“We bear witness to unspeakable horrors” : historical violence, contemporary terrorism and collective trauma in Central Asia

Beginning in 2012, thousands of Central Asians joined what they believed was a jihad in Syria and Iraq despite having no historical, cultural or linguistic ties to that conflict. While people joined from all over the world, unlike recruits from any other region the overwhelming majority of Central Asians mobilized to armed groups like ISIS were women and children. This work looks at this surprising mass mobilization through the lens of historical trauma, placing it in the context of adaptations to the multi-generational legacy of stark human suffering – the “unspeakable horrors” that the chapters to come will detail -- experienced by the indigenous peoples of Central Asia who saw their cultures, meaning-making mechanisms and social networks of mutual support and care decimated again and again in a cycle that has spanned four successive generations. These began with colonization by Russia, collectivization under Stalin, collapse of the Soviet order, and resulted in the consolidation of authoritarian regimes in what have become some of the least-free states in the world. Drawing on original fieldwork in Central Asia spanning more than two decades, fifteen years of firsthand experience in the US intelligence community and programs designed to counter and prevent violent extremism, as well as hundreds of hours original language media produced by Central Asian militants in both Russian and Uzbek and dozens of interviews with former members of armed Islamist groups from the region, this work argues that the standard focus on individuals and their ideology not only fails to explain this mobilization, but that this failure also means that our core approaches to War on Terror writ large are often useless or directly counterproductive. It argues that we cannot prevent one specific form of violence related to extremist groups without addressing the underlying causes that produce so many other forms of violence and suffering in a larger cycle – from gender-based violence and domestic abuse to addiction, alcoholism, street gangs and organized crime – that plagued these same communities, especially in the chaos of the 1990s that followed the Soviet collapse.