Ground-source heat pump systems are one of the most efficient ways to do climate control, but digging the wells can be prohibitively expensive for the individual citizen. What if you could do it at a larger scale?

Starting with a pilot to serve 37 commercial and residential buildings in Framingham, MA, Eversource is using its experience with natural gas drilling and pipe to serve up a lower carbon way to heat and cool this neighborhood. While district heating via geothermal has precedents elsewhere in the country, Boise is a notable example, it has remained a somewhat niche technology. Once networked, excess heat from one location can be used elsewhere in the system, like data centers or industrial facilities being used to heat homes in the winter.

As gas utilities look to transition away from fossil fuels, their existing knowledge base is a perfect fit for geothermal, but there are some regulatory hurdles. Six states have passed laws allowing natural gas utilities to expand beyond just gas, and bills have been filed in six more. This will likely accelerate with the formation of the Utility Networked Geothermal Collaborative which includes many utilities including giants like Dominion Energy who are looking to expand their energy portfolios.

If you want to dig more into district heating systems or geothermal energy, we’ve covered cogeneration from power plants to serve up the heat instead, doing it with wind, or even using old coal mines for geothermal heat.

hackaday.com/2025/02/26/distri…

[Nicholas LaBonte] shows off a Cyberdeck Handheld that demonstrates just how good something can look when care and attention goes into the design and fabrication. He wanted to make something that blended cyberpunk and nautical aesthetics with a compact and elegant design, and we think he absolutely succeeded.

On the inside is a Raspberry Pi and an RTL-SDR. The back of the unit is machined from hardwood, and sports a bronze heat sink for the Raspberry Pi. The front has a prominent red PSP joystick for mouse input and a custom keyboard. The keyboard is especially interesting. On the inside it’s a custom PCB with tactile switches and a ATmega32U4 running QMK firmware — a popular choice for DIY keyboards — and presents to the host as a regular USB HID device.
The keys are on a single plate of little tabs, one for each key, that sits between the front panel and press on the tact switches inside.
How did he make those slick-looking keys? It’s actually a single plate that sits between the front panel and the switches themselves. [Nicholas] used a sheet of polymer with a faux-aluminum look to it and machined it down, leaving metal-looking keys with engraved symbols as tabs in a single panel. It looks really good, although [Nicholas] already has some ideas about improving it.

On the right side is the power button and charging port, and astute readers may spot that the power button is where a double-stack of USB ports would normally be on a Raspberry Pi 5. [Nicholas] removed the physical connectors, saving some space and connecting the USB ports internally to the keyboard and SDR.

As mentioned, [Nicholas] is already full of ideas for improvements. The bronze heat sink isn’t as effective as he’d like, the SDR could use some extra shielding, and the sounds the keyboard ends up making could use some work. Believe it or not, there’s still room to spare inside the unit and he’d maybe like to figure out a way to add a camera, GPS receiver, or maybe a 4G modem. We can’t wait! Get a good look for yourself in the video, embedded below.

youtube.com/embed/u8kYHgKKhjY?…

hackaday.com/2025/02/27/a-prec…

In the rush to always have the latest and greatest, it’s not uncommon that perfectly serviceable hardware ends up collecting dust in a drawer somewhere. If you’ve got an old Kindle laying around, you may be interested in this write-up from [Hemant] that shows a practical example of how the popular e-reader can be pushed into service as a weather dashboard.

The first step is to jailbreak the Kindle, providing the user with root access to the device. From there the Kindle Unified Application Launcher (KUAL) is installed along with USBNetwork which allows you to connect to the reader over SSH. With root access and a network connection, the real project of converting it to a weather dashboard begins. [Hemant] split the project into two parts here, a Node.js server that scrapes weather data from the internet and converts it into an image, and a client for the Kindle that receives this image for display.

The Kindle has a number of quirks and issues that [Hemant] covers as well, including handling image ghosting on the e-ink display as well as a problem where the device will hang if the Internet connection is lost. For those with jailbroken Kindles that want to put their devices back into useful service, this is an excellent guide for getting started and [Hemant] also provided all of the source code on the project’s GitHub page.

There has been a long tradition of using Kindles for things other than e-readers, and even devices with major hardware problems can still have useful life in them thanks to this project which allows the e-ink display to have a second life on its own.

hackaday.com/2025/02/27/shelve…

QR codes have been with us for a long time now, and after passing through their Gardenesque hype cycle of inappropriate usage, have now settled down to be an important and ubiquitous part of life. If you have ever made a QR code you’ll know all about trying to generate the most compact and easily-scannable one you can, and for that [Terence Eden] is here with an interesting quirk. Upper-case text produces smaller codes than lower-case.

His post takes us on a journey into the encoding of QR codes, not in terms of their optical pattern generation, but instead the bit stream they contain. There are different modes to denote different types of payload, and in his two examples of the same URL in upper- and lower- cases, the modes are different. Upper-case is encoded as alphanumeric, while lower-case, seemingly though also containing alphanumeric information, is encoded as bytes.

To understand why, it’s necessary to consider the QR codes’ need for efficiency, which led its designers to reduce their character set as far as possible and only define uppercase letters in their alphanumeric set. The upper-case payload is thus encoded using less bits per character than the lower-case one, which is encoded as 8-bit bytes. A satisfying explanation for a puzzle in plain sight.

Hungry for more QR hackery? This one contains more than one payload!

hackaday.com/2025/02/26/shout-…

Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-02-23 12:34:37

Why are QR Codes with capital letters smaller than QR codes with lower-case letters?

shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/02/why-a…

Take a look at these two QR codes. Scan them if you like, I promise there's nothing dodgy in them.

---

---

Left is upper-case HTTPS://EDENT.TEL/ and right is lower-case https://edent.tel/

You can clearly see that the one on the left is a "smaller" QR as it has fewer bits of data in it. Both go to the same URl, the only difference is the casing.

What's going on?

Your first thought might be that there's a different level of error-correction. QR codes can have increasing levels of redundancy in order to make sure they can be scanned when damaged. But, in this case, they both have Low error correction.

The smaller code is "Type 1" - it is 21px * 21px. The larger is "Type 2" with 25px * 25px.

The official specification describes the versions in more details. The smaller code should be able to hold 25 alphanumeric character. But https://edent.tel/ is only 18 characters long. So why is it bumped into a larger code?

Using a decoder like ZXING it is possible to see the raw bytes of each code.

UPPER

20 93 1a a6 54 63 dd 28 35 1b 50 e9 3b dc 00 ec11 ec 11
lower:

41 26 87 47 47 07 33 a2 f2 f6 56 46 56 e7 42 e746 56 c2 f0 ec 11 ec 11 ec 11 ec 11 ec 11 ec 11ec 11
You might have noticed that they both end with the same sequence: ec 11 Those are "padding bytes" because the data needs to completely fill the QR code. But - hang on! - not only does the UPPER one safely contain the text, it also has some spare padding?

