The IMU: The Pakistan Years and Islamic State Days

It’s unclear precisely when and where Juma Namangani, a formidable guerrilla fighter and cofounder of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), was killed. Like the terrorist organization he helped create, his demise was clouded in conjecture, the story tugged by different narratives depending on the source. Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum of the Northern Alliance claimed Namangani was killed in fighting around Kunduz in early November 2001; Namangani’s Taliban allies, however, claimed he died in an airstrike near Kabul.

In any case, unlike Namangani, the IMU lived on past 2001. It survived in altered form, however, reshaped by the pressures of the American war in Afghanistan and pushed further and further from its original ideology and allies. What remains may tote the IMU label, but it’s not the IMU of the past.

In last month’s magazine, I discussed the IMU’s roots in Central Asia. The forces that formed the IMU and the hostility its leaders – Namangani and Tohir Yuldashev – had for Uzbek President Islam Karimov, continue to mark the group to this day. Every time an Uzbek commits an act of terror in the world, the IMU is mentioned, as is the repressive Uzbek state. But Karimov is dead, as are Namangani and Yuldashev.

If the original IMU was bent on overthrowing Karimov’s secular regime and setting up an Islamic state – for what does the IMU of today fight? Let’s pick up the journey in Pakistan in 2002.

The Pakistan Interregnum: Recovery and a Split

The IMU, its numbers depeated and led by Yuldashev, retreated into Pakistan's tribal areas following a devastating defeat in the Shah-i-kot Valley in March 2002’s Operation Anaconda. Some IMU fighters remained in northern Afghanistan, among ethnic Uzbek and Tajik communities, but the core crossed the border into Pakistan. The IMU settled in South Waziristan, where Yuldashev reportedly became a popular speaker at mosques and the group’s members bought land and began to farm.

Pressured by Washington, Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf launched Operation al Mizan in June 2002, targeting foreign fighters in Pakistan’s tribal areas with a deployment of 70,000 to 80,000 troops. The operation exacerbated the existing hostility between tribal authorities and the Pakistani state, with the IMU benefitting from local assistance to dodge the Pakistani Army.

With the Taliban’s seeming defeat at the hands of the American-led coalition, the IMU’s main ally was temporarily out of commission and its sources of funding drying up. Yuldashev made the decision to align the IMU with al-Qaeda’s vision of global jihad, delaying the dream of overthrowing Karimov and trading it for a fight against the Pakistani state and the Americans in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda reportedly financially compensated tribal groups that hosted the IMU in Pakistan, namely the Yargulkhel, led by Nek Mohammad, and the Kakakhel, led by Maulvi Nazir. Both tribal leaders had joined the Taliban in the 1990s and carried out attacks across the border in Afghanistan, and later targeted the Pakistani military as well.

Not all IMU members agreed with the apparent abandonment of the group’s original mission. A splinter group set up in neighboring North Waziristan, calling itself at first the Islamic Jihad Group and later the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU).

Over the span of four days in spring 2004 Uzbekistan was rocked with violence: an apparent IJU bomb-making operation in a house in Bukhara exploded, gunmen attacked two police checkpoints in Tashkent, two female suicide bombers detonated themselves at Tashkent’s famous Chorsu Bazaar, another suicide bomb detonated in a vehicle, a shootout occurred leading to the burning down of a house, militants inside, and another accidental explosion. Of the 47 people killed, 33 were said to have been IJU fighters. In July, suicide bombers attacked the Tashkent embassies of the United States and Israel, killing two Uzbek guards.

In May 2005, the United States added the IJU to its list of foreign terrorist organizations.

In time, the IJU’s mission – like that of the IMU – changed. In 2005 it aligned itself with al-Qaeda and its base in Northern Waziristan put it into the realm of the Haqqani Network, with which it plotted (but was not able to carry out) attacks in Europe and staged attacks across the border into Afghanistan. Like the IMU, the IJU reoriented itself to face of new, closer, enemies. In time its composition also diversified; its Uzbek character became less central and its mission more in line with al-Qaeda.

The Pakistan Interregnum: New Enemies and Old Friends

From 2004 to 2007, the IMU largely targeted the Pakistani military. As David Witter wrote in a 2011 brief for the Institute for the Study of War, Yuldashev reportedly sought retribution against the Pakistani military, which almost killed him in a 2004 operation in the tribal areas. That operation also kicked off infighting among the region’s leaders, with Nek Mohammad making and then breaking a deal to lay down arms. Mohammad was killed in a July 2004 drone strike and local Taliban leaders pledged to cease harboring foreign militants – but they continued to host the IMU.

In time, however, the Uzbeks wore out their welcome. Heavy fighting, the killing of local pro-government leaders, and economic blockades had taken a toll on the famous generosity of the Pashtun people. Waziristan’s tribal leadership were split over the IMU issue. The Kakakhel’s Maulvi Nazir eventually turned on the IMU. In 2007, Nazir began campaigning to expel the IMU, his ranks bolstered by new arrivals believed to be linked to the Pakistani state’s security establishment. Nazir’s campaign dislodged the IMU, pushing them further north within South Waziristan and closer to the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

The TTP’s activities – raids on Pakistani security forces and bombings – prompted the announcement of Operation Rah-e Nijat in June 2009. While the ground operation didn’t kick off in earnest until October 2009, drone strikes that summer killed both the TTP’s leader and Yuldashev.

