Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan has issued an eviction notice to a U.S. air base that has been used since 2001 to stage military and humanitarian operations in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said Saturday. The notice, delivered Friday to the U.S. Embassy in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, gives the United States six months to comply, Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood said. "The bottom line is, they want us out," he said. The Uzbek government has increasingly bristled at the U.S.

In its struggle with Islamic extremism, the United States has had few better friends than President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, who has provided both intelligence and military facilities. But Karimov's government has emerged as one of the toughest tests of the Bush administration's campaign to promote democracy, especially in the Muslim world.

Uzbek authorities pressed forward Monday with arrests of people suspected of involvement in clashes and demonstrations in the eastern city of Andijon last week, as the government sought to deflect criticism of its deadly crackdown on protesters. "At least 70 organizers of the riots in Andijon" have been detained, the Russian news agency Interfax reported, paraphrasing remarks made by Interior Minister Zakir Almatov to officials from Andijon who were visiting the capital, Tashkent.

A series of explosions and clashes between insurgents and police left at least 18 people dead and dozens wounded in the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan, authorities said Monday. Two blasts Monday in the capital, Tashkent, claimed the lives of a suspected suicide bomber and two victims, and an explosion Sunday night in the Bukhara region took nine lives, Uzbek Interior Ministry spokesman Aziz Ernazarov said by telephone.

The law has a long arm -- for the regime of Uzbek President Islam Karimov, it can stretch more than a thousand miles beyond his country's borders. Consider the case of the Rostex trading company, a small import-export business here whose employees, all Uzbek immigrants, were among a group that published a letter on the Internet recently criticizing the Karimov government.

Surrounded by war, political volatility and hostile governments, archeologists are hemmed in as they try to uncover one of Buddhism's richest civilizations from the forbidding landscape of Central Asia. In the 1st to 7th centuries, the Kushan Buddhist empire was a crucial East-West crossroads in a land then known as Bactria. Now it spreads across at least four countries: Afghanistan and the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

Sanjab Valiakhunov's family can't find him, no matter how hard they search. "In the last three days I was everywhere. I was at the morgue, at the hospital. He's not there," his sister, Rakhat Valiakhunova, said Thursday in despair after clashes here last week left at least 169 people dead by official count, and hundreds more according to human rights activists and others. "They didn't let me into the morgue, though," she added.

Spent nuclear fuel containing enough weapons-grade uranium to produce at least two bombs was safely returned to Russia from Uzbekistan this week in a high-security and classified operation, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency disclosed Thursday.

Suicide bombers on Friday struck the U.S. and Israeli embassies in Uzbekistan, killing two local guards and injuring at least nine others in the second wave of attacks this year against a key U.S. ally during the war in Afghanistan. The prosecutor general's office also was hit in the coordinated afternoon attacks in the capital city of Tashkent. It sustained more damage than either of the embassies, where guards prevented bombers from entering.

The government of Uzbekistan has agreed to open its border with Afghanistan so that emergency food can be shipped to starving Afghans in Taliban-held territory, a top U.N. official said Thursday. In an attempt to head off a looming famine, Uzbek President Islam Karimov will allow the United Nations to use his country's Soviet-era port and barges in the border town of Termez to transport aid across the Amu Darya River to Afghanistan, said Kenzo Oshima, U.N.