Retired CIA station chief Scott Uehlinger, host of “The Station Chief” podcast, joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss the New York City truck terror attack, which Marlow noted has put Central Asia on many Americans’ threat radar for the first time.
“Uzbekistan has been a problem relating to terrorism for quite some time,” Uehlinger noted, referencing the April terrorist attack in Stockholm, Sweden carried out by an Uzbek asylum seeker.
“There were also two other attacks involving Uzbeks this year,” he added. “The one January attack in Istanbul, with 39 dead, was also caused by an Uzbek. There were 14 dead in an attack in St. Petersburg, Russia as well. We’re seeing Uzbekistan a lot in the news in Central Asia.”
“It’s a very complicated area,” Uehlinger said. “I really enjoyed working for the CIA in that area, and I was doing a lot of terrorist work. But it’s a very confused area because, for one thing, when the Soviets drew the borders they deliberately drew borders that left large minority groups in each of the countries. In other words, in Uzbekistan there’s a big Tajik minority, and in Takijistan there’s a big Uzbek minority.”
“That’s significant. I mean, these are very different cultures,” he explained. “The Russians did this to keep them in line, because they’ll be too busy hating on each other, rather than worrying about the overarching Soviet Union. That created a lot of ethnic tensions right there. Generally, Central Asians have a slightly different take on Islam than the Middle Eastern states. There’s a lot more shamanism and effects of Mongol culture on them. But they have been pushed to more extremist acts.”
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