When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, interest among the population in knowing more about Islam was great and religious institutions were freed to expand, but the interpretation of Islam that filled the religious vacuum was not the native Sufism but Islamist interpretations funded by outside petrodollars [REF].
The party was established in the region in the early 1990, but its expansion "took off in earnest" in 1995, when a Jordanian named Salahuddin began disseminating HT literature among the ethnic Uzbek population of the Ferghana Valley, from where it spread [REF].