Tajikistan

[Jedburgh]

ICG, 12 Feb 09: Tajikistan: On the Road to Failure

Far from being a bulwark against the spread of extremism and violence from Afghanistan, Tajikistan is looking increasingly like its southern neighbour – a weak state that is suffering from a failure of leadership. Energy infrastructure is near total breakdown for the second winter running, and it is likely migrant labourer remittances, the driver of the country’s economy in recent years, will fall dramatically as a result of the world economic crisis. President Emomali Rakhmon may be facing his greatest challenge since the civil war of 1992-97. At the very least the government will be confronted with serious economic problems, and the desperately poor population will be condemned to yet more deprivation. At worst the government runs the risk of social unrest. There are few indications that the Rakhmon administration is up to this challenge....

[kaur]

Jedburgh's link talks already about remittances. This variable influences also other CA states (except Turkmenistan). US is renting Manas ...

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/I...n_Chapter2.pdf

http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/0...ppy-cheat-us-0

[Jedburgh]

HiCN, Oct 09: The Marriage Market and Tajik Armed Conflict

This paper explores the relationship between the 1992-1998 armed conflict in Tajikistan, sex ratios and the age at first marriage for women. The findings suggest that there is substantial and robust negative effect of temporal and regional exposure to armed conflict on entry into their first marriages by females in Tajikistan. Women born in 1975-1983, who lived in the conflict affected areas were about 30 percent less likely to enter marriage than women of the same age from the lesser affected regions. The period and region specific sex ratio has little effect on the age when women first marry. This limited effect of sex ratios in Tajikistan could be explained by the adherence to traditional marriage practices when grooms and brides are often related by a common ancestor and arranged marriage is a norm.

[bourbon]

Militants ambushed a Tajik military convoy of 80 in the Rasht Valley on September 19. Press reports have 25 soldiers KIA.


Tajikistan Blames Islamist Militants For Attack That Killed 25 Soldiers. RFE/RL, September 21, 2010.

Tajikistan: Militant Ambush Puts Spotlight on Security Situation. EurasiaNet, September 20, 2010.

Borderline Extremism: A Massacre of Government Troops Challenged President Emomali Rahmon’s Long Established Grip on His Country, by Roland Oliphant. Russia Profile, September 20, 2010.

The attack is the most serious attack on Tajik government troops in years. And it is the latest in a series of violent incidents that have shaken the mountainous Central Asian country in the past month. On September 3 a suicide bomber exploded a car bomb outside a police station in the town of Khujand, killing two police officers and injuring 25 others. And on September 5 an explosion in a Dushanbe nightclub injured seven. The preponderance of the violence has led some to speculate that Tajikistan could once again be verging on civil war.

Jail break

The recent spate of violence came after a mass jail break on August 23, when some 25 alleged militants escaped from a high security prison in the center of Dushanbe. In keeping with the foreign connection, Reuters cited government sources who told the news agency that the escapees included citizens of Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Russia. It was these fugitives the soldiers attacked on Sunday had been sent to hunt down.

[bourbon]

Al Qaeda-linked IMU claims deadly ambush on Tajik troops, by Bill Roggio. The Long War Journal, September 23, 2010.

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan today took credit for the Sept. 19 ambush that killed 25 Tajik troops, and also threatened to carry out further attacks in the Central Asian country. An IMU spokesman named Abdufattoh Ahmadi claimed the attack during an interview with Radio Liberty's Tajik Service, according to a report at Reuters.

Ahmadi said the attacks are in response to the government's closing of mosques and arresting "Muslims."

"This is our response to Tajikistan's government, which has lately shut down a thousand mosques, which arrests Muslims without any reason and prohibits women from wearing Muslim clothes," Ahmadi said. "We demand a stop to this policy. Otherwise, terrorist attacks will continue."

[ganulv]

An old classmate who I am in touch with online has been passing along links regarding some goings-on on the Tajikistan/Afghanistan border. If I have the chronology correct:

• 21 July 2012 – a general affiliated with the successor to the KGB was stabbed to death
• 24 July 2012 – a military response was initiated [LINK]
• 25 July 2012 – a ceasefire was announced [LINK]
• 27 July 2012 – things as they appear to stand at the moment

I don’t know anything much about either the events of the past week nor about Tajikistan in general, I just wanted to pass along some of the links distributed by my friend as I had yet to see anything about it on the forum up to this point.

[davidbfpo]

Khorog is the provincial capital of Gorno-Badakhshan province, in Tajikistan.

The operation is yet another attempt by the Tajik government, which has little influence in the area, to bring Gorno-Badakhshan under its full control....The pre-dawn attack on fighters loyal to Mr Ayombekov deep in the Pamir mountains underlines the continuing instability of the impoverished former Soviet republic 15 years after the end of a civil war....It took place three days after State Committee on National Security (GKNB) regional head Abdullo Nazarov was found dead.