The answer lies in the first couple of bytes.

Once the raw bytes have been read, a QR scanner needs to know exactly what sort of code it is dealing with. The first four bits tell it the mode. Let's convert the hex to binary and then split after the first four bits:

Type	HEX	BIN	Split
UPPER	20 93	00100000 10010011	0010 000010010011
lower	41 26	01000001 00100110	0100 000100100110

The UPPER code is 0010 which indicates it is Alphanumeric - the standard says the next 9 bits show the length of data.

The lower code is 0100 which indicates it is Byte mode - the standard says the next 8 bits show the length of data.

Type	HEX	BIN	Split
UPPER	20 93	00100000 10010011	0010 0000 10010
lower	41 26	01000001 00100110	0100 000 10010

Look at that! They both have a length of 10010 which, converted to binary, is 18 - the exact length of the text.

Alphanumeric users 11 bits for every two characters, Byte mode uses (you guessed it!) 8 bits per single character.

But why is the lower-case code pushed into Byte mode? Isn't it using letters and number?

Well, yes. But in order to store data efficiently, Alphanumeric mode only has a limited subset of characters available. Upper-case letters, and a handful of punctuation symbols: space $ % * + - . / :

Luckily, that's enough for a protocol, domain, and path. Sadly, no GET parameters.

So, there you have it. If you want the smallest possible physical size for a QR code which contains a URl, make sure the text is all in capital letters.

#qr #QRCodes

Table of Alphanumeric Values

When creating a QR code with alphanumeric mode, you need to know the alphanumeric values of the characters that you are encoding. See this table for reference.

^Thonky.com

Negli ultimi mesi, il gruppo di hacker cinese conosciuto come Salt Typhoon ha continuato a far parlare di sé grazie alle sue tattiche aggressive e persistenti nel settore della cybersicurezza.

Nonostante le sanzioni imposte dagli Stati Uniti e un’attenta sorveglianza governativa, Salt Typhoon ha dimostrato di non rallentare le proprie attività, continuando a lanciare attacchi coordinati contro istituzioni educative e infrastrutture critiche a livello globale.

Salt Typhoon (RedMike): Una Minaccia Globale

Recenti rapporti indicano che il gruppo ha mirato a diversi fornitori di telecomunicazioni e università in vari paesi, principalmente Stati Uniti, Regno Unito, Sudafrica. Queste incursioni hanno permesso agli hacker di compromettere dispositivi cruciali, estraendo informazioni sensibili come dati scientifici e tecnologia proprietaria.

Da quanto viene riportato dalle dashboard della piattaforma di intelligence di Recorded Future (Partner strategico di Red Hot Cyber), gli attacchi hanno iniziato ad aumentare in modo sensibile da febbraio di questo anni con dei picchi nelle date del 13 e del 21 di questo mese.
Trend degli attacchi di Salt Typhoon, informazioni prelevate dalla piattaforma di Recorded Future, partner tecnologico di Red Hot Cyber sulla Cyber Threat Intelligence

Lo sfruttamento delle CVE di CISCO IOS XE

Dall’inizio di dicembre 2024, Salt Typhoon (RedMike) ha tentato di sfruttare oltre 1.000 dispositivi di rete Cisco esposti su Internet in tutto il mondo, principalmente quelli associati ai provider di telecomunicazioni, utilizzando una combinazione di due vulnerabilità di escalation dei privilegi: CVE-2023-20198 e CVE-2023-20273. Una volta compromesso con successo, il gruppo utilizza il nuovo account utente privilegiato per modificare la configurazione del dispositivo e aggiunge un tunnel GRE per l’accesso persistente e l’esfiltrazione dei dati.

La vulnerabilità di escalation dei privilegi CVE-2023-20198 è stata trovata nella funzionalità Web UI del software Cisco IOS XE, versione 16 e precedenti, e pubblicata da Cisco nell’ottobre 2023. Gli aggressori sfruttano questa vulnerabilità per ottenere l’accesso iniziale al dispositivo ed emettono un comando privilege 15 per creare un utente locale e una password. In seguito, l’aggressore utilizza il nuovo account locale per accedere al dispositivo e sfrutta una vulnerabilità di escalation dei privilegi associata, CVE-2023-20273, per ottenere i privilegi di utente root.
Distribuzione geografica dei dispositivi CISCO sfruttati da Red Mike (Salt Typhoone) (Fonte Recorded Future)
Oltre la metà dei dispositivi Cisco presi di mira da RedMike si trovavano negli Stati Uniti, in Sud America e in India. I dispositivi rimanenti si estendevano su oltre 100 altri paesi. Sebbene i dispositivi selezionati siano principalmente associati a provider di telecomunicazioni, tredici erano collegati a università in Argentina, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malesia, Messico, Paesi Bassi, Thailandia, Stati Uniti e Vietnam.

Tale comportamento mette in evidenza la minaccia continua rappresentata dagli attori sponsorizzati dagli stati e la loro capacità di compromettere la sicurezza nazionale. Particolarmente preoccupante è la strategia di Salt Typhoon di sfruttare vulnerabilità nei dispositivi Cisco.

Gli obiettivi di Salt Typhoon (RedMike)

La Cina ha sviluppato un’ampia rete di operazioni di spionaggio informatico mirate a istituzioni accademiche, aziende e governi stranieri, con l’obiettivo di ottenere vantaggi strategici in settori chiave come l’intelligenza artificiale, la crittografia e la tecnologia quantistica. Gruppi di hacker sponsorizzati dallo Stato, come Brass Typhoon APT41 e Violet Typhoon APT31, sono stati collegati a campagne di attacco sofisticate che sfruttano vulnerabilità nei sistemi informatici di università e centri di ricerca per esfiltrare dati sensibili. Queste operazioni non si limitano al cyberspazio, ma coinvolgono anche il reclutamento di ricercatori e studenti stranieri attraverso programmi di scambio accademico e collaborazioni scientifiche, che spesso fungono da copertura per il trasferimento illecito di conoscenze.

Parallelamente, il governo cinese utilizza società di copertura e joint venture con istituzioni occidentali per acquisire tecnologie emergenti senza destare sospetti. Attraverso iniziative come il programma “Thousand Talents”, Pechino ha incentivato il rientro di scienziati e ingegneri cinesi dall’estero, spesso con informazioni e brevetti ottenuti illegalmente.

Inoltre, le cyber-operazioni cinesi hanno preso di mira fornitori di infrastrutture critiche, tra cui aziende di telecomunicazioni e contractor della difesa, con l’intento di compromettere la sicurezza delle comunicazioni e raccogliere dati di intelligence strategici. Queste attività, sempre più sofisticate, come quelle di Salt Typhoon (RedMike), hanno portato a crescenti tensioni tra la Cina e le potenze occidentali, con sanzioni e misure di ritorsione da parte di Stati Uniti ed Europa per contrastare l’aggressiva espansione dello spionaggio informatico cinese.

