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TASHKENT, Aug 8 (AFP)-Uzbek security forces said Tuesday they have launched an assault to crush a group of armed Islamists who streamed across the border, killing several Uzbek troops, says the report. "The operation to neutralize [the rebels] is now in an active phase," said Security Council Secretary Murakbar Rakhmankulov to reporters. Uzbek troops have been fighting some 70 to 100 Islamists who have crossed from Tajikistan to the Sariasiysky district of the Surkhandarinsk region, southern Uzbekistan. Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Komulov said that three Uzbek troops had died in the fighting while security forces in the neighboring republic of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have both been put on heightened alert. The flare-up marks the second security crisis in the impoverished Central Asian region in less than a year. Uzbek authorities said they have evacuated all civilians from the area and surrounded the Islamists. Some 15 to 30 families are thought to live in the remote mountainous border area. The well-armed Islamists, according to the report and officials in Tashkent, were trained in camps in Afghanistan and crossed into Uzbekistan from Tajikistan via an isolated 4,000-meter (13,000-foot) high mountain pass. They were seeking to create a base to store weapons and food as they planned their attacks on Uzbek territory, and open a transit route for drugs and weapons, the report claimed. Komulov added that he had reason to believe that United Tajik Opposition forces had helped the Islamist groups. The Tajik border guards announced on Monday that they were closing the border with Uzbekistan and sending reinforcements to the mountainous region. But Major General Safarali Sayfullayev, the first deputy chairman of the Tajik state border committee, ruled out the possibility that the armed group had crossed into Uzbekistan from Tajikistan, Interfax reported. Uzbek border guards on Monday said that around 10 of their troops had been killed in a shootout with armed Islamists who attacked a frontier post in the south of the country. A spokesperson for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Zubar ibi Abdurakhim, told BBC radio his fighters had attacked the border post. The Islamists are said to be armed with sniper rifles, night-vision goggles and grenade launchers. They are believed to be led by Uzbek Islamist Djuma Namangani, who shot to prominence last year when his men kidnapped four Japanese geologists in neighboring Kyrgyzstan. Most of the gunmen involved in the kidnapping of the four Japanese geologists from August to October last year were reported to have retreated south to Tajikistan and Afghanistan following the hostage crisis. According to the authorities, Uzbek and Tajik forces were coordinating their efforts to flush the gunmen out of a remote mountain region. |
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