Chapter Twelve
The sheep I let roam on the mountainsides have dispersed.
The sea chases its flocks one after another.
I remembered last year in Koktebel,
but my mind could not gather in a single poem.
-Belgi
The journalist Hamid Ismailov recalls:
In 1994 I started working for the BBC in the newly established Uzbek Service. We first heard about Uzbek Islamist fighters in 1995, when our Moscow correspondent, Timur Klychev, came back from a trip to Tajikistan and told us about the “Uzbek” or, more accurately, “Namangan” battalion under the command of a certain field commander by the name of Juma. According to Timur this battalion, which had so far fought in Tavildara, was regarded as one of the bravest and most highly skilled in the ranks of the Tajik Islamic opposition, and it consist