Gli attacchi di Febbraio 2025

Il 15 febbraio 2025, Salt Typhoon ha sferrato moltissimi attacchi che hanno colpito 13 università e cinque fornitori di servizi Internet, inclusi quelli in Italia. Queste aggressioni segnano un notevole incremento della campagna di Salt Typhoon, considerata una delle più grandi operazioni di cyber-spionaggio condotte dalla Cina contro gli Stati Uniti. Le conseguenze di questi attacchi non si limitano a violazioni immediate dei dati, ma pongono interrogativi sugli impatti a lungo termine sulla ricerca accademica e sull’innovazione tecnologica.

E’ stata violata con successo un’affiliata statunitense di una società di telecomunicazioni del Regno Unito, vari provider di servizi Internet (ISP) e 13 università, tra cui importanti istituzioni come l’UCLA. Nel corso del mese di febbraio, Cisco ha confermato che questa falla è stata utilizzata per colpire le reti di telecomunicazione statunitensi, dimostrando la persistenza del gruppo nell’utilizzare sia le vulnerabilità consolidate che quelle più recenti per mantenere l’accesso ai sistemi compromessi.

Gli attacchi non si sono limitati agli Stati Uniti, ma si sono estesi anche a entità internazionali, tra cui ISP in Italia, Sudafrica e Thailandia. L’ampiezza di questi attacchi ha destato notevoli preoccupazioni per quanto riguarda la sicurezza dei dati sensibili e l’integrità delle infrastrutture di telecomunicazione su scala globale.

In generale le attività malevole di Salt Typhoon (Red Mike) hanno sfruttato le vulnerabilità identificate come CVE-2023-20198 e CVE-2023-20273, che hanno facilitato l’accesso non autorizzato ai router Cisco IOS XE. Ciò ha permesso agli aggressori di manipolare i dispositivi di rete e potenzialmente di esfiltrare dati sensibili.

Malware utilizzato da Salt Typhoon per compromettere le reti

Salt Typhoon (RedMike) dopo aver avuto accesso e compromesso i router CISCO, impiega una serie di sofisticati malware per infiltrarsi e compromettere le reti in vari settori.

MASOL RAT

Uno degli strumenti principali del loro arsenale è una versione personalizzata del MASOL RAT (Remote Access Trojan),che consente agli aggressori di ottenere il controllo remoto dei sistemi infetti.

Questo malware è particolarmente efficace nell’esfiltrazione di dati sensibili, nel monitoraggio delle attività degli utenti e nell’esecuzione di comandi sulle macchine compromesse. L’uso del MASOL RAT evidenzia l’attenzione strategica di Salt Typhoon per la furtività e la persistenza, che gli consentono di mantenere l’accesso a lungo termine alle reti mirate senza essere individuati.

MASOL RAT, tracciato da TrendMicro dal 2020 può essere utilizzato per prendere di mira entità governative del sud-est asiatico. In base alla stringa PDB della backdoor (E:\Masol_https190228\x64\Release\Masol.pdb), si ritiene che il Remote Access Trojan possa essere stata sviluppato già nel 2019. E’ stata osservata anche una nuova variante Linux in circolazione dopo il 2021.
La configurazione del malware MASOL RAT estratta (Fonte TrendMicro)

JumbledPath

In un rapporto pubblicato da Cisco Talos il 20 febbraio, i ricercatori hanno confermato che Salt Typhoon ha ottenuto l’accesso all’infrastruttura di rete principale tramite dispositivi Cisco e ha poi utilizzato tale infrastruttura per raccogliere una serie di informazioni.
Panoramica sulla gestione dei dati JumbledPath (Fonte Cisco Talos)
L’approccio di Salt Typhoon per ottenere l’accesso iniziale ai dispositivi Cisco è quello di ottenere le credenziali di accesso legittime della vittima utilizzando tecniche LOTL (Living-off-the-Land) sui dispositivi di rete.

Salt Typhoon (RedMike) ha utilizzato un’utilità personalizzata, denominata JumbledPath, che gli ha consentito di eseguire un’acquisizione di pacchetti su un dispositivo Cisco remoto tramite un jump-host definito dall’attore. Questo strumento ha anche tentato di cancellare i log e compromettere la registrazione lungo il jump-path e restituire l’acquisizione compressa e crittografata risultante tramite un’altra serie unica di connessioni o jump definiti dall’attore.

Ciò ha consentito all’attore della minaccia di creare una catena di connessioni ed eseguire l’acquisizione su un dispositivo remoto. L’utilizzo di questa utilità contribuirebbe a offuscare la fonte originale e la destinazione finale della richiesta e consentirebbe inoltre al suo operatore di muoversi attraverso dispositivi o infrastrutture potenzialmente altrimenti non raggiungibili pubblicamente (o instradabili).
Metodo di Salt Typhoon per Bypassare gli elenchi di controllo degli accessi (Fonte Cisco Talos)
Questa utility è stata scritta in GO e compilata come binario ELF usando un’architettura x86-64. La compilazione dell’utility usando questa architettura la rende ampiamente utilizzabile su sistemi operativi Linux, che includono anche una varietà di dispositivi di rete multi-vendor. Questa utility è stata trovata in istanze Guestshell configurate dall’attore su dispositivi Cisco Nexus.

L’autore della minaccia ha modificato ripetutamente l’indirizzo dell’interfaccia loopback su uno switch compromesso e ha utilizzato tale interfaccia come origine di connessioni SSH ad altri dispositivi all’interno dell’ambiente di destinazione, il che gli ha consentito di aggirare di fatto gli elenchi di controllo di accesso (ACL) in vigore su tali dispositivi.

Un tipico attacco di Salt Typhoon

Salt Typhoon (RedMike), spesso prevede un approccio multiforme che sfrutta vulnerabilità note in dispositivi di rete ampiamente utilizzati, in particolare quelli di Cisco.

Un altro comportamento degno di nota mostrato da Salt Typhoon consiste nello sfruttare le tecniche LOTL (Living-off-the-Land) sui dispositivi di rete, abusando dell’infrastruttura affidabile come punto di snodo per passare da una società di telecomunicazioni all’altra. Di seguito viene riportata l’infrastruttura di sfruttamento di Salt Typhoon:
Infrastruttura di sfruttamento del dispositivo di rete Cisco RedMike (Fonte: Recorded Future)

Ricognizione

Salt Typhoon inizia con un’ampia ricognizione per identificare i potenziali obiettivi all’interno delle infrastrutture critiche, come i fornitori di telecomunicazioni e le istituzioni scolastiche. Questa fase può comportare la scansione dei dispositivi vulnerabili, la raccolta di informazioni sulle configurazioni di rete e l’identificazione del personale chiave.
Tecniche, Tattiche e Procedure (TTPs) degli attacchi di Salt Typhoon, informazioni prelevate dalla piattaforma di Recorded Future, partner tecnologico di Red Hot Cyber sulla Cyber Threat Intelligence

Sfruttamento delle vulnerabilità

Il gruppo sfrutta spesso specifiche vulnerabilità nei dispositivi Cisco. Ad esempio, è noto che sfrutta vulnerabilità come CVE-2018-0171 e CVE-2023-20198. Queste vulnerabilità consentono agli aggressori di ottenere l’accesso non autorizzato ai dispositivi di rete inviando messaggi o comandi artigianali, provocando condizioni di denial-of-service o l’esecuzione di codice arbitrario.

