Later that year the IMU conducted its first verifiable operations, with an incursion into the Batken region of southern Kyrgyzstan – a region populated mainly by ethnic Uzbeks, and lying between Tavildara in Tajikistan and the Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan.
Batken |
The 1999 Tashkent bombing in February 1999 which were blamed on foreign Islamic militants and the subsequent incursion of the Kyrgyz region of Batken by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, who were based in Tajikistan and opposed to Uzbek President Islam Karimov, led to Uzbekistan sealing its border and commencement constructing a barbed wire fence around long sections of its border with Kyrgyzstan in the Ferghana Valley.