Security Committee: More than 5,000 gunmen concentrated along Tajik-Afghan border

Baku. 3 February. REPORT.AZ/ Dushanbe is concerned about the ongoing concentration of armed units uncontrolled by Kabul along the border with Tajikistan. According to the Tajik intelligence data, there are at least 5,000 gunmen there, Report informs, a spokesman for Tajikistan’s State Committee for National Security (SCNS) told TASS on Wednesday. 

"Our intelligence agencies are not only closely following the situation in the inhabited localities in this and other districts of Kunduz Province, but also took additional security measures by reinforcing the Panj border detachment," the spokesman said, commenting on reports of Afghan media about the appearance of several hundred armed foreign mercenaries in Afghanistan’s frontier Imam Sahib district. According to him, up to 5,000 militants are concentrated along the Tajik-Afghan border with a total length of 1,344 kilometers.

According to Tajikistan’s State Committee for National Security, they include members of the Taliban movement, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Jamaat Ansarullah groups, there are a few dozen natives of Tajikistan. The SCNS officer noted that Dushanbe neither "underestimated nor overestimated these groups’ danger" having sufficient forces to rebuff the attacks and also "having strategic military allies in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), primarily Russia."