KHUJAND, August 9, 2016, Asia-Plus — A joint training was conducted for commanders of frontier posts deployed along the Isfara-Batken stretch of Tajikistan’s common border with Kyrgyzstan at the end of the last week.
During a two-day training that took place in Batken and Leilek border units in Kyrgyzstan, the border officers were trained in how to prevent border incidents in case of tensions between border communities and localize conflict situations without use of weapons, according to Kyrgyz border service’s press center.
The Tajik side proposed to conduct similar training courses in the northern Tajik city of Isfara in the near future.
Similar training courses were also conducted last year that allowed reducing the number of incidents along the Tajik-Kyrgyz border and stabilizing the situation in the border areas of the two countries.
Recall that the latest skirmishes sparked by a territorial dispute between residents along the Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border escalated on August 4, 2015, leaving several people injured and damaging multiple homes.
The area at the focus of that and much previous unrest lies on the jagged frontier where the east of Tajikistan’s Sughd province and Kyrgyzstan’s Batken province meet.
The two countries have been unable to agree on the location of the border they inherited when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. As the population in the dense Ferghana Valley grows, it has become increasingly difficult to demarcate the contested sections, where valuable agricultural land often lies.
