Many of these conscripts returned home impressed by the Islamic zeal of their opponents, and newly aware of the religious, cultural and linguistic characteristics they shared with their neighbours in the South; and which distinguished them from their rulers in Moscow.

Following the war, Khojayev returned to his hometown of Namangan in Uzbekistan's Fergana Valley radicalized by his experiences, and became associated with a local Islamic ideologue, Tohir Yuldashev (born 1967).

In the period of initial instability that followed Uzbekistan's sudden independence in 1991, Yuldeshev and Khojayev (now adopting the nom de guerre Juma Namangani) established a radical Salafi Islamist group in Namangan which they called Adolat (Justice).

[24] Evading arrest, Yuldashev and Namagani fled to Tajikistan, where civil war was raging following a bloody but successful coup led by Emomali Rahmonov earlier in 1992.

Disillusioned with the political concessions made by the Tajik Islamists, Yuldeshev and Namangani formed the IMU in 1998 with the aim of creating a militant Islamic opposition to Karimov in Uzbekistan.

[24] In Afghanistan Yuldeshev was able to exploit the contacts he had made on his earlier travels to negotiate freedom of operation from the Taliban, in return for providing them with assistance in their battle with Massoud's Northern Alliance.

It is estimated in 2000 that the IMU was approximately 2000 strong, and in the spring they contributed around 600 fighters to the Taliban's offensive against Massoud, participating in the successful siege of Taloqan, where they fought alongside Bin Laden's 055 Brigade.

By the summer of 2000 Western and CIS intelligence sources claim the IMU were equipped with more advanced weaponry such as sniper rifles and night-vision goggles, and had been supplied with a pair of heavy transport helicopters by Bin Laden.

Namangani led IMU fighters back to the Tavildara Valley in Tajikistan, and from there launched multipronged attacks into Batken in Kyrgyzstan, and also into northern Uzbekistan, close to Tashkent.

[29] Once again the raids were followed by a strategic retreat to Tavildara, and once again international pressure on the Tajik government saw Namangani agree to him and his men being flown by the Russians back to Afghanistan, where they arrived in January 2001.

In the spring the IMU again supplied the Taliban with 600 fighters for a renewed campaign against Massoud, while in Batken in Kyrgyzstan a number of sleepers armed the previous year executed a series of attacks.

In March 2002, Yuldashev and many IMU members are believed to have fought against Coalition forces during Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan's Shahi Kot Valley, suffering heavy casualties before retreating to the Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

[39] In June 2014, the Pakistan Armed Forces began a major military campaign against militant groups in North Waziristan, in the wake of the IMU and TTP's attack on Jinnah International Airport.

[4] IMU leader Usman Ghazi declared the group's support for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in September 2014,[44] however it continued to cooperate closely with the Taliban in Afghanistan, according to Afghan government sources.

[45] In March 2015, a group of IMU militants in northern Afghanistan, led by Sadulla Urgenji, released a video in which they stated they no longer view the Taliban's Mullah Omar as leader and pledged allegiance to ISIL's Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

[23] In August 2015, a video was released by the group in which its leader, Usman Ghazi, leads IMU fighters in taking an oath of allegiance to ISIL and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

While IMU was originally an ethnic Uzbek movement, its recruitment base expanded to include Central Asians (Afghans, Tajiks, Uyghurs and Turkmens) and as well as Arabs, Chechens and Westerners.

[52] Uyghurs, Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs and other ethnic groups flocked to serve under IMU leader Juma Namangani, who died in November 2001.

[53] A number of the IMU's senior leaders and ideologues have been non-Uzbeks, including its Kyrgyz former military commander, Abbas Mansur, and its Mufti (religious authority), Abu Zar al-Burmi, a Pakistani national of Burmese Rohingya descent.

[56] He was IMU's mufti, joining and then leaving ISIL in a video called (Arabic: المفتي ابو ذر عزام يتبرأ من تأييد تنظيم الدولة, romanized: Muftiy Abu Zar Azzom Davla jamoatidan bezor buldi).

It produces high-quality videos, publishes audio and written statements, and has released newsletters in Uzbek, Russian, Persian, Arabic, German, Burmese, Urdu and Pashto.

[70] An IMU suicide bomber was responsible for the December 2011 attack on the funeral of an Afghan government official in Takhar, killing 19 people, including Alhaj Mutalib Baig, an ethnic Uzbek Member of Parliament and former Tahkar Chief of Police.

[74] In September 2002, an aide to Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, the Foreign Minister of the Taliban, claimed he had been sent prior to 9/11 to warn the U.S. government of an impending attack and to persuade them to take military action against Al Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan.

[75] In his book Terror and Consent, Philip Bobbitt noted that Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, a scientist of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, had met Osama bin Laden in Kabul in August 2001.

Mahmood is said to have disclosed that bin Laden "insisted that he already had sufficient fissile material to build a [nuclear] bomb, having obtained it from former Soviet stockpiles through the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.