Accesso iniziale e furto di credenziali

Una volta ottenuto l’accesso iniziale attraverso lo sfruttamento delle vulnerabilità, Salt Typhoon utilizza spesso malware come il MASOL RAT (come visto in precedenza) o kit di exploit personalizzati. Questi strumenti consentono agli aggressori di stabilire un punto d’appoggio all’interno della rete, di esfiltrare dati sensibili e di raccogliere credenziali legittime per ulteriori accessi. Il furto di credenziali è cruciale perché consente di aumentare il livello di accesso.

Come difendersi dagli attacchi di Salt Typhoon

Salt Typhoon (RedMike) ha tentato di sfruttare più di 1.000 dispositivi Cisco a livello globale. Il gruppo ha probabilmente compilato un elenco di dispositivi target in base alla loro associazione con le reti dei provider di telecomunicazioni. Insikt Group di Recorded Future ha anche osservato che RedMike stava prendendo di mira dispositivi associati a università in Argentina, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malesia, Messico, Paesi Bassi, Thailandia, Stati Uniti (USA) e Vietnam.

Per proteggersi dagli attacchi di Salt Typhoon (RedMike), le organizzazioni devono implementare una strategia di cybersecurity completa che enfatizzi la gestione delle vulnerabilità, la sicurezza della rete e la formazione dei dipendenti. Ecco alcune misure chiave da considerare:

• Gestione delle patch: Aggiornare e applicare regolarmente le patch a tutto il software, in particolare ai dispositivi di rete come router e switch Cisco. Assicurarsi che le vulnerabilità note, come CVE-2018-0171, CVE-2023-20198 e CVE-2023-20273, vengano affrontate tempestivamente.
• Segmentazione della rete: Implementare la segmentazione della rete per limitare gli spostamenti laterali all’interno della rete. Ciò rende più difficile per gli aggressori accedere ai sistemi critici se riescono a compromettere una parte meno sicura della rete.
• Controlli di accesso: Applicare controlli di accesso rigorosi e il principio del minimo privilegio. Assicurarsi che gli utenti abbiano solo l’accesso necessario per i loro ruoli e rivedere e aggiornare regolarmente queste autorizzazioni.
• Autenticazione a più fattori (MFA): Abilitare l’autenticazione a più fattori per l’accesso a sistemi e applicazioni sensibili per aggiungere un ulteriore livello di sicurezza contro il furto di credenziali.
• Monitoraggio e rilevamento: Implementare solidi sistemi di monitoraggio e di rilevamento delle intrusioni per identificare attività insolite e potenziali violazioni. [Esaminare regolarmente i registri e gli avvisi di sicurezza per individuare eventuali segnali di comportamento sospetto.
• Piano di risposta agli incidenti: Sviluppare e aggiornare regolarmente un piano di risposta agli incidenti che delinei le procedure di risposta agli incidenti di cybersecurity. [6]

Conclusioni

Salt Typhoon è salito alla ribalta a causa della sua recente infiltrazione nell’infrastruttura delle telecomunicazioni commerciali. I senatori statunitensi hanno definito l’attacco “strabiliante”, affermando che dovrebbe fungere da “campanello d’allarme” per le aziende che si ritiene siano state violate, tra cui AT&T, Verizon e Lumen.

RedMike ha probabilmente preso di mira queste università per accedere alla ricerca in aree correlate a telecomunicazioni, ingegneria e tecnologia, in particolare presso istituzioni come UCLA e TU Delft. Oltre a questa attività, a metà dicembre 2024, RedMike ha anche eseguito una ricognizione di più indirizzi IP di proprietà di un provider di telecomunicazioni con sede in Myanmar, Mytel.

La continua esposizione di vulnerabilità nei dispositivi Cisco ha portato a una crescente preoccupazione tra i fornitori di servizi e le istituzioni, costringendoli a rivedere le loro strategie di sicurezza. È diventato evidente che la protezione delle reti e dei dati è di fondamentale importanza per preservare non solo la sicurezza nazionale, ma anche la fiducia del pubblico nei sistemi digitali.

Di fronte a queste minacce in evoluzione, esperti del settore e professionisti della cybersicurezza sottolineano l’importanza di misure di sicurezza robuste e difese proattive. È necessario che le organizzazioni conducano approfondite valutazioni delle loro reti, focalizzandosi in particolare sulle vulnerabilità all’interno dei dispositivi Cisco. La situazione attuale serve da monito sulla necessità di una vigilanza continua contro avversari sofisticati come Salt Typhoon e i suoi affiliati.

Mentre il gruppo continua a lanciare attacchi mirati contro infrastrutture critiche e istituzioni educative, è fondamentale che le organizzazioni di tutto il mondo migliorino le loro posture di sicurezza e collaborino per condividere informazioni, riducendo i rischi posti da tali minacce informatiche. La battaglia contro il cyber spionaggio è tutt’altro che finita, e solo attraverso uno sforzo collettivo la comunità internazionale può sperare di salvaguardare le proprie frontiere digitali.

Questo articolo è stato redatto attraverso l’utilizzo della piattaforma di Recorded Future, partner strategico di Red Hot Cyber e Leader Mondiale nell’intelligence sulle minacce informatiche, che fornisce analisi avanzate per identificare e contrastare le attività malevole nel cyberspazio.

L'articolo Salt Typhoon (RedMike): La Cyber Minaccia Cinese che Sta Scuotendo il Mondo proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

#History #China #PersianEmpire #TurkicEmpire #MongolEmpire #RussianEmpire #SilkRoute #Eurasia #Transoxiana #FerganaValley #Uzbekistan #Tajikistan #Turkmenistan #Kazakhstan #Kyrgyzstan #Islam #MilitantIslamism #Jihad #CentralAsia #URSS #SovietUnion

from: Jihad : the rise of militant Islam in Central Asia
by: Ahmed Rashid

2 Conquerors and Saints: The Past as Present

The ethnic, political, and religious factions now vying for control in Central Asia have a history almost as old as the Central Asian civilizations themselves. Since around 500 B.C., when Darius I added the region known as Transoxiana (present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) to the Persian Empire, to the 1920s, when Stalin forcefully divided the region into the five socialist republics that correspond to the current independent republics, Central Asia has been a center for war and empire, art and culture, religion and commerce.
Much of the reason for Central Asia's rich history is geographical: its huge landmass lies at the heart of the Eurasian continent. In ancient times it was considered the center of the world, linking China with Europe by means of the famous Silk Route. In reality this consisted of several routes, forged to allow merchants to carry goods by camel caravan across the two continents. But the travelers transported more than silk or spices; they also spread new technologies—such as papermaking, gunpowder, and silk weaving— new ideas, and new religions. The religion of the ancient Greeks, Buddhism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity, Hinduism, Manichaeanism, and most of the major ideas of Islam have at one time or another found a home in Central Asia. It is the prevalence of the various ideas on Islam, in particular, and how they have been received by the various rulers of the Central Asian landmass, that are essential to an understanding of the conflicts that threaten the region today.

