Terror and the Uzbeks

In the weeks after Sayfullo Saipov drove a rented pickup truck down the Hudson River Greenway, a bike path in lower Manhattan, killing eight people allegedly in the name of the Islamic State, the phrase “hotbed of terrorism” has once again surfaced to describe Central Asia, Uzbekistan in particular.

Saipov followed Rakhmat Akilov and Abdulkadir Masharipov, Uzbek nationals who carried out attacks in Stockholm, Sweden and Istanbul, Turkey, in 2017. According to, admittedly incomplete, open source aggregation of terrorist incidents, there have been 1,041 attacks of various kinds globally as of November 17, 2017. The three attacks carried out by Uzbeks account for only 52 of 6,691 fatalities resulting from the catalogued attacks. With Uzbeks responsible for less than 1 percent of deaths from terrorism this year, why did Saipov’s attack in New York spark the following headlines?

“How Uzbekistan Became A Hotbed For Violent Extremism And Radicalism,”
— Huffington Post, November 2

“New York attack suspect’s Uzbekistan roots put focus on Central Asia’s battle with extremism,”
— Washington Post, November 1

“NYC terror attack: What you need to know about Sayfullo Saipov's Uzbekistan,”
— USA Today, November 1

The USA Today article started thusly:

The man accused of the deadly truck rampage through a New York City bike path Tuesday immigrated from Uzbekistan, a Muslim-majority former Soviet Republic in Central Asia that has recently become a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists. 

Just this year, Uzbeks committed terror attacks in Stockholm, Istanbul and St. Petersburg, Russia.

If there was ever a time that Uzbekistan was a “breeding ground for Islamic terrorists” it was nearly two decades ago, in 1999. That year, according to the open source Global Terrorism Database, there were eight terrorist attacks in Uzbekistan. Six of the attacks were car bombs that went off within a single hour in Tashkent on February 16. The bombings appeared to be an assassination attempt, as then-President Islam Karimov was riding through the capital in a motorcade at the time of the bombings. Two hours after the attack the government declared that the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) was responsible. A new prison had to be opened to hold the thousands arrested in the weeks and months following the attacks.

Whether the IMU was really responsible has been disputed by critics of the Karimov regime, but it marked the beginning of Tashkent’s perfection of the security state. While the powerful internal security services hunted down Islamic extremists and political dissidents with similar fervor, the IMU was squeezed out of the region. In the years since, the group’s aims shifted from Karimov’s removal to a broader Islamist agenda, becoming a Taliban and al-Qaeda ally in Afghanistan in the early 2000s. Much of the group was destroyed when the Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and the remnants, which had fled into Pakistan, were pushed out of Waziristan and back into Afghanistan in 2014. What remains – none of the original leadership survives to this day – is far removed from the country whose name it carries.

None of this history appears in the pages of American papers. Ignorance on the part of the Western press perpetuates a stereotype about Uzbekistan as a “hotbed” of terrorism without sufficient evidence to back up the claim.

The Huffington Post article began in a fashion similar to the USA Today piece:

Uzbekistan, the native country of the suspect in Tuesday’s terrorist attack in Manhattan, is a former Soviet Union republic that under a repressive government has become a hotbed for radicalism, Islamist extremism, and terrorist recruitment.

It’s common in the democratic West to link repressive governments to discontent to terrorism as if settling the first issue – repressive governments – would magically solve the latter two issues. This is problematic because of its abject simplicity. The three attacks carried out by Uzbeks in 2017, as well as the countless other attacks perpetrated by men (terrorist attacks are carried out almost exclusively by men) across Western nations, illustrate that the problem of terrorism is far more complex than a bad government and an angry young man.

What can the three Uzbek-perpetrated attacks actually tell us about either the process of radicalization or Uzbekistan? First, let’s briefly review the attacks and attackers in question.

Istanbul: The Professional

An hour into 2017, Abdulkadir Masharipov, born in Soviet Uzbekistan in 1983, approached the Reina nightclub in Istanbul. Wielding an Ak-47, Masharipov killed a police officer and a bystander at the entrance and then opened fire at the more than 600 people celebrating the New Year inside the club. Masharipov reportedly used stun grenades to disorient club-goers and provide cover as he reloaded. Masharipov fired more than 180 rounds in about seven minutes. He then slipped into the kitchen, changed his clothes, and escaped the club with the survivors of his attack. More than two weeks later, Turkish authorities arrested Masharipov.

Information on Masharipov is decidedly thin, in part because of Turkey’s restricted media environment and repressive government. It’s believed that he received training in Afghanistan and Pakistan before entering Turkey via the Iranian border in early 2016. He also was reported to have been in Syria, returning to Turkey in November 2016.

Security sources told Reuters that given the attack’s military nature and Masharipov demonstrated skill, he’d likely had training, saying, “The assailant has experience in combat for sure ... he could have been fighting in Syria for years.”

