Tajikistan news.

Tajikistan launches huge al-Qaeda manhunt

Tajikistan has launched a large counter-strike along its Afghan border, seeking to track down the al-Qaeda guerrillas who ambushed and killed twenty eight government troops over the weekend. 

By Richard Orange in Almaty
Published: 3:56PM BST 23 Sep 2010
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Emomali Rahmonov, Tajik president, has imprisoned more than 100 members of banned Islamic groups.

"Government troops launched a sweeping raid in the Rasht region, involving armoured vehicles and helicopters," an interior ministry official said. "During the operation, five guerrillas were killed and five more captured."

The al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) on Thursday claimed responsibility for the weekend attack in the mountainous Central Asian country. "This is our response to Tajikistan's government, which has lately shut down a thousand mosques, which arrests Muslims without any reason and prohibits women from wearing Muslim clothes," Abdufattoh Ahmadis, IMU spokesman, said in a video address sent to Radio Liberty in the country's capital Dushanbe. "We demand a stop to this policy. Otherwise, terrorist attacks will continue."

 Tajikistan's Defence Ministry had previously blamed the attacks on Abdullo Rakhimov, known as Mullo Abdullo, one of the opposition commanders in the country's 1990s civil war, in which more than 50,000 people died.

The Ministry said Mullo Abdullo had been backed by an international squad of militants from Chechnya, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The attacks have raised fears that Islamist violence may spread across Afghanistan's northern border and destabilise its neighbour. At the end of last month, 25 inmates, including some prominent Islamic militants, broke out of a maximum-security prison, and escaped to Rasht, an embarrassing setback for the country's recent crackdown on Islamic extremists.

Tajik officials have vowed retaliation. "We will destroy all of them. The time of forgiveness is over," General Tokhir Normatov, chief of staff of Tajikistan's police has said. The government of President Emomali Rahmonov has in the last year imprisoned more than 100 members of banned Islamic groups, putting 36 members of Hizb ut-Tahrir and 25 members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan behind bars.

The country's Islamic opposition accuse the president of reneging on the terms of the 1997 peace agreement. The only legal Islamic party, the Islamic Renaissance Party, won just 8 per cent of the vote in the most recent elections in 2005. (telegraph.co.uk)
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