Path to Tajikistan: ISIS continues to terrorize the border

Ayat Ezz

At the moment, elements of the ISIS organization are deployed in the border areas between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, having carried out intensive terrorist operations in that area. In the most recent of these operations two days ago, a bomb exploded near an Afghan military base located on the border between the two countries, which resulted in three soldiers being killed and five others wounded, according to a statement issued by the Afghan army.

Among the operations for which ISIS claimed responsibility was the bloody event that killed more than 30 people at a prison riot in Tajikistan last month. The organization, through one of its media outlets, said the perpetrators of the prison incident were “soldiers of the caliphate.”

Alexander Bortnikov, director of the Russian intelligence Federal Security Service (FSB), warned of the danger of ISIS members concentrated in the border areas between Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

“The presence of thousands of ISIS members in northern Afghanistan bordering the Tajik territory is only an introduction to the organization’s infiltration into Tajikistan and the country’s destabilization,” Bortnikov said at a conference of security leaders from former Soviet republics hosted in Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe.

One of the most striking things about the prison incident in May was Bekhruz Gulmurod, the son of a former Tajik special forces commander who joined ISIS, was one of the organizers of the riot. This reveals the level of influence that the organization has been able to devote to Tajikistan during the past period.

This prompted some Western powers, including Russia, to pay attention and raise the level of security in Tajikistan in order to prevent any attacks and infiltration of ISIS elements, because a terrorist intrusion into Tajikistan threatens the security and interests of Russia on its border.

Importance and impact

Tajikistan is among the countries that many terrorist movements desire because of its geographical location and its Islamist movements such as the Brotherhood-affiliated Islamic Renaissance Party, in addition to other extremist groups influenced particularly by the ideology of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. These groups were active in the country in the early 1990s, especially in the region of the Fergana Valley between Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Tajikistan was one of the countries in Central Asia in which ISIS sought to strengthen his influence and attract a number of its citizens to join it. Several foreign estimates have indicated that the organization has managed to recruit 1,000-1,400 Tajiks during the last phase and that the number of Tajik terrorists who carried out terrorist operations was large compared to other elements of different nationalities.

It is also considered one of the most important and largest countries close to Afghanistan, as the organization was able to establish several cells in Afghanistan near the border with Tajikistan. The most striking evidence is that the number of Tajiks within the so-called Khorasan area has significantly increased.

In light of the crisis, the political analyst and vice president of the Arab Center for Political and Strategic Studies, Mukhtar al-Ghobashi said that ISIS is currently crying like someone drowning and holding onto anything to survive, adding that the terrorist organization knows the region has fragile security and is far from eyes.

Ghobashi stressed that Tajikistan is considered to be one of the countries closest to Afghanistan where ISIS is currently seeking to enlarge its Khorasan state so that it can penetrate the Asian continent.