Uzbekistan's government casts itself as a frontline ally in the War on Terror, blaming a wave of bombings on the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group it links to al-Qaeda. Journalist Marcel Theroux travels through the country to test that story, asking why young Uzbeks are drawn to the movement in the first place. He finds a state that jails and tortures suspected Islamists on a mass scale, sweeping up not just militants but ordinary believers, students, and critics of President Islam Karimov's government. Interviews and reporting from inside Uzbekistan trace how that repression feeds the very radicalization it claims to be fighting, pushing some young people toward the underground movement rather than away from it. Theroux weighs the government's terrorism narrative against accounts of arbitrary detention and abuse, filed as Washington was courting Karimov as a strategic partner after September 11. The film's argument is blunt: counter-terrorism cooperation with an authoritarian ally can end up manufacturing more of the threat it is meant to contain.