Eurasianet reported on April 28 that trouble appears to be brewing on Tajikistan’s common border with in the remote Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, or GBAO, in southeastern Tajikistan.
On April 28, Khovar state-run news agency reported that a high-ranking security services officer was earlier that day killed during an armed clash with an alleged gang of drug smugglers trying to cross into Tajik territory.
The State Committee for National Security, or SCNS, said in a statement that three of the attackers dumped drugs, weapons and ammunition and fled back into Afghanistan, but that another three Tajik accomplices had been detained. The haul of abandoned items is said to have comprised 45 kilograms of heroin, one Kalashnikov assault rifle with four magazines, 74 cartridges, night-vision goggles, and 10,000 US dollars in cash.
RFE/RL’s Tajik Service, known locally as Radio Ozodi, named the killed officer as Komron Rajabzoda, the head of the SCNS’s office GBAO’s capital, Khorog. Rajabzoda is the high-ranking SCNS officer to have been killed in the line of duty in the mountainous Pamirs region since General Abdullo Nazarov, the then-head of the SCNS’s office in GBAO, was stabbed to death in 2012.
Recall, SCNS’s Public Relations Center said on April 26 that Tajik security forces have killed two people who belonged to "an international terrorist organization" near the Afghan border.
The incident occurred near Dashti Yazgulom village in GBAO’s Vanj district, the SCNS said in a statement, without identifying the individuals or the group they allegedly belonged to.
Khovar cited the SCNS Public Relations Center as saying that two alleged terrorists were killed after they illegally crossed the border river and entered the country "with the intention of committing a terrorist act, and were killed by law enforcement agencies during an anti-terrorist operation."
Two Kalashnikov assault rifles, two foreign-made pistols, eight hand grenades, twelve magazine sf bullets, nineteen packages of explosives, two special means of communications and mobile phones were reportedly found at the scene of the incident.
According to Eurasianet, Bomdod, a Prague-based news website focused on Tajik current affairs, cited its own unnamed sources as saying that six people had filtered across the border and that two were known to be Tajik citizens. The outlet cited sources as saying that while two men were killed, another four members of the same group fled the scene and had gone into hiding. The group is suspected to be made up of members of the Jamaat Ansarullah militant group, Bomdod quoted its sources as saying.
None of these details could be independently verified.
In its own statement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Tajikistan implied that the attackers were operating at the behest of an unspecified organization.
Eurasianet says there is yet more backstory, however. On April 20 or thereabouts, the Embassy of Afghanistan in Dushanbe, which is still run by avowed opponents of the regime now in charge of Kabul, reportedly held a ceremony in memory of Afghan fighters and leaders killed by the Taliban.
According to Eurasianet, a flurry of indignant social media activity ensued among sympathizers of the Taliban regime. One Twitter user with almost 35,000 followers wrote in a Pashtun-language post, without providing evidence, that the government of Tajikistan was hatching a plot to mount an attack on Afghanistan.
Another Afghan Twitter user claimed on April 23 to have been informed by unnamed sources that a “group of [four] Tajik terrorists” had entered Tajikistan and that they were being hunted down by the authorities. This tweet was posted three days prior to the date that Tajikistan’s SCNS said the alleged Jamaat Ansarullah cell had made its incursion.
The strange and unexplained aspects of these episodes have reportedly prompted some critics of the government to question the official narrative. Some of them, casting doubt on the accuracy of the SCNS’s statement, suggested, without providing evidence, that claims of a militant attack may have been fabricated.