The Importance of Geography

Central Asia's greatest strength in the past— and its greatest problem today— is that it is landlocked, bordering Iran and Afghanistan to the south, China to the east, and Russia to the north and west. The vast Central Asian steppe is bounded by the Caspian Sea in the west, the Hindu Kush and the Pamir Mountain ranges in the south, and the Tian Shan Mountains in the -est along the border with China. There are no clear geographical boundaries in the. north, where the Kazakh steppe merges into Siberia.
Central Asia was once known as "the land between the two rivers'' for the two major rivers, the Amu Darya (Oxus) and the Syr Darya (Jaxartes), that bounded much of its territory before emptying into the Aral Sea. These two rivers have created formidable geographical, cultural, and political boundaries that separated Central Asia from the rest of the world even as the Silk Route connected it.
The Amu Darya, for example, divided the nomadic Turkic and Mongol empires in Central Asia from the Persian Empire to the south, and helped act as a buffer— along with an independent Afghanistan— between the British Empire in India and tsarist Russia. Recently it has marked the border between Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and Central Asia.
The Syr Darya has protected Central Asian kingdoms from periodic invasions from Mongolia, Siberia, and the Gobi Desert. Rivers are not the only natural boundaries.
Central Asia lies at the crossroads of the world's highest mountain ranges: the Pamir Mountains, which cover 93 percent of today's Tajikistan; the Tian Shan Mountains, stretching to the east and north of the Pamirs; the Himalayas to the southeast; and the Hindu Kush to the south.
The legendary traveler Marco Polo crossed the Pamirs in 1273 on his way to China, dubbing the range the Roof of the World. "Ascending mountain after mountain, you at length arrive at a point, where you might suppose the surrounding summits to be the highest lands in the world. ... So great is the height of the mountains, that no birds are to be seen near their summits. Here there live a tribe of savage, ill disposed and idolatrous people, who subsist upon the animals they can destroy and clothe themselves with the skins," wrote Polo in his memoirs.
In the center of this vast, magnificent landscape of mountains and steppe are two of the largest deserts in the world.
In the south, covering much of Turkmenistan, is the Kara-Kum (black sands) Desert: more than 135,000 square miles where rain falls approximately once a decade.
To the north, in Uzbekistan, lies the Kyzyl Kum (red sands) Desert.
But between these bleak wastes lush, well-irrigated valleys provide oases around which settlements and cities have grown, each oasis a self-contained economic community whose citizens traded with the local nomads and caravans that passed through. The harsh, sparsely populated landscape made Central Asia ripe for conquest but difficult to rule: empires rose and fell periodically throughout its history.
The geographical face of Central Asia remained largely untouched until the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the region became part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. The Russians and later the Soviets changed the landscape, building massive irrigation networks flowing from huge reservoirs to support cotton agriculture between the Amu and Syr Darya rivers. Although in the process they created irretrievable environmental damage and pollution that have eventually resulted in acute water shortages, the drying up of lakes and rivers, and further desertification, the water routes were for many years essential sources of agriculture and food. Today those irrigation networks lie broken, hostage to the political battles that divide the region.
Central Asia currently comprises five independent republics: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, whose fiercely disputed boundaries were drawn by Stalin as part of his divide-and-rule campaign. Its landmass of 1,542,200 square miles hosts a population of just 52 million people, representing more than one hundred ethnic groups, from the predominant Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and Tajiks to Germans, Koreans, and Tibetans. The largest ethnic group is the Uzbeks, who make up 72 percent of Uzbekistan's 22 million people as well as substantial minorities in all the other Central Asian republics. Before the breakup of the Soyiet Union, there were also some 10 million Russians, comprising one-fifth of the population, many the result of forced relocation by Stalin, as another means of weakening the power of the region's ethnic groups. A large number of these Russians have migrated to Russia since 1991.
But the heart of Central Asia has always been the Fergana Valley. Just two hundred miles long and seventy miles across at its widest point, the fertile valley has for centuries been the home for the largest concentration of people. Today it has 10 million inhabitants, 20 percent of the total population of Central Asia.
The emperor Babur, who conquered Afghanistan and founded the Mogul Empire in India in the fifteenth century, was born in the Fergana Valley, describing it in his memoirs as the closest place to Paradise on earth. From his splendid palaces in Delhi, Babur would recall the 140 varieties of grapes and watermelons produced in Fergana. Valley horses were prized as cavalry mounts by nomadic tribes and empire builders as far away as China.
More than crops and livestock flourished in the Fergana Valley. Fergana has also traditionally been the center of Central Asia's political and cultural Islam, producing saints, scholars, mystics, and warriors whose knowledge and learning spread across the Muslim world.
The bordering city of Osh, today the second-largest city in Kyrgyzstan, was a seat of Islamic learning in the tenth century. Legend has it that the large mountain in the center of the town was blessed by King Solomon; it still bears the name Takht-i-Sulaiman (Seat of Solomon) and was long a site of Muslim pilgrimage. To the west lie the ancient Muslim capitals of Bukhara and Samarkand. The 360 mosques and 113 madrassahs (Islamic religious schools) of medieval Bukhara produced scholars who spread their faith throughout Russia, China, South Asia, and the Middle East. In the words of a medieval proverb: "The sun does not shine on Bukhara, it is Bukhara that shines on the sun." Even after Bukhara became a Russian protectorate in 1868 there were still 100 madrassahs in Bukhara, with some 10,000 students.

