We bear witness to unspeakable horrors Historical violence, contemporary terrorism and collective trauma in Central Asia: Dr Noah Tucker

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 mobilised to armed groups like ISIS were women and children.

In the span of only a few years, migrants displaced from Central Asia spread conflict even further, carrying out or attempting deadly attacks in the US, Europe, Turkey, Russia and elsewhere, including the deadliest terror attack in New York since 9-11 and the Crocus Hall Attack in Moscow in March 2024.

Dr Noah Tucker's work provides a unique anthropological approach to both sides of this episode in the long War on Terror, and offers compelling evidence that we cannot understand the Central Asian mobilisation to the Syrian conflict without taking account of generations of trauma experienced by these communities in successive authoritarian systems across the ideological spectrum, and how this unexpected episode of catastrophic violence was misunderstood by the systems that were intended, and spectacularly failed and continue to fail, to prevent and counter it.

Drawing on original fieldwork in Central Asia spanning more than two decades, 15 years of combined firsthand experience in national security and programmes designed to counter and prevent violent extremism, hundreds of hours of 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 mobilisation and contemporary terrorism more broadly, but that this failure also means that our core approaches to War on Terror writ large are often useless at best and at times directly counterproductive.

Dr Noah Tucker is a Research Fellow in the School of International Relations and an Associate at the University of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He was previously Managing Editor at Registan.net and Senior Editor for Central Asia at RFE/RL. He worked as a national security professional for ten years in the United States and has served as research consultant for a variety of international organisations seeking expertise on religion and conflict in Central Asia, including USAID, OSCE, UNDP, the US State Department, USIP, UNOCT and The Global Coalition against Daesh.