Mahmoud Habibulloh, a 64-year-old watchman in this Kyrgyzstan small town of Kara Suu, in the Fergana Valley, was thrilled when his son told him a year ago that he had found a job in much wealthier Russia.
Shortly after his departure, the son, Rahmatulloh—who left a wife and two children behind—phoned to say he was working in Turkey instead. Some 20 days later, another call came from an unfamiliar man. Rahmatulloh, the caller said, had just been killed fighting for the cause of Islam in Syria.
“Had I known that’s where he’d end up, I would have just hidden his passport,” Mr. Habibulloh said.
Just like his son, thousands of Muslims from former Soviet Central Asian republics have traveled to Syria since the warthere began in 2011. Some have joined Islamic State while others fight with al Qaeda’s local franchise, Jabhat al Nusra. All of them, however, pose a threat to the weak Central Asian countries as they confront stalling economies and a rise in Islamic radicalism.
“These men want to come back—with their shields and not on their shields,” said Tokon Mamytov, the former deputy head of Kyrgyzstan’s State Committee for National Security, the successor to the Soviet KGB, who now teaches at the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University in the capital, Bishkek.
The Syrian war has drawn fighters from all five Central Asian states, with 500 flocking there since the conflict began from Kyrgyzstan alone, a mountainous country with the population of Maryland. The most high-profile of these Central Asians in the ranks of Islamic State so far is Col. Gulmurod Halimov, who served until his defection in April as the head of police special forces in neighboring Tajikistan.
“Listen, you dogs, the president, the ministers, you don’t know how many guys, how many brothers here are waiting, are yearning to come back…We are heading back to slaughter,” Mr. Halimov said in a video released by Islamic State to celebrate his defection.
A particularly fertile ground for such recruitment to Syria has been here in the populous Fergana Valley, a historic center of Central Asia’s Islamic civilization that has been divided by the seesawing borders of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. All three ethnic groups straddle these borders, and political and religious repression—sometimes combined with ethnic frictions—has frequently led to eruptions of violence here.
In 2005, Uzbekistan’s security forces putting down unrest killed hundreds of people in the town of Andijan. In 2010, fighting between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks claimed hundreds more lives in the Kyrgyzstan portion of the valley.
Kara Suu bore the impact of both events. The town is split in two by the border between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a once-symbolic frontier where Uzbek border guards now shoot to kill. The Kyrgyzstan part of the town, with a population of just 24,000, has become deeply conservative in recent years. Most women here, including many little girls, are veiled. Some even wear the full-face black niqab, attire that is exceedingly rare in the region’s big cities.
This religious observance is in part the legacy of Rashod Kamalov, the popular imam of the town’s huge As-Saraxsi mosque until his detention in February. Mr. Kamalov—whose father, also a prominent Islamic scholar, was shot dead in murky circumstances at a nearby security checkpoint in 2006—preached for good morals and against corruption and drugs. According to Kyrgyzstan’s security officials, however, he also recruited more than 100 young men from the area to fight in Syria—a claim his supporters deny.
Syria’s connection with the region runs deep. While most Central Asians follow the relatively tolerant Hanafi school of Islam and mix their observance with traditional beliefs, the purist ideology at the root of Islamic State’s worldview was introduced here almost a century ago by a preacher from Syria known as Shami-Damullo, who had been expelled from the Ottoman Empire for spreading the stricter Wahhabi creed.
The Soviets initially promoted Shami-Damullo because they found his attacks on local clerics useful to discredit the traditional Hanafi religious establishment. In subsequent decades, some of his former disciples headed Central Asia’s Uzbekistan-based official Islamic authority, while others were allowed to set up a network of underground prayer circles under the name Ahl-al-Hadith, a movement that was particularly strong in the Fergana Valley.
After the Soviet Union’s collapse, the region became a magnet for Hizbut-Tahrir, a global movement that calls for replacing corrupt modern states with a worldwide Islamic caliphate. Once Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the caliphate’s re-establishment last year, the militant group, also known as ISIS, found unusually receptive audiences here.
“ISIS knows that a lot of people here are thirsty for the arrival of the caliphate and for justice in the world, and so it is telling them: We have now created the caliphate, come and join it,” said Orozbek Moldaliev, head of Kyrgyzstan’s State Commission on Religion Affairs, a government agency.
Mr. Kamalov, too, spoke about the caliphate in his Kara Suu sermons, though, publicly at least, he stopped short of endorsing Islamic State’s decision to proclaim it.
Nevertheless, the preacher was detained by Kyrgyzstan’s authorities in February, and this month was given a relatively mild sentence of five years in a controlled residence for possessing extremist materials.
“He has been jailed for uttering just one word—caliphate—even though it clearly says in the Quran that the caliphate will be established one day,” said Turunbay Kasimov, who performs the call to prayer in Mr. Kamalov’s As-Saraxsi mosque. “All of Kara Suu is upset.”
Some of Kyrgyzstan’s human-rights groups also protested the sentence, saying Mr. Kamalov was singled out for his campaign against government corruption, and against the discrimination of ethnic Uzbeks, who predominate in Kara Suu. Many residents in the area say they have to pay bribes to the ethnic Kyrgyz officials if they want to avoid made-up accusations of involvement with banned Islamist groups.
“Officials here have turned fighting against extremism into a lucrative business that’s making them rich,” said Husseinbay Saliyev, regional coordinator of the Bir Duino human-rights group that has been vocal in defending Mr. Kamalov.
Mr. Habibulloh, however, is not convinced. His son, he says, was among those who assiduously attended Mr. Kamalov’s sermons in As-Saraxsi, as did a neighbor—now also dead—with whom the young man traveled to Syria. Mr. Habibulloh says he knows of at least five youths from the immediate neighborhood who were killed in that distant war.
“I have no proof that Kamalov recruited them, but I have my suspicions. An imam must know what is going on with the flock in his mosque,” Mr. Habibulloh said. In the months between Rahmatulloh’s death and Mr. Kamalov’s arrest, the grieving father said he had repeatedly tried to approach the controversial imam.
He had no luck, he says: “Whenever Kamalov would see me, he would just run away.”
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Photo: In this screengrab from a YouTube video released by Islamic State, Col. Gulmurod Halimov, right, is shown celebrating his defection in April to IS. He had been head of police special forces in Tajikistan.