Throughout the 1990s, President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan launched a series of crackdowns against Islamist militants led by a former Soviet soldier named Juma Namangani and a young Muslim mullah named Tohir Yuldeshev, who sympathized with Wahhabi teachings. In 1998, with funding provided by Osama bin Laden and working out of Kabul, Afghanistan where they had been provided safe haven by the Taliban, Namangani and Yuldeshev announced the founding of a new militant organization: the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The new organization immediately declared a jihad against Karimov's regime and declared that its goal was to create an Islamic state under the rule of Islamic sharia law in Uzbekistan. (see also)
Source: Ahmed Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 137ff.