Read Online Is This Your First War? by Michael Petrou - Free Book Online Page A

valuable.
    Then, in May 2005, Uzbek security forces shot dead as many as 1,500 demonstrators in the town of Andijan, gunning down survivors who tried to flee into Kyrgyzstan. The demonstrators had gathered to hear speeches from businessmen who had been freed from jail, and to protest rising prices. Some even invited Karimov to hear their complaints. The Uzbek president nonetheless described the victims as radical Muslim terrorists. China, seeing obvious parallels with its own restive Uighur population, agreed. So did Russia, seizing an opportunity to drive a wedge between the United States and one of its Central Asian allies. The United States, however, could not ignore such a sordid slaughter of unarmed civilians. It condemned the massacre and accepted some survivors of the attack as refugees. Karimov ordered U.S. soldiers out of Uzbekistan that July.
    Uzbekistan is now firmly part of Russia’s sphere of influence, as it was for decades under Soviet rule. Islam Karimov’s oppression, meanwhile, has increased. Not coincidentally, so has the radicalization of growing numbers of Uzbek Muslims. Hundreds have fought in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. According to Ahmed Rashid, there were maybe five or six hundred Uzbek militants in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas after the September 11 attacks. By 2008, there were several thousand under the command of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. New recruits continue to arrive, including from outside Central Asia. In 2010, four German Muslims were convicted of plotting to bomb airports and nightclubs in Germany. The four belonged to the Islamic Jihad Union, a splinter group of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. At least two of the convicted men, German converts to Islam, had trained with Uzbek militants in Pakistan.
    â€œExcuse me.”
    The woman sitting behind the desk at my hotel in Tashkent was about fifty years old, ethnically Russian, one of thousands whose families were encouraged to move to Uzbekistan during Soviet times and who then found themselves stranded there when the Soviet empire collapsed. Her hair looked as if it had been seared into a puffy helmet with chemicals and a blowtorch. She was smoking and a little overweight, but hard and thick rather than plump, and she wore a starchy uniform that must have been uncomfortable. She had already allowed me to pay for a room, a process that seemed to have required an enormous amount of effort on her part and drained whatever goodwill she might once have possessed.
    â€œExcuse me.”
    It took her a very long time to raise her head.
    â€œLook, I’m sorry to bother you. I’ve been on planes and in airports for two days. I know it’s really early in the morning, but I’m starving. Is your restaurant open?”
    She looked at me with what I wanted to believe was motherly pity but recognized as contempt.
    â€œ Nyet .”
    I tried to smile and stepped back from the counter toward the stairs heading upstairs to my room. I took a few steps, looked around, and noticed there were no hallways branching off to what might have been place to eat. This wasn’t the kind of place with a rooftop patio.
    â€œDo you have a restaurant?” I asked.
    She inhaled and blew smoke.
    â€œ Nyet .”
    I have a friend, Justinian Jampol, who used a chunk of money he inherited in his early twenties to purchase Soviet artifacts that were scattered around Eastern Europe after the Cold War ended and grew his collection into a world-class museum. I should have sent him a bar of soap from this hotel. It was pink and hard, about the size of a book of matches, and it refused to lather or break down even after prolonged exposure to hot water. But the room had a bed. I fell into it and was immediately unconscious.
    A few hours later, with the sun now high and strong, I left the hotel and started walking toward Tashkent State University. I was only going to be in the city for a day, but I figured I’d file a story