Taliban advance in Afghanistan: Tajikistan on alert

Tajikistan is concerned about the advance of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of reservists are now supposed to protect their own border. More than 1,000 Afghan soldiers have already fled to the neighboring country.

Tents are lined up on a barren, stony field in Badachshan Mountain. Men of all ages squat on mats and blankets. Obviously they didn’t get much with them when they fled Afghanistan. The Taliban are on the rise there.

Where exactly the pictures of the Afghan ambassador to Tajikistan, which the news agency Asia Plus has now published, were taken is left open – for security reasons.

More than 1000 refugees are now believed to be living in the camp. Among them are many Afghan soldiers who have sheltered from the radical Islamic Taliban.

“We had no other choice”

It was for her life, says a young man in a video published by the Berg Badachschans regional administration:

We had no choice but to withdraw to neighboring Tajikistan as the Taliban continued to advance towards the border. We were saved because Tajikistan opened the border. We are now being taken to a safe place. The enemy is on the other side – in Afghanistan. But he’s very, very close.

Residents of the Tajik border town of Chorug filmed how the radical Islamic Taliban threw away the Afghan flag and hoisted their own at the border post.

Mobilize 20,000 reservists

The head of the United Staff of the CSTO, the Eastern Defense Alliance, Anatoly Sidorov, assumes that the Taliban have now brought large parts of the Afghan-Tajik border under their control. “Tajikistan has announced that it intends to mobilize up to 20,000 reservists in order to be able to defend the border in an emergency,” said Sidorow. Appropriate preparations have already been made. A Russian military base in Tajikistan has also been rehearsing combat readiness.

“If necessary, additional measures in the interests of the Russian-Tajik alliance will be taken with great determination to avoid any aggression or territorial provocations,” said Russia’s Foreign Office spokeswoman Maria Sakharova.

Taliban representatives see concerns as unfounded

Taliban officials who met with the Russian President’s Afghanistan envoy in Moscow assured that such concerns are unfounded. “Our territory will never be used against our neighbors and friendly countries,” said the head of the delegation, Shahabuddin Delawar, at a press conference in Moscow.

The Kremlin takes the situation seriously

The fact that the Taliban representatives were received here at all shows how seriously the Kremlin takes the situation. Because the Taliban are classified as an extremist organization in Russia and are therefore prohibited. The contacts are important, said Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov. These negotiations are necessary against the background of the tense situation in Afghanistan and with a view to developments on the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

An attitude shared by the Afghanistan expert Wassilij Krawzow, who heads an organization of KGB veterans. “However, the military-political situation on site is developing so quickly that there is little hope that such efforts will be successful.” If Afghanistan’s statehood is lost, however, there is a great danger that the country will again turn into a reservoir for international terrorism.