History of Conquest

The history of Central Asia is a tale of conquest, of Mongol "hordes" and Arab holy warriors who swept across its steppes and crossed its mountains and, for a time, enfolded it within the largest empires in the world. Alexander, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan: at one time each of these conquerors added the territories of Central Asia to his vast empire, founding dynasties that survived for centuries— until the next invader arrived.
Early Central Asian history is dominated by the rivalry between the Persians to the south and the Turkic tribes to the north, who vied for control of the rich oasis cities. The Persian Empire under Darius I added Transoxiana to its territory around 500 B.C. but the Persians were ousted for a time by Turkic nomadic invasions from Siberia and Mongolia. These tribes had originally (beginning in about 1000 B.C.) inhabited the Alatau Mountains in eastern Central Asia. (The Chinese began using the word Tur or Turkic to identify all the nomadic tribes who posed a threat to their empire— the ancient origins of the word Turkistan [home of the Turks], used even today to identify Central Asia.) The resurgent Persians next fell victim to Alexander the Great, who conquered Bactria and Sogdiana (ancient Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan) between 329 and 327 B.C., founding the modern-day city of Khujand. Alexander consolidated his control by urging his men to marry local women; he himself married a Sogdian princess, Roxana. Alexander's Greco-Sogdian heirs created the Bactrian Empire, which governed a large part of Central Asia and Afghanistan between 300 and 140 B.C. The western region of Central Asia (presentday Turkmenistan) was ruled by the Parthians, a tribal dynasty based on the Saka tribes, whose empire lasted until A.D. 226, when they were defeated by the Persian Sassanids. Meanwhile, the north of Central Asia was invaded in the last century B.C. by successive waves of Sakas, who in time were driven out by another tribal group of nomads from the Gobi Desert: the Hsiung-nu, the forefathers of the Mongols. The Hsiung-nu had spread west after defeating the Uighurs, another tribal confederation who at that time ruled present-day Xinjiang Province and western China. Continuing their westward march across Central Asia, the Huns, as they were now called, reached the Volga River by a.d. 400. Their empire— the first nomadic Mongol empire— now stretched from Korea to the Volga.
In the fifth century the Huns invaded Europe under their chief Attila and marched on Rome. As the Huns moved westwards the vacuum in eastern Central Asia was once again filled by invading Turkic tribes, who continued their incursions for several centuries. These nomadic invasions from Mongolia and western China have left behind few traces of their empires or culture, and little is known about the political system they erected to rule their vast landmass. Invariably, they would arrive to conquer and then move on eastwards whilst other tribes arrived to take their place.
One nomadic empire did leave some impressive traces: the Kushan Empire, which dates from the first and second centuries A.D. and also included northern India, Iran, and present-day Xinjiang Province in China. In the second century the great Kushan king Kanishka became a patron of the Mahayana school of Buddhism, which was the first to humanize the figure of Buddha. (Previously Buddha had been depicted only by symbols, such as the prayer wheel.) Massive and beautiful stylized Kushan Buddha statues have been unearthed in archaeological digs in the twentieth century in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. It is also noteworthy that in keeping with the religious tolerance that has always characterized Central Asia, the Kushans allowed Zoroastrianism and Hinduism to flourish alongside Buddhism.
For the first several centuries A.D., then, various groups contended over Central Asia: Huns, Sassanians, Turks, and Chinese, who invaded the Fergana Valley. But the next important series of incursions began around 650, when the Arabs came, bringing with them the new faith of Islam. During the next hundred years they sent invading forces into Transoxiana, capturing Bukhara and Samarkand. In 751 an Arab army defeated a Chinese army at Talas, in present-day Kyrgyzstan, decisively ending Chinese ambitions and establishing Islam in Central Asia, although the Arabs themselves did not remain to found substantial kingdoms in the region.
Independent Muslim kingdoms sprang up in the oasis cities. The most significant of these was the empire of the Persian Samanids (874-999), who made their capital at Bukhara. With a well-organized bureaucracy and army the Samanids regulated and expanded the Silk Route, spreading the Persian language and making Bukhara a trade, transport, and cultural center of the Islamic world. Physicians such as Ibn Sina, mathematicians like Al Biruni, and poets such as Firdausi ensured that the Samanid court would leave an indelible mark on the development of the Persian language and culture, an importance that would not be eroded in Central Asia for centuries.
The Samanid Empire came to an end with the arrival of a new wave of Turkic tribes. The Ghaznavids (based in Ghazni, Afghanistan) took over Khurasand, the Qarakhanids captured Bukhara, and later the Seljuks arrived to defeat them and conquer Central Asia and Turkey.
By 1055 the Seljuk chief Turhril was standing outside the gates of Baghdad. For the next two hundred years the Seljuks ruled the area from the Pamir Mountains and the borders of China to Iraq, uniting Central Asia with the Persian and Arab worlds for the first time under Turkic hegemony.
The Mongol hordes (ordas) were the next to sweep through the region. In 1218 the Seljuks had executed an envoy of the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan and murdered 450 merchants who had been trading with the Mongols. The infuriated Mongols set out to conquer the Seljuks, and historians have subsequently blamed Seljuk high-handedness for the Mongol onslaught that followed. Under Genghis Khan the Mongols captured Bukhara in 1220, killing thirty thousand people. Standing before a pile of heads in Bukhara, Genghis Khan declared, "You ask who I am, who speaks this to you. Know, then, that I am the scourge of God. If you had not sinned God would not have sent me hither to punish you." The Mongols continued eastwards, adding Russia and parts of Eastern Europe to their empire. Then, having conquered this vast area, they settled down to exploit it. They developed the Silk Route, which had broken down during the incessant invasions, building resthouses along the way and instituting a postal service. Under the Mongols it was possible for caravans to travel in safety from Istanbul to present-day Beijing. For the first time since the conquests of Alexander the Great, Europe was linked with Asia. After the death of Genghis Khan, Central Asia was ruled by his son Chagatai, whose descendants divided the region into two khanates: Transoxiana in the west and Turkistan in the east.
