Another joint drill for Tajik and Chinese servicemen will be conducted in GBAO in late July

Another joint drill for Tajik and Chinese servicemen will be conducted in the Gorno Badakhshan Autonomous Region (GBAO) in late July this year, according to the Ministry of Defense (MoD).

An official source at a MoD says the joint anti-terror exercise will be conducted in GBAO’s Ishkashim district bordering Afghanistan and Chinese servicemen will arrive in Tajikistan with their own weapons and in their own armored vehicles.    

According to him, 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 (PLA) along with armored carriers, artillery and aircraft.   

The purpose of the exercise is to rehearse coordination and interaction in combating international terrorists, the source added.  The exercise scenario is reportedly based on terrorist groups penetrating into Tajikistan from Afghanistan.   

Recall, a joint four-day anti-terror drill for Tajik and Chinese servicemen took place in GBAO’s Ishkashim district on October 20-23, 2016.  The exercise involved about 10,000 servicemen, including Chinese mobile company, along with armored carriers, artillery and aircraft.

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.

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.”