Deadly fighting in Tajikistan after general's murder

At least 12 Tajik troops and 30 militants were killed in a military operation to reassert control over a restive region close to the Afghan border after the murder of a top security agent, officials said Tuesday. Tajik special forces have poured into the eastern Badakhshan region in the last days after the murder of regional security chief General Abdullo Nazarov, which the authorities blamed on a renegade local strongman. The clashes mark the biggest upsurge of internal unrest for two years in mainly Muslim Tajikistan, the ex-Soviet Union's poorest state that borders Afghanistan and China and is still recovering from a 1992-97 civil war. "During the special operation in Badakhshan province, 12 troops were killed and 30 militants were killed," the security service said in a statement read on state television. "The special operation is continuing." Some 40 militants, including eight Afghan citizens, have been arrested while 23 troops were also wounded in the clashes, the statement added. A military source, who asked not to be named, told AFP the dead and wounded were being transferred by helicopter to the capital Dushanbe. The official statement denied unconfirmed reports of large numbers of deaths among civilians during the operation. The clashes were centred around main town of the region, Khorog, which lies just east of the border with Afghanistan in the Pamir Mountains and where the federal government has long had little authority. The operation was launched after Nazarov was pulled out of his car and stabbed to death on Saturday, in a killing that sent shockwaves through Tajikistan. The security service veteran had served as the deputy head of the State Committee for National Security (ex-KGB) until being assigned to bring order to Tajikistan's restive Mountainous Badakhshan Autonomous Region (MBAR) in 2010. The authorities initially pointed the finger at tobacco smugglers but then implicated a former rebel commander from the civil war, Tolib Ayombekov, who had since become a commander of the state border unit on the Afghan frontier. The state national security committee has said Ayombekov is now leading a militant group which has been involved in smuggling and had also carried out a string of deadly crimes on the frontier. The murder appears to have prompted the government to launch an all-out assault to impose control over a region where for long its writ has carried little authority. The Badakhshan region, making up almost half of Tajikistan, is one of its poorest areas and has long been notorious as a fiefdom of local strongmen, many of whom fought as rebels in the civil war. A top regional prosecutor, Nafasbek Dilshodov, was also seriously wounded in what the authorities described as a "terror attack" on Monday night. In a sign of the gravity of the situation, all phone and Internet communication links with Badakhshan have been cut off. Tajik media said all shops in Khorog were closed, the market was shut and all state offices besides the police were not working while dozens of houses were lying in ruins. Access in and out of the region was blocked while the operation was underway, with only military vehicles to circulate and the only flights the helicopters ferrying the wounded and the dead to Dushanbe. Meanwhile, the telecommunications agency has also blocked the independent Tajik news site Asia Plus after it published an interview with Ayombekov. The unrest appears to be the most serious security challenge for the secular regime of President Emomali Rahkmon since the security forces suffered repeated attacks by militants in the Rasht Valley in the summer 2010. That violence followed the escape of 25 militants from a prison in a brazen nighttime jailbreak in August 2010 that saw almost 40 members of the security forces killed.