DUSHANBE, February 28, Asia-Plus – Anzob tunnel linking the Tajik capital with roads leading to northern Tajikistan will scarcely be put into operation by the date fixed, April 30, Habib Davlatov, engineer-in-chief with the directorate for being-built enterprises of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MoTC), said.
According to him, concreting work at the tunnel has not yet been finished. “ Because of bad weather conditions we are running late with completing the concreting work,“ Davlatov said, adding that avalanche that hit the area on February 26 did not damage the tunnel but made the concreting work difficult. “It remains to concrete more than 2,000 meters,” the MoTC official said.
Sobir International, an Iranian construction company, began work on a 5-kilometer Anzob tunnel to link northern and southern Tajikistan on December 25, 2004. The project was scheduled to take 20 months.
The tunnel is located some 80 kilometers outside Dushanbe. Iran has provided $21,500 in long-term loan and a $10 million grant in financing for the $40 million project to complete the tunnel, which is considered to be a turning point in Tajik-Iranian relations. The share of Tajikistan in the project is $7.6 million.
Excavation works on the Anzob tunnel were completed in March 2006; the presidents of Tajikistan and Iran, Emomali Rahmonov and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, inaugurated the tunnel on July 26, 2006.
We will recall that the construction of the Anzob tunnel began in 1989 but because of destabilization of the situation in the republic the construction was suspended and resumed only in 2003. In May 2003, Tajikistan and Iran signed in Tehran a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on joint construction of the Anzob tunnel in Tajikistan. Iran’s Sobir International won a tender for the construction of the tunnel.
Once the Anzob tunnel becomes operational, it will not only facilitate transportation and direct north-south transit within Tajikistan in the winter season but also drop the transit time by four to five hours. A regular traffic via the Anzob tunnel was expected to open in April this year.
