Fifteen years after militants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) fought with Kyrgyz troops, they have now reportedly moved into Pakistan and in northern Afghanistan.
On May 24, three Turkmen soldiers were killed along the Afghan border. Though it remains unclear who killed them, many are pointing to the IMU, who are believed to be active in Afghan provinces bordering Turkmenistan.
The director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Turkmen Service (Azatlyk), Muhammad Tahir, chaired a recent debate about the current situation of the IMU and the group's potential for causing instability in Central Asia after foreign forces complete their drawdown at the end of this year with an eye toward total departure by the end of 2016.
Speakers include Alisher Sidikov, director of RFE/RL's Uzbek Service (Ozodlik), Aleksei Malashenko, the Central Asia analyst at the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment, and Jacob Zenn, Eurasian affairs analyst for the Jamestown Foundation, as well as Noah Tucker of Registan.net, one of the premier websites on Central Asia, who was speaking from Washington; and Haji Seyit Dawud, director of the Afghan media-resources centre in Kabul.
According to an article in RFE/RL, the speakers agreed that one of the biggest differences between the IMU in the late 1990s and today is that the group is now less cohesive. The IMU had a core of several hundred to, maybe, more than a couple of thousand fighters in the late 1990s. Almost all of them were from Uzbekistan and they operated in a confined area, generally along the Pamir Mountains between northern Afghanistan and southern Kyrgyzstan.
The IMU has since spread its area of operations. According to Tucker, the IMU seems "to exist almost as two different groups, one in Pakistan and one in Afghanistan." Others argue the IMU has split into many different factions or splinter groups.