The last great explosion out of Central Asia was to leave the most significant cultural influence in the region. Timur (Tamerlane), who did not begin his conquests until he was forty years old, created the first indigenous empire in Central Asia. Timur was a Barlas Turk who had been born near Samarkand, and he made the city his capital in 1369. After he had conquered Central Asia, he added India, Persia, Arabia, and parts of Russia to his empire. Samarkand was already one of the largest cities in the world, with a population of 150,000, and under Timur it became one of the architectural marvels of the world as well, for Timur brought in artisans and architects from all the conquered regions. By now, after almost four hundred years of Turkic rule, the region had become established as the center for Turkic influence in Central Asia and of resistance to Persian cultural and political domination. Timur even replaced Persian with the Jagatai dialect of Turkish as the court language. The Shaybani Uzbeks, who traced their genealogy back to Uzbek Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, created the last of the great nomadic empires in Central Asia. In 1500 they defeated the Timurids (descendants of Timur) and set up their capital in Bukhara. Under Shaybani rule Turkic (Uzbek) language and literature flourished. The great Uzbek poet Mir Alisher Navai (1441-1501) created the first Turkic script, which replaced Persian.
After the sixteenth century, weakened by the decline of the Silk Route as sea routes opened linking Europe to Africa and India, the Shaybani Empire began to erode. Large empires and strong rulers were no longer needed to ensure the safety of the Silk Route, whilst the dramatic loss of income from the traffic in trade meant that rulers were no longer capable of keeping large standing armies and expanding their kingdoms. In addition, the conservative ulema (Islamic scholars, who had enormous influence over daily life) banned innovations in education and science, further marginalizing Central Asia. The Shaybani Empire gradually degenerated into a collection of small, squabbling, city-based fiefdoms. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these emerged as three separate but weak khanates— Khiva, Kokand, and Bukhara — in which the khans (rulers) later established dynasties: the Kungrad in Khiva, the Mangyt in Bukhara, and the Ming in Kokand. The impoverished khans survived by the slave trade and the imposition of exorbitant taxes on the population.
It was inevitable that the tsars, seeking to expand their Russian empire, should eventually look to Central Asia. By 1650 the Russians had annexed Siberia and reached the Pacific Ocean. In the next two centuries Russia moved to conquer the Caucasus and Central Asia. Peter the Great invaded the Kazakh steppe in 1715 and began building Russian forts, the first at Omsk in 1716. By 1750 all the Kazakh khans, who saw the Russians as their best security against the marauding Uzbeks, had signed treaties with Moscow. The Russian expansion was fueled by the empire's vast military bureaucratic apparatus, which had subdued the Caucasus and was now without a role even as the tsars eyed the potential resources of Central Asia: minerals and cotton. When the American Civil War (1861-65) cut off vital cotton supplies to Russian factories, the urge to conquer Central Asia was irresistible. At the same time Russia was watching with apprehension the steady expansion of the British Empire in India from Bengal towards Afghanistan. This was the era of the Great Game —the vast power struggle between Russia and Great Britain for control of Asia that used Central Asia and Afghanistan as pawns in their efforts to outmaneuver each other, building influence. At the end of the nineteenth century, Afghanistan was established as buffer between the two empires of Russia and Britain.
In the brief period between and 1876, Russian armies captured Tashkent and much of modern-day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, although the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan remained open, and tribal leaders and bandits frequently took refuge in one another's territories— a tradition that is being revived today amongst the Islamic extremists of Central Asia and the Taliban. The Russians established the province of Turkestan, whose capital was Tashkent and which was ruled by a governor general appointed by Moscow. They left the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva as autonomous political units, dependent on Russia. Whilst the settled regions were easily conquered, the nomadic tribes continued to resist for several decades, and periodic revolts broke out in the Fergana Valley. In 1885 Russian troops crushed a revolt in the valley towns of Osh, Margilan, and Andijan led by a Sun Dervish, Khan Tura. The most serious threat to Russian rule arose in May 1898, when twenty-two Russian soldiers were killed in Andijan by Islamic rebels. The revolt spread to other towns before Russian troops arrived and brutally quashed the rebellion.
As a way of controlling the region, the Russians began resettling Central Asia with ethnic Russians and Cossacks and turning the rest of the land over to cotton production; in 1891 alone more than a million Russian and Cossack farmers were settled on Kazakh lands adjoining Siberia. The Russians developed large cotton plantations by means of vast irrigation projects. New industries manned by Russian workers were also introduced, and Central Asia was linked with Russia through a railway network that for the first time brought the Russian Empire up to the borders of Afghanistan, Iran, China, and British India. Tsarist rule ended in a holocaust of suffering for the peoples of Central Asia. In 1916, with the region facing a massive famine, a revolt broke out after Moscow tried to draft Central Asians to fight for the tsarist army in World War I. The government also increased taxes and forcefully appropriated wheat from the region. The Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads, who saw no reason why they should fight in Europe for the tsar, were the first to rebel, and the revolt soon spread across Central Asia. But as with previous rebellions, tsarist troops brutally suppressed it, killing tens of thousands of people in the process. In the Tian Shan Mountains a Cossack army carried out reprisals against the Kyrgyz, slaughtering flocks, burning down villages, and forcing huge numbers of Kyrgyz to flee across the border into Chinese Turkestan. Even today the Kyrgyz identify the 1916-17 repression as the worst period in their history, in which as much as a quarter of the Kyrgyz population was slaughtered or forced to flee.
But when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, Central Asia had no desire to become part of the new Soviet Union. Central Asians resisted Sovietization more fiercely than most other regions, with the Muslim Basmachis ("bandits"), as the Bolsheviks termed them, leading the struggle. By 1929, however, when the Basmachis were finally defeated, the map of Central Asia had been forcibly redrawn into five soviet republics, and the centuries of wars for control of the region seemed to have come to an end. That too was to change.

