Tajikistan’s president is visiting a mountainous region on the Central Asian nation’s border with Afghanistan for the first time since dozens were killed there in battles between armed gangs and government troops.
Emomali Rakhmon today said in the eastern town of Khorog that the unrest had been provoked by the impunity of criminal organisations in the area.
Government forces unleashed a massive operation in July in the Gorno-Badakhshan province in what they said was an
effort to capture the killers of a top security official.
Analysts have suggested the campaign was actually a bid by the central government to bolster its authority in an area
it has only loosely controlled since the civil war of the 1990s.
Security has been tightened in locations visited by Rakhmon.
——————(AP)