WASHINGTON: The United States on Tuesday slapped a $3 million bounty on a former Tajik special operations commander who received American training but later defected to the militant Islamic State extremist group.
Gulmorod Khalimov, now 41, is a former colonel in Tajikistan’s interior ministry police special operations unit and a trained sniper. Last year he declared allegiance to the IS group.
According to US officials, between 2003 and 2014 Khalimov attended five training courses in the United States and Tajikistan paid for by a US State Department anti-terrorism programme.
In May 2015, he appeared in a video distributed online, bearded and in a black head scarf, bearing a sniper rifle and vowing to bring “jihad” to Russia, Tajikistan and the United States.
Published in Dawn, August 31st, 2016
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