After Tajiks were charged with a deadly attack in Moscow, the country has cracked down on signs of Islam. But experts say it’s not addressing the causes of terrorism.
People in Tajikistan were expecting a government crackdown after Tajik men were arrested and charged with a terrorist attack on a Moscow concert hall in March.
But it still seemed excessive to Nilufar, a 27-year-old education professional, when she saw local authorities with scissors outside a K.F.C. in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, trimming beards that were deemed too long.
Excessive, but not so surprising. In the span of a month, Nilufar herself had been stopped three times by the authorities for wearing a hijab in public.
“Nowadays, as soon as you go outside, you can actually feel how the raids have intensified,” Nilufar said in a recent interview in Dushanbe, providing only her first name because of fear of retribution.
With a population of 10 million, Tajikistan has many challenges that counterterrorism experts say make it an incubator for extremism: poverty, poor education, high unemployment and grievances against an autocratic government that severely restricts the practice of religion.
In the face of these challenges, critics say, Tajikistan has continued to restrict how Islam can be taught and practiced and increasingly implemented superficial policies regulating head scarves and beard lengths.
The country came under global scrutiny after four Tajik men were charged as the assailants in the worst terrorist attack in Russia in two decades, which killed 145 people and injured more than 500 at the Moscow concert hall. Other Tajiks were later arrested in connection with the attack.
American officials have said that Islamic State Khorasan Province, a branch of ISIS known as ISIS-K, was responsible for the attack, and radicalized Tajiks have in recent months caught the attention of governments and counterterrorism experts around the world.
Tajik adherents of the Islamic State have also been involved in terrorist attacks in Iran and Turkey, as well as thwarted plots in Germany, Austria and elsewhere. Last month two Tajiks helped stage a mutiny at a Russian prison, the state news agency TASS reported, adding that they claimed to be motivated by radical Islam.
The attacks have tarnished the country’s image abroad, especially in Russia, where about one million Tajiks — 10 percent of Tajikistan’s population — toil in low-skilled jobs to send money home.
The government’s response, overseen by President Emomali Rahmon, an authoritarian leader who has been in power for more than three decades, has been to crack down.
“In Tajikistan, authorities are getting frustrated by the international stigma they’re receiving and the blame they’re getting for all these attacks,” said Lucas Webber, the co-founder of Militant Wire, whose research focuses on the Islamic State. “So they’re just doubling down, being heavy-handed.”
Tajiks have long been accustomed to restrictions that would surprise many Westerners, with legislation governing conduct at weddings, birthdays and even funerals (“extravagant emotions” are banned at memorials). Hijabs — head scarves that cover a woman’s neck and generally don’t reveal any strands of hair — have been banned in schools since 2007 and public institutions since 2009.
But in June, the Parliament passed a law banning “clothes alien to Tajik culture,” a term the government often uses for clothing it considers Islamic. Hijabs are a target.
The law imposes fines of between 7,000 and 15,000 somoni, or about $660 and $1,400, in a country where the average monthly salary is just above $200.
The rationale appears to be that stamping out public signs of conservative Islam will help tamp down conservative Islam itself — and potentially reduce Islamic extremism.
But Mr. Webber said the government’s reaction only added fuel to the fire.
“The terrorists who planned the Moscow attack could not have asked for better responses from the Tajik government,” he said. “Because they want to stoke tensions, they want backlash.”
Several Tajik government bodies responsible for implementing the laws declined to meet with The New York Times in Dushanbe or respond to emailed requests to comment.
Tajikistan is a mountainous country in Central Asia bordered by Afghanistan, China, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan; the vast majority of the population are Muslim. The country is heavily reliant on Russia economically and its leaders maintain a very close relationship.
Outside the K.F.C., several women who were with the men trimming beards approached Nilufar and a friend. The women said they were from the Committee on Women and Family Affairs, a government body that advises on and implements state policy. They asked the two women to remove their head scarves.
Nilufar tried to explain that she did not normally wear a head covering, but was mourning her mother’s death.
“The women told me, ‘All this is being done for a reason,’” Nilufar said. Many Tajiks had been involved in terrorist attacks, they told her, adding that fundamentalists from Afghanistan had come to the country.
“They sport long beards and their wives wear head coverings,” she said the women told her, and it had become difficult for the authorities to catch them, “because we also dress like them, and it’s hard to tell the difference.”
The women wanted to fine Nilufar. She called an uncle with government connections, who told them to leave her alone.
But when she was stopped in June a third time, she said, this time by the police, she had to spend the night in a cell because she refused to sign a document accepting that she had broken the law.
“When I got to the station, there were already about 15, even 17 women wearing head scarves sitting in the cell, including an older woman who was at least 50,” she said.
In the morning, the station chief arrived — an acquaintance from her university course — and released her. “My husband was angry with me, and worried,” Nilufar said. But he understood what she had been through: He had previously spent five nights in jail before agreeing to trim his beard.
After the experience, Nilufar finally decided to stop wearing her hijab, because she was worried that a stain on her record could hinder her ability to work.
That kind of policing has been a focus of ISIS-K propaganda published in Tajik, among other languages, said Riccardo Valle, the research director of The Khorasan Diary, a research and media platform about the terrorist group.
The propaganda also makes much of crackdowns on Tajiks in Russia, where the authorities have conducted raids on migrant dormitories that house Central Asian guest workers, and have requested documents from people in public places, effectively racially profiling them.
Experts interviewed by The Times said that the strategy of strictly monitoring physical appearance was not an effective way to combat extremism, because it bred resentment. It was also ineffective, they said, arguing that radicalized extremists might try to remain inconspicuous by avoiding outward signs of religiosity.
Family members of two of the men accused of carrying out the Moscow attack said neither had shown any external signs of religiosity.
“My son was never a practicing Muslim,” said Gulrakat Mirzoyeva, 59, the mother of Dalerjon Mirzoyev, one of the men charged in the assault. “Sometimes he prayed, but not really.”
All four of the accused attackers had been working in Russia for at least several months, some making repeated trips in and out. Many experts say that it is not only crushing poverty at home but degrading experiences of migration that drive Tajik citizens into the hands of militants.
Tajiks who join groups like ISIS-K “are almost all Tajiks who were migrant laborers and were radicalized outside Tajikistan via social networks,” said Bruce Pannier, a Central Asia fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.
Mr. Mirzoyev had done four stints of six to eight months working in Russia to provide for his wife and their four children. Their home, in a dusty village on the Tajik steppe, has no running water.
Shamsidin Fariduni, another man accused in the attack, had become an observant Muslim after time in prison. His mother, Muyassara Zargarova, insisted he was not an extremist.
He went to work in Russia repeatedly because of financial pressure, she said. First he needed to pay for his wedding, then for medical help when his wife developed pregnancy complications. And when the baby was born with breathing problems, he and his brother went back to look for work once more.
In the aftermath of the concert hall attack, the Tajik authorities have increased security cooperation with Moscow. Mr. Rahmon has also increased ties with Beijing, though China has denied media reports that it is building a base in Tajikistan.
The United States and Tajikistan signed an agreement in May to use software that will notify U.S. authorities in real time if travelers who are considered suspicious enter Tajikistan.
But the state needs to be doing more, said Larisa Aleksandrova, a Dushanbe-based expert on human rights.
Instead of tackling substantive problems like corruption, poverty, and social inequality, she said, the state was focusing on “where to put a comma in a sentence, what to name a particular ministry or what clothes, for example, women or men should wear.”
“It distracts us by talking about problems which, in my opinion, are not so relevant,” she said.