Tajikistan - Rebels 'r Us

Tajikistan is sort of the Wal-Mart for rebels. Iran, Osama and local warlords keep the market value up but they are cheaper to import than the Afghan trained ones. You can always pick up a few lean and mean fighters here for a little jihad. There is a group in Northern Tajikistan led by an Uzbek Islamist Juma Namangani, from the city of Namangan in the Fergana valley. He fled Uzbekistan to Tajikistan in the early 1990s to escape President Islam Karimov's clampdown on political and religious opposition, and became a field commander on the Islamic side in the Tajik civil war. If you look at a map of Tajikistan you'll notice how it hooks around the countries of Kyrgystan and Uzbekistan. This of course is not how the people, natural barriers or trade flow in the region. If you crack a history book you'll learn that the Tajiks (which are Persian in origin) created Khiva, Samarkhand and Bukara, the great cites of Islamic learning in what is the only tourist spot in Uzbekistan. Everyone from the Talibs to the Tajiks want it back. For now the Islamic rebels view Uzbekistan as being cut out of the same cloth as Russian and are waging war through direct and indirect means (through the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) while borders are bottled up tightly. There are also a number of Afghan Uzbeks (who fought under Dostum and Malik) who are looking for a little action.