Tajikistan will later this month conduct another round of joint military exercises with Chinese military personnel in the Gorno Badakhshan Autonomous Region (GBAO).
Another joint drill for Tajik and Chinese servicemen will be conducted in the Gorno Badakhshan Autonomous Region (GBAO) from August 8 to August 11, Orif Nizomiyon, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense of Tajikistan, told Asia-Plus in an interview. .
The exercises will take place along the Afghan border, in GBAO’s Ishkashim district.
“The exercise will involve a battalion of the Mobile Forces of Tajikistan’s Armed Forces and a company of the Chinese People's Liberation Army along with armored carriers, artillery and aircraft,” Nizomiyon said.
The exercise will reportedly simulate a coordinated response to an incursion of militants from Afghanistan through Tajikistan and into China.
The Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region sits at the nexus of security problems including Uighur unrest in China’s Xinjiang region; Afghanistan’s war and opium trafficking; and jihadists’ potential return from Iraq and Syria to China, Central Asia or Russia.
Recall, a similar drill for Tajik and Chinese servicemen took place in GBAO’s Ishkashim district from October 20 to October 23, 2016. The exercise reportedly involved about 10,000 servicemen, including Chinese mobile company, along with armored carriers, artillery and aircraft.
China has conducted its first-ever joint bilateral military exercises in Tajikistan, a sign of Beijing's increasing concern about instability in Afghanistan and the capacity of other regional countries to contain it. Chinese troops did conduct exercises in Tajikistan in 2012, but those were under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and also included other troops from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia.
Earlier in 2016, China and Tajikistan, along with Afghanistan and Pakistan, created a "Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism" to jointly combat terrorism. Some sources say that according to a joint statement by the four sides, the chiefs of general staffs of the four armed forces met in Urumqi, China, in early August 2016 and announced the formation of the mechanism, which will coordinate efforts on “study and judgment of counter terrorism situation, confirmation of clues, intelligence sharing, anti-terrorist capability building, joint anti-terrorist training and personnel training.”
