Radicals in Retreat.(Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan)

Sheraly Akbotoev received the summons in Kabul last November. An Uzbek religious instructor and avowed jihadist, Akbotoev was a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a hard-line group with ties to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. "Come to Logar province" in northern Afghanistan, his superiors told him by phone. "Something has happened." U.S. fighter planes had attacked a convoy of IMU fighters fleeing Konduz, where some 300 of them had been helping the Taliban resist the U.S.-backed forces of the Northern Alliance. A top IMU aide, Akbotoev was being ordered to the soldiers' funeral. The bodies, wrapped in blankets, were virtually unrecognizable. One in particular, he says, "was just meat. There wasn't much left." But he knew who it was because the dead man's name had just been mentioned in the farewell prayer: Juma Namangani, a former Soviet paratrooper and leader of the IMU. A mysterious and supposedly pious man, Namangani's name had symbolized the lingering Islamist dream of establishing a Taliban-style state in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

Until Namangani's death, the IMU had made its own name through military-style insurgency. At its peak, the group claimed about 1,200 hard-core fighters, along with thousands more family members and followers. In the late 1990s the guerrillas were concentrated in terrorist training camps in Tajikistan and Afghanistan, from where they launched military-style attacks against the secular, dictatorial regime in Uzbekistan. Those incursions failed, and the IMU later joined with the Taliban to fight the Northern Alliance. But U.S. bombs battered the group last winter. At best only a couple of hundred of IMU zealots remain, and they are now haphazardly dispersed in Iran, Tajikistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. Their very weakness, though, is beginning to worry some longtime observers. They say a disorganized, weakened IMU could become more Qaeda-like in its structure--and thereby harder to defend against in an inherently unstable region.

If the IMU remains dangerous, it's because the group's new leader might, if anything, be more committed to jihad than his predecessor. (Some people in Central Asia maintain that Namangani is still alive, though there is no evidence to support them.) Tahir Yuldash, Namangani's chief ideologue and rival, has been trying to revitalize the movement from Pakistan. IMU defector Khoseyin Alimov, 21, now back in Uzbekistan, told NEWSWEEK he attended a speech Yuldash gave in Wana, a village in the Pakistani tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, this past May. Just weeks earlier, IMU fighters allegedly killed a dozen or more Pakistani soldiers in at least two shoot-outs in the same area. According to Alimov, Yuldash, speaking in a large hall and flanked by 30 guards, told his audience that "despite the fact that there are only a few of us, we are proud to fight the American bloc. Even if only one Muslim is left alive, it will be a victory. We need to erase America from the face of the earth." Alimov says Yuldash then handed out envelopes filled with money--compensation for those who'd lost relatives in Afghanistan.

Yuldash's ascendancy has ominous implications. Known in Pakistan as Qari Tahir Jan, he is revered as a brilliant communicator who speaks Arabic, Persian, Uzbek and Pashto. As the IMU's military leader, Namangani gained fame, but little in the way of lasting strategic success. Yuldash is said to represent a strain of thinking closer to bin Laden's. Analysts believe he has broadened the IMU's scope of enemies to include the West, whereas Namangani was more focused on Central Asia. With fewer resources at his disposal, Yuldash will have every incentive to rely more upon terrorist tactics. "What's happened in Afghanistan may actually be playing into his hands," says Tamara Makarenko, an IMU specialist at the University of Glamorgan in Wales. "He still has sleepers in all the ...