The October 31, 2017 truck-ramming attack in Lower Manhattan was the first lethal jihadist attack in New York City since September 11, 2001. The attacker, mirroring the vehicular terrorist attacks that have troubled Western Europe in recent years, used a rented truck to drive down a bike path, killing eight before being shot, apprehended, and hospitalized. Soon after, authorities identified the suspect as Sayfullo Habibullaevich Saipov, a 28-year-old national of Uzbekistan. Saipov reportedly came to the United States in 2010, and settled in the Tampa, Florida area, before moving to Paterson, New Jersey. Business records and other accounts show that he also had ties to Cincinnati and Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. Reportedly, Saipov left a note at the scene of the attack detailing his allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State (IS).
The suspected attacker’s revealed country of origin immediately raised questions from the media, analysts, and authorities over what role, if any, the situation in Uzbekistan and Central Asia more broadly played in Saipov’s radicalization. For some, the attacker’s allegiances and his Uzbek origins were sufficient to declare his case to be one aspect of the broader mobilization of Uzbek IS supporters worldwide. Yet others, including New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, pointed to the U.S. domestic context in evaluating what drove him to commit the attack. In a press conference, Cuomo claimed that “after [Saipov] came to the United States is when he started to become informed about ISIS and radical Islamic tactics”.
What we know about Saipov so far points to a necessary debate within the academic literature on radicalization amongst Central Asian, and Uzbek communities specifically, outside of Uzbekistan. Edward Lemon and John Heathershaw argue that what occurs in “transnational spaces of migration is…more important than root causes in Central Asia” when it comes to mobilization to violent extremism. This type of research, even in much larger Central Asian diaspora communities in Turkey and Russia, is nascent; in the United States context it is even more limited. This analysis offers some context to broader factors that may have played a role in Sayfullo Saipov’s radicalization. It provides a brief overview of the IS-related wave of mobilization amongst Uzbeks, comparing the situation inside and outside Uzbekistan, and clarifying several misconceptions about radicalization in these communities. With these trends in mind, the analysis also documents past instances where members of the Uzbek diaspora in the United States were involved in terrorism cases. From these assessments, it highlights a few underexplored factors that analysts might consider when trying to document links between members of diaspora communities and international terrorist organizations like IS.