DUSHANBE, April 10, 2015, Asia-Plus – Helping Tajikistan, Russia defends itself and other member nations of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) against terrorist threats, Russian Deputy Defense Minister, Anatoly Antonov, noted.
Antonov on April 9 wrote in the Russian Defense Ministry Twitter microblog, “IS (Islamic State) militants have already appeared near Tajikistan’s border. Providing assistance to Tajikistan, we defend Russia, the CSTO member nations, our allies.”
He considers that Russian military base deployed in Tajikistan is able to protect Tajikistan and the CSTO member nations against the terrorist threat.
“The Russian military base in Tajikistan is our outpost in the region that is ready to protect Tajikistan and the CSTO member nations against the possible terrorist threat” Antonov writes.
We will recall that Antonov told reporters in Moscow on March 5 that the IS group already had a presence in Afghanistan. He said that the IS militant group posed a threat to Russia”s partners in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). “We have noticed that in this region the first factions of the Islamic State group have emerged. We see how they are starting to push toward the southern borders of our allies, first of all those in the CSTO,” Antonov said. The main threat posed by the militants is to Tajikistan, Antonov explained.
Previously, in January, Antonov said that Moscow wanted to boost the Tajik national army as a CSTO outpost in Central Asia.
On March 14, CSTO head Nikolai Bordyuzha told reporters in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, that CSTO forces could be at the Tajik border within three days if a conflict broke out there.
Russian business daily
Kommersant
reports that in response to the “IS threat,” Russia this month reportedly pledged to supply 70 billion rubles of weapons and military equipment to Tajikistan.
Kommersant
quoted anonymous officials on the Russian General Staff as saying that military aid to Tajikistan to counter IS could reach up to 70 billion rubles and could include weapons, ammunition, aircraft, artillery systems and weapons — much of it secondhand hardware from the Russian army.
Meanwhile, Major-General Yevgeniy Tubol, the commander of the Russian military base in Tajikistan, told representatives of the Working Group on Afghanistan under the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) Foreign Ministers’ Council on April 2 that within the framework of modernization and technical re-equipment, the base will receive new modern military hardware and its overall strength will reach 9,000 servicemen by 2020.
Tubol said that the base’s forces could be at the Tajik-Afghan border within a day if a conflict broke there.
The Russian military base deployed in Tajikistan is Russia”s largest non-naval military facility outside the country. It was officially opened in Tajikistan in 2004 under a previous agreement, which was signed in 1993, and hosts Russia’s largest military contingent deployed abroad.
A total of some 6,000 Russian troops are stationed at three military facilities collectively known as the 201st military base – in Dushanbe, Qurghon Teppa, some 100 kilometers from Dushanbe, and Kulob, about 200 kilometers southwest of Dushanbe.