In the fall of 2009, the IMU moved into North Waziristan under the wing of the Haqqani Network. Again, the IMU laid low and recovered, coached away from its Yuldashev-driven vendetta against the Pakistani state by the Haqqanis. In 2010, Abu Usman Adil emerged as the IMU’s new leader. As early as 2007, the IMU had been implicated in attacks in Afghanistan and may have been moving fighters back into northern Afghanistan’s ethnic communities as early as 2008. Reports about militants around Kunduz, for example, often cited militants with ties to both the Taliban and the IMU.

Throughout the IMU’s time in Pakistan, its ideological grounding evolved away from an Islamist, nationalist vision of an Islamic state in Uzbekistan to the global jihad.

As Witter wrote in 2011, “The IMU has evolved from being an organization focused on targeting President Karimov’s administration in Uzbekistan to a multifaceted terrorist group with broader objectives and increased capability to fight coalition forces in Afghanistan and launch terrorist attacks in Europe.” This strategic shift, he noted, made the IMU a bigger threat to the NATO mission in Afghanistan as well as Western countries. The group’s associations with the Haqqani Network and al-Qaeda “are the greatest causes for concern,” Witter argued.

Demise in Afghanistan?

On June 8, 2014, 10 militants stormed Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, Pakistan’s busiest airport, and killed 36 people. The militants were well-armed with automatic weapons, a rocket launcher, and suicide vests. The TTP and IMU claimed the attack jointly. The attack marked the formal end of negotiations that had been going on between Islamabad and the TTP earlier in the year.

On June 15, Pakistani airstrikes struck IMU camps in Northern Waziristan, the opening salvos of Operation Zarb-e-Azb, which aimed to clear the area of foreign militants in particular alongside the TTP. The operation continued for a year and a half, featurning not only Pakistani airstrikes and on-the-ground troops but American drone strikes as well. While reports indicated that Pakistani security forces were allowing friendly militants – i.e. those that attacked Afghanistan, not Pakistan – to escape across the border, the TTP and IMU were especially hard hit by the operation.

With Waziristan no longer a safe haven, by early 2015 the IMU – now led by Usman Ghazi following Adil’s 2012 death in a U.S. drone strike – aimed to slip back into Afghanistan. In August 2015, Ghazi pledged allegiance to the Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, completing a process that had begun the previous September when Ghazi issued a statement saying “on behalf of members of our Islamic Movement, I herewith announce to the world that we are siding with the Islamic Caliphate.”

Ghazi’s statement came shortly after another IMU statement that the Taliban – the IMU’s longtime ally – “cannot be trusted” as the group had lied about the death of its leader Mullah Omar.

In the summer of 2015, the Afghan government announced that Omar had been dead since 2013; the Taliban shortly after confirmed the claim. The revelation kicked off a split in the Taliban, its main cohort standing behind Mullah Mansour and a splinter faction following Mullah Rasul, with Mullah Dadullah as his deputy.

Ghazi reportedly led a large faction of IMU from Pakistan to Zabul province in southeastern Afghanistan to join Dadullah, who had also pledged support to the nascent Islamic State regional affiliate, known as Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP).

Once again, the IMU’s timing could not have been worse. Mullah Mansour’s main Taliban faction teamed up with ethnic Hazara militiamen in early November 2015 and decimated Dadullah’s Taliban force and the IMU alongside it. Ghazi was reportedly killed in the Zabul battles.

By early 2016, some analysis were declaring the IMU dead.

A Northern Resurrection or an Islamic State?

In June 2016, the IMU released a statement that said while its fighters were “dispersed in many faraway fields” its activities had not ceased. The IMU pledged to “stand shoulder-to-shoulder with… Muslim brothers of Afghanistan.”

Sources told RFE/RL's Uzbek Service that the IMU was reforming under Abdul Rahman Yuldash, IMU founder Tohir Yuldashev’s son, in northeastern Afghanistan's Badakhshan province. The IMU, other sources said, numbered between just 60 and 100 people. Yuldash, some reported in early 2017, was recruiting for ISKP.

Meanwhile, other ethnic Uzbeks with IMU reportedly on their resumes, have risen to prominence among ISKP in northern Afghanistan. On April 8, 2018 NATO’s Resolute Support Mission announced that Qari Hikmatullah, a senior ISKP commander, and his bodyguard had been killed a few days earlier in an airstrike. The press release noted that “Hikmatullah, a native Uzbek, had a history of divided loyalties; first as an Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan leader, followed by allegiance to the Taliban, and ultimately [ISKP].”

Hikmatullah’s ISKP successor was reportedly Mawlavi Habibul Rahman, another Uzbek.

For the time being, what remains of the IMU seems to have fallen in line behind the Islamic State as it undergoes its own rebirth in Afghanistan following defeat in the Middle East. The IMU’s original leaders and original foe – Islam Karimov – are all dead. But as they say, what is dead may never die. The IMU name lives on.