DUSHANBE, MAY 10 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Tajikistan started reinforcing its army along the border with Afghanistan against a potential surge north by the Taliban, official sources told The Conway Bulletin.

At the end of last month, the Taliban captured the town of Zebak, 35km from the border with Tajikistan, its furthest advance north in years of fighting.

“Although the Talibs always claim not to cross the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, we have still decided to announce an intensified military situation in Tajikistan’s Ishkashim region,” a senior official in one of the regional emergencies ministries told a Bulletin correspondent.

Ishkashim region is part of Tajikistan’s Badakhshan province, which borders Afghanistan.

In Dushanbe, witnesses saw military transport planes take off from the airport and head in the direction of Badakhshan and, for the first time under a military pact agreed in 2012 between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, media reported that Tajik hospitals have been caring for injured Afghan government soldiers.

Analysts and some government officials have been warning for years that any Taliban move north towards Tajikistan threatens stability in Central Asia.

The risk is that a destabilised southern Tajikistan would drag the government into the fight against the Taliban. Russia, too, has a base in Tajikistan and could get pulled into the conflict.

People living in Ishkashim near the border with Afghanistan have started to flee their homes, witnesses said.

Parvina, a 47-year-old, teacher at the university in Khorog, the nearest Tajik town, said that although people in the region had lived with the threat of fighting in Afghanistan spilling over into Tajikistan, the situation was currently more serious than usual.

“Afghanistan has had this war for decades and of course I am afraid of it,” she told a Bulletin correspondent by telephone. “The only thing that is separating us from Afghanistan is the Amu Darya River and I do not think that it will be hard for the Talibs simply to cross it whenever they decide to.”

Over the past few years, Central Asian states have boosted trade and diplomatic ties with Afghanistan, making plans to build pipelines and electricity routes across the country, as well as trading gas and establishing air links.

But the threat from the Taliban has never been far away. In 2015, the Taliban briefly captured the city of Kundiz near the Tajik border. Turkmenistan has also been bolstering its border forces over the past few years after it said that Taliban forces attacked its border posts.

ENDS

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(News report from Issue No. 328, published on May 12 2017)