China’s embassy in Tajikistan has urged Chinese businesses and workers to evacuate the Afghanistan-Tajikistan border areas where several Chinese citizens were killed in what Tajik authorities say were a pair of cross-border attacks in late November.
Three Chinese citizens were killed in an attack on November 26. According to Tajikistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the attack originated in Afghanistan and targeted a Shohin SM compound in the Shamsiddin Shohin district in Khatlon Region along the Afghan-Tajik border. Shohin SM is a private gold-mining company, one of many Chinese enterprises operating in Tajikistan.
The attack was carried out, the ministry said, “using firearms and a drone equipped with a missile.” The ministry blamed “criminal groups” located in Afghanistan, without naming any specific group.
Other reports, such as Reuters, referred to drones dropping grenades.
In Afghanistan, Taliban authorities condemned the attack. Foreign Ministry deputy spokesman Hafiz Zia Ahmad Takal said that an initial assessment initiated that “this incident involves elements that are trying to create chaos, instability, and distrust between countries in the region,” according to the Associated Press.
Four days after the first attack, two more Chinese workers were killed in Shodak village in the Darvoz district of Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO). The Chinese workers were employees of China Road and Bridge Corporation.
The press center of Tajikistan’s Border Troops, administratively under the State Committee for National Security, said in a December 1 statement that the second attack took place around 6:45 pm local time and involved “members of an armed terrorist group” entering Tajikistan from “the village of Ruzvayak, Mokh and Mai, Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan.”
Both attacks originated in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan Province. On November 30, soon after the second attack, Taliban authorities announced the arrest of two individuals in connection with the attack.
Following the first attack, according to RFE/RL’s reporting, “Afghanistan’s Taliban-run Interior Ministry announced that a delegation led by the governor of the country’s Badakhshan Province and a senior commander in the Taliban border forces, Maulavi Abdul Mannan Hasan, had traveled to Tajikistan.”
Tajikistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not publicly acknowledge the visit.
Since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, Tajikistan has been the most hesitant country in Central Asia to engage openly with the new regime. It had provided some support for the Taliban’s opposition in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Western-backed Afghan Republic government. But that support has eroded in the face of the Taliban’s consolidation of control over Afghanistan and arguably the weight of wider regional cooperation with the Taliban. And thus, Tajikistan has slowly recalibrated its approach to the Taliban. Evidence of this shift includes the March 2023 handover of the Afghan consulate in Khorog, the capital of GBAO, and the exchange of official visits, including a Tajik delegation of senior diplomats and security officers that traveled to Kabul on November 15.