The Islamic State claimed the Reina attack and later reporting by the New York Times suggested that Abdurakhmon Uzbeki (actually from Tajikistan), a close associate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed by a U.S. raid this summer, helped plot the attack.

Stockholm: The Asylum Seeker

On April 7, 2017, Rakhmat Akilov hijacked a brewery delivery truck and drove the vehicle down a popular pedestrian street in central Stockholm before smashing into a storefront. Akilov, a 39-year-old construction worker from Uzbekistan, had entered Sweden in 2014 seeking asylum.

Akilov, born in Samarkand in 1978, claimed he was fleeing the Uzbek security services, which he said had tortured him and accused him of terrorism. But in December 2016, Akilov was told his residency request had been denied – Sweden’s migration service said no evidence had been found to support his asylum application – and that he had four weeks to leave the country. Akilov did not, lost his construction job, and scrambled to avoid deportation. The authorities put him on a wanted list in February 2017.

After the attack, Swedish police said Akilov had "expressed sympathy for extremist organizations, among them IS [Islamic State]” and Uzbek authorities claimed that he had tried to entice family back in Uzbekistan to join IS (though Swedish authorities could not confirm this accusation.)

New York: The Drifter

Sayfullo Saipov, whose attack is detailed in the introduction of this article, came to the United States in 2010 after winning a coveted spot in the Diversity Visa Program, colloquially known as the green card lottery. Annually, the program receives about 20 million applications from around the world and 50,000 such visas are approved. In 2010, more than 78,000 Uzbeks applied – Saipov was one of 3,300 offered legal residency in the United States.

Saipov, who had been an accountant at a hotel in Tashkent before moving to the United States arrived at the peak of unemployment following the 2008 global financial crisis. That year, unemployment averaged above 9.5 percent in the United States. Saipov arrived in Ohio but subsequently lived in Florida, driving a truck. By 2017, Saipov had moved to New Jersey where he drove for Uber.

Other Uzbeks residing in the United States who encountered Saipov said he never quite fit into the community. U.S. authorities said his phone contained 90 videos and 3,800 images featuring Islamic State propaganda, including videos of beheadings and instructions on explosives.

Terror and the Uzbeks

What, if anything, can we draw from these three attacks and their Uzbek perpetrators?

First, there are as many paths to radicalization as there are people.

Akilov and Saipov certainly fit into the trope of the discontented pushed into extremism by economic hardship and resentment toward the countries to which they had immigrated with high hopes for a prosperous future. Akilov had been denied residency in Sweden and Saipov didn’t seem able to settle into a normal life in the United States. Both appeared to have been radicalized online.

With so little information available about Masharipov, it’s more difficult to discern the path he took. Many Central Asians move to Turkey for economic reasons, through claims that Masharipov’s path wound through Afghanistan first chips away at an outright economic reasoning for his radicalization.

Second, in the cases Akilov and Saipov, in particular, their radicalization appears to have occurred after they left Uzbekistan. Saipov’s case helps illustrate the necessity of helping new immigrants integrate into a community.

U.S. President Donald Trump lambasted the Diversity Visa program in the wake of the attack and tweeted about ordering “Homeland Security to step up our already Extreme Vetting Program.” In 2010 when Saipov was granted a green card via the lottery, ISIS didn’t exist and there were no red flags: He was a young man with a university degree and no criminal record. How Saipov become a terrorist is more about the United States, the difficulty of achieving the American Dream, and the allure of extremist messaging to the disconnected and discontented than it is about Uzbekistan.

Third, there are factors in Uzbekistan which are important to discuss; however, they need to be cast as secondary.

For example, lack of proper Islamic education in Uzbekistan – a product of the Soviet Union’s atheism and the Karimov regime’s nervousness about any source of social organizing – certainly helps make young Uzbeks susceptible to perverted extremist preaching. While in Uzbekistan, men like Akilov and Saipov were described as not terribly religious. Islam, while an obvious part of life in Uzbekistan, is not a defining characteristic for many individuals simply because almost everyone is Muslim. Upon leaving, Muslim identity may have become a more prominent part of how they defined themselves, perhaps especially because in Sweden and the United States they were no longer surrounded by a Muslim society.

Uzbekistan’s authoritarian government is often cited as part of the radicalization puzzle. This may be true, though not in the form in which it is often presented. A harsh government simultaneously can generate the kind of grievances and restrictions on religious liberty that give birth to extremists while also maintaining the security structures that make it difficult for such groups to operate locally. This is what happened to the IMU and perhaps Masharipov (though again, thanks to Turkey’s restrictive media environment we know little about his path). The Uzbek security state has proven its strength, a fact illustrated by the negligible number of terrorist attacks experienced by the country since independence. Tashkent’s authoritarianism may be an affront to democratic values, but it’s not the reason Saipov drove a truck down a busy bike path in New York.

If Uzbekistan is a “breeding ground for Islamic terrorists” as USA Today proclaimed, so too is the United States. It’s an absurd statement in both cases.