DUSHANBE, Tajikistan — Tajikistan's president is visiting a mountainous region on the Central Asian nation's border with Afghanistan for the first time since dozens were killed there in battles between armed gangs and government troops.
Emomali
Rakhmon said Wednesday in the eastern town of Khorog that the unrest
had been provoked by the impunity of criminal organizations in the area.
Government
forces unleashed a massive operation in July in the Gorno-Badakhshan
province in what they said was an effort to capture the killers of a top
security official.
Analysts have suggested the campaign was
actually a bid by the central government to bolster its authority in an
area it has only loosely controlled since the civil war of the 1990s.
Security has been tightened in locations visited by Rakhmon.
