‘Over 100’ Tajiks who joined terror killed

DUSHANBE: More than one hundred citizens of Tajikistan have died fighting for Daesh in the Middle East, the ex-Soviet country’s leader Emomali Rakhmon said Friday.
“To date more than 100 have been killed in the fighting,” Rakhmon said while speaking to university students in the capital Dushanbe, listing cases of Tajik students joining the feared group from home and while studying abroad.
Rakhmon, who has been accused of using the IS threat to crack down on observant Muslims, said that people departing to join Daesh have “betrayed their motherland, their parents and the Hanafi madhhab,” referring to the school the vast majority of Tajiks adhere too.
Tajikistan, the poorest of the former Soviet republics, has a population of eight million and shares a border with Afghanistan.
Tajik officials have also blamed the situation on the economic downturn in Russia, where thousands of Tajiks work as laborers, claiming that people are wooed by Daesh from places like Moscow.
The government has increased pressure on the country’s largest opposition group, the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT). Party leader Muhiddin Kabiri said in Moscow last week that he would not return home due to a probe into his past business activities.