produced by a media production outfit associated with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU, a group that was blamed for several terrorist attacks in the country in the 2000s, officials said. The consensus among security experts is that the IMU, which is known to have been most active in unruly border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 2000s, has for many years been a spent force.

One of the preachers named in the case of the Surkhandaryo region suspect was Sirojiddin Mukhtarov, an ethnic Uzbek originally from southern Kyrgyzstan who is best known by this adopted name of Abu Saloh. Militancy experts have identified Mukhtarov as the founder of Katibat al Tawhid wal Jihad, a movement that emerged in Syria in 2013 and was among several analogous groups pooling fighters originating from Central Asia.

Katibat al Tawhid wal Jihad was banned by Uzbekistan’s Supreme Court in 2016. 

Uzbek security services announced the detention of 30 supporters of the group in late January. The suspects came from regions all over the country and were also poised, security officials said, to travel to Syria.

When security officials talk about extremist-related cases, they are often less specific than that about the affiliations of suspects.

On January 27, UzA reported that a court in Termez, the capital of the Surkhandaryo region, had sentenced two men to 15 years and 15-and-a-half years in prison, respectively, for their involvement with an unnamed religious extremist organizations and disseminating materials propagating extremist ideas and terrorism over the internet.

“These persons propagated the ideas of jihad and hijra (travel to lands adhering to ‘real Islam’) near mosques in Termez, and they planned to participate in militant action in Syria and Palestine,” UzA reported, conveying the ruling of the court.

With so many of these arrests and trials being pursued away from public scrutiny, there are few ways to verify the credibility of risk evaluations made by Uzbek security officials, who have a long tradition of extorting confessions through torture.

In some cases, the Uzbek government has aimed its fire at bloggers, which is how public activists sharing their reporting and commentary via social media platforms are known in Uzbekistan.

On January 27, a court in Tashkent sentenced Fazilhoja Arifhojayev, a blogger focused on religious themes, to seven-and-a-half years in prison on charges of possessing and disseminating seditious material.

Arifhojayev came to prominence following a public spat with another blogger and well-known religious authority called Abror Abduazimov. In one notable incident from June 2021, the two men had a physical confrontation at the Tuhtaboi mosque, which is located in a historic neighborhood of Tashkent.

Two days after that, Arifhojayev was detained by police on petty hooliganism charges and had his mobile phone confiscated. He was subsequently ordered to serve a 15-day stretch in jail, but he was never released. In July, police announced that they had discovered extremist content on Arifhojayev’s phone, which precipitated the more serious charges.

His lawyer, Sergei Mayorov, insisted that his client was innocent of the charges.

“The trial was conducted in a disgusting fashion. All our arguments, all our evidence, all our motions were rejected,” he told reporters.