ComingAnarchy’s Younghusband has a great post on the mysterious alleged terrorist group the Bayat. It is reprinted below:

A few weeks ago I had asked James what he thought of a mysterious alleged fundamentalist group that has recently surfaced in Tajikistan. I promised I would take a look into them, and here is what I found.

In April of 2004 Tajik security forces arrested twenty people from Isfara in northern Tajikistan on various charges including the 12 January 2004 killing of Sergei BESSARAB, an active Evangelical Baptist proselytizer. The twenty were alleged members of a previously unknown Islamic extremist group known as Bay’at (“the Oath”). Tajik security forces said they had only just found out about the group, but the mayor of Isfara told the Jamestown Foundation :

We first learned about Bayat in our district in 1997 when law enforcement agencies arrested an Uzbek citizen, who was a close relative of one of the leaders of the IMU, for a murder. The suspected murderer was soon found to have ties to an underground organization known as ‘Bayat’.

Twelve were convicted and sentenced to 25 years in jail. Bay’at has been accused of torching businesses selling alcohol and mosques whose imams are dependent on Dushanbe. The government has also stated that members of Bay’at fought on the side of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and some are now in custody at Guantanamo Bay. Tajik Interior Minister Khumiddin SHARIPOV has labelled Bay’at a terrorist organization.

IRP deputy chairman Muhiddin KABIRI accuses the Tajik security forces of fabricating Bay’at. At a protest on 1 June 2005 demonstrators protesting the conviction of seven individuals allegedly part of Bay’at told journalists, “They’ve falsely claimed that our children are members of Bayat, which is a falsification. There is no Bayat. They invented the Bayat group and put our children in jail.”

It is difficult to gauge the level of threat that Bay’at represents. Just the rumour of the group allows for official security forces to crackdown on suspect individuals or groups that may not even be related to Islamic militancy. Moreover, the use of excessive force could radicalize the people, engendering a greater possibility for dissidence.