Fighting in eastern Ukraine diverts attention from no less disturbing developments in the southern underbelly of the Russian Federation.
The rekindled Tajik-Kyrgyz conflict is not the only hot spot in the south of the CIS. In mid-September, the Taliban, banned in Russia, began moving heavy armored vehicles, tanks and additional units to the Tajik border. Videos have appeared in the media showing the Taliban learning to fly American Black Hawk combat helicopters in Kabul, Stanradar wrote.
The Americans, when they left Afghanistan, left the Taliban and other jihadists entrenched in Afghanistan with more than $85 billion worth of weapons. This is dozens of times more than they delivered to the Kyiv regime, which is currently attracting the main attention of the world media. For 2020, the cost of weapons donated by the Americans to the Islamists in total was 1,000 (a thousand!) Times greater than all of Tajikistan’s annual military spending.
The Pentagon provided the Afghan spooks not only with about 70,000 combat vehicles, but also aviation: more than twenty attack aircraft, transport aircraft, ScanEagle reconnaissance UAVs, more than fifty helicopters…
After the surrender of Afghanistan, the Americans handed over 200 combat helicopters and aircraft to the Taliban. Only the USA, China and Russia have more.
Judging by the news from the Afghan-Tajik border, the only problem today for the Afghan dushmans inspired by American gifts in terms of moving jihad to the north is not the lack of modern military equipment, but of competent pilots and other specialists. Even a few weeks before the start of the Special military operation (SMO), it was noted that the number of terrorist formations on the Tajik-Afghan border had doubled, and drug trafficking had increased sixfold.
In the first decade of February Tajik Deputy Foreign Minister Imomi Sodik Ashurboyzoda said at a conference of the Valdai Club that a large number of militants from the former Soviet republics are concentrated on the Tajik-Afghan border: “Today, terrorist groups that do not hide their selfish goals in relation to the countries of Central Asia are equipped and their combat readiness is very high.”
Already a week after this statement, the Afghan-Tajik and Afghan-Uzbek borders became hot. The Taliban deployed more than 10,000 of their fighters with artillery and armored vehicles to the province of Balkh (bordering Uzbekistan) and the provinces of Kunduz, Takhor and Badakhshan (bordering Tajikistan). On February 14, the Chief of the General Staff of the Taliban Armed Forces, Kari Fasihuddin Fitrat, announced the transfer to the former Soviet border an aviation too.
The entire army of Uzbekistan is about 48,000 people, Tajikistan – about 10,000 people (after the capture of Afghanistan by the Taliban in Dushanbe, an additional 20,000 people were announced to be mobilized). And the Taliban, thanks to the United States and its NATO allies, now have the best weapons in the region. And they know how to fight.
The official reason for the concentration of militants near the borders of the CIS is to counteract hostile actions from the territory of Tajikistan. It’s looks like, Ahmad Shah Massoud Jr. with his National Liberation Front of Afghanistan finds refuge in Tajikistan. Other leaders of the Afghan anti-Taliban resistance have also settled here, including former Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh.
Tajikistan has been a member of the CSTO since 1992. Accordingly, an escalation on the border with Afghanistan could draw Russia into the conflict. The need to “liberate Tajikistan” has long been spoken about not only by extremists allied with the Taliban from the Ansorullah group (Tajik Taliban) and the recently created part of its activists, the organization Tehreek-e Taliban Tajikistan (Taliban Movement of Tajikistan), but also by the militants who are in confrontation with them Wilayat Khorasan (Afghan branch of IS*).
The Tajik Taliban from Ansorullah have also significantly upgraded their weapons since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, which stimulates their advance to the north. Today it is already difficult to call Ansorullah a grouping: the Taliban have given them control over several counties bordering Tajikistan, this is the official part of the Taliban, which Kabul is literally pushing towards the borders of the Russian Federation.
It is active in northern Afghanistan the military wing of Vilayat Khorasan too, spreading the influence of the “Islamic State”* banned in Russia. And the geographical position of Afghanistan allows IS fighters to operate not only in Iran, Pakistan or India, but also in post-Soviet countries with an eye on destabilizing the situation in Russia and the CIS.
Since the spring, while the SMO was developing, IS militants fired at least three times at the Uzbek Termez from the Multiple rocket launchers (MRL), and in May dealt the same blow to Tajikistan. The Taliban themselves have been demonstrating the desire to spread the fighting beyond the borders of Afghanistan towards the borders of Russia, since the end of May they have been spreading statements by the terrorist group “Caucasus Emirate” calling for a “holy war” in the Caucasus. At the same time, the Taliban are calling on Russian Muslim pilots in the Russian Aerospace Forces not to fight against “Ukrainian brothers”, to desert from military service, fly to Afghanistan and go “under the green banner of jihad.” For those wishing to go over to the side of the Taliban, special Internet tools have been set up (this happened almost immediately after the opening of the Taliban embassy in Moscow).
The vector of geopolitical aspirations of the bearers of the Islamist project coincides with the aspirations of the Ukrainian Nazis. We are talking about a significant part of the Russian south, including the Stavropol Territory and the Krasnodar Territory, as well as the Belgorod and Bryansk Regions. The presence of a common enemy – Russia, the mistress of these lands, makes the Islamists and Ukrainian Nazis tactical allies, concluded Stanradar.
inozPRESS.kg,
Sept. 27, 2022