The Uzbeks consider the mausoleum a holy place and pray here before heading off on Hadj.
The Vegetable Lamb is a thirsty beast, and much of the Uzbeks' land is desert.
Even here where restoration is futile, Uzbeks are busy righting minarets and retouching Koranic script.
It is an ethnic hodge-podge of Uzbeks and Tajiks, Aimaq and Hazaras, Turkmen, Mongols and Baluch.
By contrast, the splendid cities of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva are monuments to the Uzbeks' Islamic civilisation.
They came from all over the world, they were Uzbeks and Yemenis and Egyptian and Libyans and foreigners.
Swiss prosecutors office told the BBC that they are investigating two other Uzbeks in relation to the case.
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Both these measures will, by the same token, damage Mr Karzai's relations with the Northern Alliance's warlords, who are mainly Tajiks and Uzbeks.
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Since then, there have been several brushes between Uzbeks and Kazakhs, mostly villagers unclear about which country they are living in.
Tajiks speak Persian, whereas Azeris, Turkmen, Uzbeks and Kazakhs speak Turkic languages.
They argue that America should back and harness the Uzbeks' regional ambitions.
Tajiks form the second largest group, followed by Uzbeks and Hazaras.
Karzai, in his efforts to mollify his restive fellow-Pashtuns, has made conciliatory gestures to the Taliban which have alienated Tajiks and Uzbeks who helped him come to power.
Indeed, rather than fix the track, the Uzbeks dismantled it.
ECONOMIST: Spats over control of water roil an already unstable region
In Afghanistan, what we called the Northern Alliance was an alliance of Sunni Tajiks, Sunni Uzbeks and Shiite Hazaras, and so they jointly took over Kabul together in 2001.
The Uzbeks seek security, an even more compelling incentive.
In private, some Kazakhstan officials say that, although much could be done to save the southern section, the Uzbeks seem determined to continue diverting vast quantities of water to their cotton fields.
However, the Kirgiz, and their neighbours in Kazakhstan, both formerly nomadic people, have always been less religious than the Uzbeks, who were more settled and practised a more conservative form of Islam.
It is a compromise between the claims of the Pushtuns (the country's largest ethnic group, to which both Mr Karzai and most of the Taliban belong) and the Northern Alliance of minority Tajiks and Uzbeks.
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Another reason for American caution is that the usefulness as a fighting force of the Northern Alliance's mixture of Tajiks, Uzbeks and others, though greater than many sceptics had believed two months ago, may now be drawing to an end.
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Olivier Roy, a Paris-based specialist on Central Asia, points to the cultural split in the region between the nomads from the steppes and mountains, mainly Kirgizs, Kazakhs and Turkmens, and the sedentary, mainly urban Uzbeks and Tajiks who settled in the river basins of Transoxania.
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