Uzbekistan’s State Security Service (SGB) last week raided an Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP, or ISIS-K) cell in the country’s eastern city of Namangan.

At least four people were detained, with 12 others placed under investigation—but the claimed leader of the group did not fit the usual profile. According to a July 19 SGB statement, she is a 19-year-old teenager.

The suspect

The SGB says the young woman at the heart of the cell was radicalised in Istanbul, Turkey, while she was studying religion at a hujra (a private Islamic school ) in 2022. That would mean she was just 16 or 17 years-old when, as the SBG puts it, “her views drastically changed.”

After returning from Turkey to Davlatabad district in Namangan, the suspected cell leader, who has not been named, created accounts and groups on the Telegram social network, where she posted ISKP extremist material, including audio and video files “promoting jihadist ideology,” according to the SGB.

Her Telegram groups, combined, had more than 120 members. They are said to have shared posts about fomenting social unrest and protests, waging jihad and becoming “shahids”, or martyrs, which in the ISKP context means carrying out suicide attacks and establishing a Sharia government.

The SGB and Interior Ministry raided the homes of 16 alleged cell members, seizing mobile phones, religious books, DVDs, flash drives, a laptop computer and a tablet.

The SGB statement did not provide information about the other alleged cell members, except for one person who was described as the “founder of a private university in Namangan”.

As for the suspected leader of the ISKP cell, it appears her parents might have tipped off authorities. The SGB statement on the raids in Namangan mentioned that her father noticed her change following her return from Turkey and “tried to bring some sense to his daughter.”

The young woman responded by “accusing [her father] of unbelief and calling him a “kafir”, or infidel.

The alleged depth of the woman’s transformation and conviction at such a young age will surely rattle Uzbek officials.

Women have departed Central Asian countries and other countries to join jihadist groups in the Middle East, usually as the brides of jihadist men. There have been instances of women’s brigades being formed among some of the region’s jihadist groups, but no evidence has emerged of close cooperation between women and men in planning strategies or carrying out attacks.

A female leader of an ISKP cell is something new.

Already on the watch

Uzbek security and law enforcement have been on the lookout for ISKP terrorist-militants and with good reason.

The ISKP has twice launched rockets at Uzbekistan from an area in northern Afghanistan, located just across the Amu-Darya, the border river that separates Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.  

The first incident occurred in April 2022, when none of the rockets made it across the river. The second attack took place in July 2022, when several rockets landed in the Uzbek border city of Termez, causing damage to some buildings.

An Uzbek national who was an ISKP militant in Afghanistan was lately convicted in Uzbekistan for involvement in the July 2022 attack, as well as several other attacks inside Afghanistan.

That militant, Obid Saparov, who is 46 years old, was radicalised when he went to Russia as a migrant labourer in 2013. Subsequently, in 2014, he left for Afghanistan, via Azerbaijan and Iran. Saparov spent a decade as a member of extremist groups in Pakistan’s tribal area and Afghanistan before he was finally detained by Pakistani security forces and extradited to Uzbekistan.

Saparov’s story is more typical of people from Central Asia who join ISKP.

Since 2022, ISKP has been broadcasting its propaganda in the Uzbek and Tajik languages in an attempt at recruiting among the Tajik and Uzbek minority groups in Afghanistan, but also in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Its propaganda has proved effective among a good many Tajik nationals. Since late 2023, Tajik citizens who joined ISKP have been arrested in Germany and Austria on suspicion of plotting attacks in those countries, and have been blamed for involvement in ISKP attacks in Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan, and for the devastating March 2024 attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall that killed more than 140 people.

Alleged ISKP militants rounded up by Kyrgyzstan's State Committee for National Security, or GKNB (Credit: GKNB handout).

Suspected ISKP members have also been caught in raids in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan. Barely one year ago, in June 2024, Kyrgyzstan’s security service said it apprehended 15 ISKP militants in raids around the country, including in the capital Bishkek.

Two weeks before the Crocus City Hall atrocity, Russia’s Federal Security Services (FSB) killed two Kazakh citizens who the FSB claimed were ISKP militants. They had recently arrived in the village of Koryakovo, Kaluzhsky Oblast, allegedly with the intention of carrying out an attack on a synagogue.

At the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s (SCO’s) anti-terrorism conference held in Tashkent in September 2024, SGB chief Abdusalam Azizov, called on the member states (Belarus, China, Russia, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) to help the current Afghan government eliminate ISKP inside Afghanistan.

The coming crackdown

The level of concern about ISKP is growing across Central Asia.

The raid in Namangan will almost surely spark a fresh government campaign aimed at rooting out ISKP members inside Uzbekistan.

More than 120 people were members of the groups organised by the detained leader in Namangan, but the raids only involved 16 people.

The profile of potential ISKP members will now also have to be updated.

Previously, Uzbek authorities, and authorities in other countries, were mainly watching men aged from their late teens to 50s, people like Obid Saparov. But now Uzbekistan has a 19-year-old woman in custody who was allegedly organising an ISKP cell.

The list of potential suspects will grow in Uzbekistan, a country where more than half of the 37mn people living there are under the age of 30.

On July 21, Uzbekistan said it had discovered and broken up two illegal religious schools in Tashkent Province (Credit: SGB).

It is not surprising that two days after the SGB released its statement about the raids in Namangan, they reported uncovering and breaking up two illegal religious schools in Tashkent Province where two men were teaching religion to more than 40 children.

There will probably be more reports like this and about detentions of young people, even teenagers, both male and female, from Uzbekistan in the coming months.