JUNE 18 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Russia’s military has been testing using drones at night in Tajikistan’s Pamir mountains, Russian media reported quoting a military press release. Russia is worried about the threat from the Taliban to Central Asia.
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(News report from Issue No. 236, published on June 18 2015)
JUNE 12 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmenistan has extended its military draft, websites reported, perhaps to bolster units along the increasingly tense border with Afghanistan.
“According to incoming reports, the majority of young men, who have been recently drafted in Lebap and Balkan velayats, will be sent to the military units based in Kushka, i.e. near the Turkmen-Afghan border,” the website reported.
Senior military officials have previously said that they need to boost the number of soldiers in the army to counter perceived threat from the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Last year reports from the border said that Turkmen army units clashed with Taliban units in a number of skirmishes. This year, though, reports from the border of military activity have been much reduced.
Even so, the Chronicles of Turkmenistan website reported that the Turkmen military has extended the draft for con- scripts to July 25 from the end of June.
“According to incoming reports, the majority of young men, who have been recently drafted in Lebap and Balkan velayats, will be sent to the military units based in Kushka, i.e. near the Turkmen-Afghan border,” the website reported.
The countries that border Afghanistan — Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan — have been warning that the Taliban is preparing to move to Central Asia.
Russia has supported this assessment and sent various military advisers to the region as well as offering to boost its military presence along the border.
But many Western analysts have scorned this viewpoint and said instead that the narrative has been designed to bolster strict military and authoritarian rule in the region.
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(News report from Issue No. 236, published on June 18 2015)
JUNE 8 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Ramaz Davitaia, a corporal in the Georgian army, died at a military hospital in Georgia three years after being badly injured in Afghanistan. Davitaia is the 30th Georgian solider to die supporting the NATO operation in Afghanistan. Georgia wants to join NATO and has been an enthusiastic supporter of US- led operations.
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(News report from Issue No. 235, published on June 11 2015)
JUNE 11 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – On a stopover in Bishkek as part of a wider tour of Central Asia and its capitals, UN Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon said Kyrgyzstan should hold an impartial investigation into the death of 400 people during fighting in the south of the country in 2010.
Most of the people killed during fighting around the city of Osh in south Kyrgyzstan in 2010 were Uzbek.
“Kyrgyzstan has ambitious plans to promote interethnic harmony and to protect the rights of all, including minorities,” Reuters quoted Mr Ban as saying at a press conference in the city.
“But it’s important for these policies to be put into practice. Root causes must be addressed fully and impartially investigated and prosecuted.”
The inference is clear. Any Kyrgyz investigations since 2010 have been skewed to clear ethnic Kyrgyz of blame for the fighting which drove thousands of ethnic Uzbeks over the border into Uzbekistan.
Although lying inside Kyrgyzstan’s borders, Osh and the surrounding towns and cities have always been heavily populated by ethnic Uzbeks.
Human rights groups have accused Kyrgyzstan of a cover up over how the fighting in 2010 started by convicting local Uzbek leaders for starting the fighting.
Relations between the two communities living around Osh continued to be strained and the peace fragile.
Mr Ban was visiting Bishkek as part of a Central Asia tour, his second since 2010.
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(News report from Issue No. 235, published on June 11 2015)
JUNE 10 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Russia would be prepared to send a rapid reaction force to defend Tajikistan’s southern border from Taliban incursions, Russian media quoted General Nikolai Bordyuzha as saying. General Bordyuzha is head of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), an FSU intergovernmental military group.
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(News report from Issue No. 235, published on June 11 2015)
JUNE 8 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The authorities in Tajikistan lifted a ban on Facebook and YouTube imposed after a police chief defected to the radical group IS in Syria last month, the AFP news agency reported.
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(News report from Issue No. 235, published on June 11 2015)
JUNE 9 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A Kazakh agricultural equipment manufacturer is in negotiations with a Turkish company to buy the licence to manufacture its armoured vehicles. Kazakhstan has previously said that it wants to improve and strengthen its defence sector manufacturing base.
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(News report from Issue No. 235, published on June 11 2015)
JUNE 3 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tajikistan’s prosecutor-general issued an arrest warrant for Gulmurod Khalimov, the paramilitary police chief who defected to IS in Syria.
Mr Khalimov was also formally stripped of his military title. He had been a colonel.
He appeared at the end of May in a video from Syria in which he cradled a sniper rifle and pledged to ferment revolution in Tajikistan.
Mr Khalimov had left his home in April, telling his wife that he was going away on a business trip for a few days.
Instead he became IS’ most high-profile recruit from Central Asia.
Central Asian countries are increasingly worried about the ability of IS to recruit disenfranchised and poor young men from the region. With his glamour and seniority, Mr Khalimov’s recruitment has added extra weight to the IS propaganda programme.
Mr Khalimov had led Tajikistan’s paramilitary OMON unit and had been trained by special forces in the United States and in Russia.
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
JUNE 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Defence minister from CSTO member states flew into Dushanbe for their annual meeting, set to begin on June 4. The Collective Security Treaty Organisation includes Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
JUNE 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Police in Baku arrested a former city official and three other men for criminal negligence linked to a fire in an apartment block last month which killed at least 15 people, media reported. The fire spread quickly because of flammable padding used to decorate the building.
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