Link to news report:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18965366

Link to BBC's Country Profile:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16201032

The map on the news report at least shows where this happened.

[ganulv]

The map on the news report at least shows where this happened.

My classmate has one embedded at her personal website, as well.

[davidbfpo]

A round-up opinion piece:http://www.rferl.org/content/explain.../24657769.html

[ganulv]

and got it online today, as well. [LINK]

[davidbfpo]

Not exactly a great shock given shared interests:

Radio Liberty reports officers from the Afghan National Security Agency arrested and took to Kabul Qari Wadud, commander of the security forces in the Shuhada district in Afghan Badakhshan Province. Qari Wadud is reportedly suspected of being involved in the events that took place in Khorog, the capital of Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region (GBAO) last week.

Link:http://news.tj/en/news/afghan-region...-khorog-events

[davidbfpo]

A review of this "Stan", five years since the last post, after twenty years since a short civil war and a peace settlement. Must have been bad if so many fled to Afghanistan:

Tajikistan’s civil war dragged on for over five years, leading to huge casualties. Over its course, between 35,000 and 157,000 people were killed, 37,500 households were destroyed. Some 600,000 people fled to neighbouring Afghanistan, and 195,000 were dispersed across other post-Soviet states. More than 1.5m people became refugees within their own country, in this mountainous corner of the former Soviet empire.

Link:https://www.opendemocracy.net/od-rus...n-s-civil-war?

[davidbfpo]

Part Two by the same author as before, from Open Democracy; which examines the role of external actors (not Russia) who were once useful to the regime, but not now.
Link:https://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/bakhtiyor-sobiri/tajikistan-so-close-no-matter-how-far?

[davidbfpo]

An article via Open Democracy and subtitled:

Tajikistan is trying to persecute what was once Central Asia’s only legal Islamist party out of existence. But is this really about countering terrorism, or just cracking down on dissent in any form?

Link:https://www.opendemocracy.net/od-rus...led-islamists?

[AdamG]

File under 'poorly planned vacations'

Four cycling tourists, including two Americans, were killed in an attack in Tajikistan, authorities told ABC News. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack in a Twitter post Monday. A group of seven cyclists was heading north in Danghara district, about 55 miles southeast of the capital Dushanbe, when they were struck by a car with five armed people onboard on Sunday. Tajikistan’s interior minister said that, after striking the cyclists, the people in the car got out and attacked them with a firearm and a knife.

The two Americans, a woman and a man, were killed along with a Swiss man and a Dutch national. Authorities said at the time they believed it may have been a deliberate terrorist attack, although they had not ruled out armed robbery. On Monday afternoon, an IS terror group issued a statement on Twitter in Arabic claiming the attack.

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/2-american...opstories.html

[AdamG]

Typical NYT piece -
A Dream Ended on a Mountain Road: The Cyclists and the ISIS Militants
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/07/w...ke-attack.html

[davidbfpo]

Articles on this country are arely spotted, so thanks to a "lurker" for the pointer to this article in CTC's 'The Sentinel'. The author is a DoD analyst and ex-US Army veteran.

Abstract:

A confluence of factors signals an increasing terrorism threat to Tajikistan from the Islamic State in the near future. In late July 2018, Islamic State attackers conducted the group’s first attack in Tajikistan. An Islamic State Tajik spokesman threatened to increase attacks in Tajikistan the following week. Loss of Islamic State territory in Iraq and Syria may force the movement of the significant numbers of Tajik citizens fighting there. Separately, the Tajik group Jamaat Ansarullah reportedly pledged allegiance to Islamic State Khorasan, providing Islamic State Tajiks fleeing Syria a base in Afghanistan to join.

Link:https://ctc.usma.edu/converging-fact...at-tajikistan/

I note the defector from Tajikstan's OMON, Gulmurod Khalimov has a section about him and it appears he is alive, possibly now in Afghanistan. For a resume see:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulmurod_Khalimov

[davidbfpo]

A briefing via The Soufan Group:

Bottom Line Up Front:

• On May 19, 2019, a prison riot in Vakhdat, Tajikistan, left 29 people dead, including supporters of the so-called Islamic State.
• Allegedly orchestrated by militants, government information about the riot is limited and leaves many questions unanswered.
• Tajikistan has seen an uptick in jihadist-inspired violence over the last few years, signaling a worrisome trend for future instability in the country.
• In Tajikistan, counterterrorism is used as a means of suppressing political opposition and as a tool by external powers seeking to solidify a more robust presence in the country.

Link:https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbri...in-tajikistan/