Islam in Central Asia

The people of Central Asia are predominantly Sunni Muslims of the Hannafi sect. Shia Muslims make up a small minority in some of the great trading cities, like Bukhara and Samarkand, as well as in Tajikistan, where the Ismaeli sect, whose spiritual leader is the Aga Khan, can be found in the Gorno-Badakhshan region of the Pamir Mountains. (The Ismaelis also occupy adjacent areas south of the Pamirs in modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan.) Since 1991 Central Asia has also seen a meteoric rise of militant Islamic sects, each with its own brand of orthodoxy and sharia (Islamic law), and this phenomenon has obscured one of the most important aspects of traditional Central Asian Islam— its tolerance. Characterized by major advances in philosophy, ethics, legal codes, and scientific research under largely liberal political rulers, and spread through a vast region by Arabs, Mongols, and Turks, the Islam of Central Asia took many forms. Early Central Asian Muslims coexisted in relative peace not only with one another but also with the Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and Nestorian Christians who had established pockets of civilization in the region.
Perhaps the most important Islamic movement to arise in Central Asia was Sufism: a form of Islamic mysticism that preached direct communion with God and tolerance towards all other forms of worship. Sufism originated in Central Asia and Persia soon after the Arab invasions. The name derives from the rough woolen cloaks worn by the early Sufi brothers (sufi means "wool" in Arabic), who inherited some of the symbols of pre-Islamic nomadic mystics. The Sufis encouraged popular participation in Islam through their opposition to authority, intellectualism, and the mullahs (clergy).
Sufis urged all Muslims to experience God directly, without the intervention of priests or scholars— an important factor in the spread of Islam amongst Central Asia's sparse, nomadic population. The Sufi orders, or tariqas ("the way"), are best defined as "brotherhood[s] of Sufis who have a common pedigree of spiritual masters, ... in which elders initiate disciples and grant them formal permission to continue a common school of thought and practice."
Sufis invoke God through the zikr, vocal (or sometimes silent) prayers, Dervishes—another Sufi sect— perfected into an art form. Many of the tariqas evolved into secret societies with their own codes of behavior and prayer. The tariqas played a major role in reviving Islam in the thirteenth century after the Mongol destruction, and they continued to sustain Islamic faith and practice centuries later in the Soviet era, when Islam was driven underground by the authorities.
The most important tariqas are Naqshbandiyya, Qadiriyya, Yasawiyya, and Kubrawiyya.
The Qadiriyya, probably the oldest extant order, was founded by Abd al-Qadir. A minor tariqa in Baghdad in the twelfth century, the Qadiriyya moved to Central Asia, becoming particularly strong during the thirteenth century, and then spread to Afghanistan and India. Central Asian Qadiris were centered mainly in the cities of Transoxiana.
Kubra, the founder of Kubrawiyya, was martyred in the Mongol massacres in Central Asia in 1221. The Kubrawiyya order took strong hold in Khorezm (present-day Uzbekistan).
The Yasawiyya order was founded by the poet and mystic Ahmed Yasawi, who died in 1166 and is buried in southern Kazakhstan. Their main influence was in the Fergana Valley and amongst the southern Turkic tribes.
Muhammad ibn Baha ad-Din Naqshband (1317-89), the founder of the Naqshbandiyya tariqa, is still the most revered mystic and saint in Central Asia and Afghanistan. Even today his tomb outside Bukhara is the most important place of pilgrimage in Central Asia.
Unlike other Sufi sects the Naqshbandis, though mystics, believe in active missionary work and political activism; many led revolts against the tsar and the Communists. The leader of the 1898 revolt in Andijan was a Naqshbandi.
The Sufi orders spread their message to China via the Fergana Valley and to India and the Arab world through Afghanistan. Sufi spiritual leaders, especially the Naqshbandis, vied with the traditional ulema, who tended to be fiercely opposed to them, for influence amongst local rulers. And influence they had: the rulers of the Turkic dynasties would seek validation for their rule from the leading Sufi saints. The relationship of ruler and mystic, in the words of Islamic scholar Bruce Lawrence, tended to be "fraught with tension," for Sufi mystics saw themselves as eternal rulers, more powerful than the most autocratic temporal ruler.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the leading Naqshbandi families (leadership in the sect was frequently passed down from father to son) served as political advisers and spiritual guides to many of the khans who governed the increasingly fragmented Central Asia. Some of these Sufi families became rulers themselves. Many became rich and corrupt in the process, one of the reasons for the Jadid reforms in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century Naqshbandi political activism played a major role in influencing militant Islamic movements in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and most recently the Fergana Valley.
But beyond the oasis towns and valleys, the spread of Islam on the Central Asian steppe was slow and sporadic. Islam did not come to the Kazakh steppe until the seventeenth century, and even then the predominant Sufism incorporated ancient shamanistic traditions of the nomadic culture, such as the veneration of animals and nature. Although Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Persian kings, was discouraged by the Islamic invaders, elements continued to thrive on the steppe, taking on an Islamic coloring, as well as in Iran and India.
Thus, early on in the history of Islam two branches of the religion emerged in Central Asia: the traditional, conservative, scholarly Islam of the settled areas and the oasis cultures that was dominated by local rulers and the ulema, and the much looser, less restrictive Islam of the nomads that still favored Sufism and pre-Islamic traditions.
As historian Fernand Braudel noted, "Islam is essentially an urban religion. So Islam consists of a few densely populated regions, separated by vast stretches of empty space."
Even today the nomadic Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkmen tribes are far less Islamicized— and much less susceptible to Islamic radicalism— than their ethnic counterparts in the settled oasis areas.
The Arabs who brought Islam Central were soon displaced by Persian and Turkic tribes, each of whom adopted Islam. Of the two, for many centuries Persian was the dominant influence, lasting until the Safavid dynasty came to power in Persia around 1500. The Safavids changed Persia's state religion from Sunni to Shia Islam— step that considerably reduced Persian influence in Central Asia. In addition, Persia became preoccupied with combating the challenge of the Ottoman power in Turkey on its western borders, and Persian leaders therefore paid less attention to Central Asia.
Nevertheless, the earlier Persian empires had left an enormous legacy in Central Asia in the arts, language, poetry, and sciences. Not until the Shaybani Uzbeks, who aggressively made their empire more Turkic, did Persian control and influence in Central Asia wane. The only vestiges of Persian ethnicity remaining in Central Asia today are the Tajiks, who speak Persian and are proud of their Persian culture and heritage. But the tension between Persian and Turkic culture continues, both in the competition for influence in Central Asia between Iran and Turkey and in the ongoing disputes between Tajikistan and Turkic Uzbekistan over Tajiks in Uzbekistan and Uzbeks in Tajikistan, and over borders. Many Tajiks assert that the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, which Stalin handed over to Uzbekistan, should rightfully belong to Tajikistan. For they are Tajik cultural and historical centers.
Central Asian Islam became less dynamic under the tsars, not because Central Asia's new Russian masters tried to interfere with the Islamic clergy, law, or practices but because they wooed them with modern advances: industry, education, technology. The Russians also supported the ultra-conservative ulema, whilst at the same time settling millions of ethnic Russians in the region to try and make good Russians out of Central Asians.
But the new colonial masters were only partly successful. The introduction of Western ideas and sciences paved the way for a modernist reinterpretation of Islam by the Jadids, a reform sect of Tartars whose inspiration was Ismail Bay Gasprinski (1851-1914), founder of the influential Tartar-language newspaper Tercuman in 1883. Based on Usul-i-jadid (new educational principles), Jadidism was one of the many intellectual Islamic reform movements that swept the colonized Muslim world in the late nineteenth century. All sought in varying degrees to reconcile the problems associated with exposure to Western modernism with Muslim religion and culture, particularly for Muslims who lived in colonies ruled by non-Muslims. These movements, in India, Egypt, Turkey, and Afghanistan, were primarily anticolonial and pan-Islamic, but they also advocated religious reform, modern education, and an understanding of the sciences.
Jadid teachers and scholars in Tashkent and the Fergana Valley founded new schools with modern curricula: math, the sciences, theater, poetry, and Russian and Turkic literature, as well as traditional Islamic subjects. They staged plays and operas and published a number of newspapers that helped revive the Turkic languages and develop a modern Turkic culture. The literature they generated analyzed local history, culture, and politics in a modern way for the first time. This embrace of modernism brought the Jadids into conflict not just with the Russians but also with the ulema, whom they considered reactionary and obscurantist. For their part the Russians had encouraged the ulema to continue their practice of a conservative interpretation of the sharia as a way of countering anti-Russian Islamic and nationalist movements.
For all their success the Jadids remained an intellectual rather than a mass movement, divided over ideology and politics. When the 1917 revolution came, some Jadids backed the Bolsheviks because they sought to throw over the tsarist empire and saw in the Communist ideology a chance of greater freedom, the adoption of modern ideas, and education whilst others resisted them because of their lack of respect for Islam. The Jadids who joined the Communist Party after 1917 played a critical role in helping build indigenous Communist parties in Central Asia, but it did them little good. The Soviets termed the Jadids bourgeois reformers and banned their literature. When Stalin came to power he began a steady purge of Jadids; the last Jadids were eliminated in the massacres of 1937. During the brief cultural flowering after independence in 1991, Uzbek intellectuals attempted to republish and popularize Jadid writings, but they were quickly suppressed. Uzbek President Islam Karimov discourages all attempts to renew interest in Jadidism, although the movement has immense relevance in today's discussion of the way Islam, nationalism, and democracy can coexist in Central Asia.

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