Mumin Ahmadi is a correspondent for RFE/RL's Tajik Service.
Afghan military pilots who fled to Tajikistan when the Taliban seized power in Kabul say the militant group is pressuring them to return to Afghanistan by threatening to kill their relatives.
Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Masud briefly visited Dushanbe for Afghan peace talks mediated by Tajikistan and Pakistan, but the Taliban failed to show up, several sources say.
RFE/RL gained exclusive access to a Tajik facility where dozens of U.S.-trained Afghan pilots are being secretly held. The pilots, interviewed by RFE/RL, escaped to Tajikistan onboard Afghan Air Force aircraft on August 15, when the Taliban seized control of Kabul.
The Taliban has provided Tajik militants based along the border with Tajikistan with new military vehicles, weaponry, and other equipment over the past two weeks, security sources in Tajikistan and northeastern Afghanistan say, amid an ongoing military buildup on both sides of the frontier.
The Taliban has said that it has no plans to destabilize Afghanistan’s neighbors. However, the Taliban has put Tajik militant group Jamaat Ansarullah in charge of security in several districts it captured near the Tajik border.
Staying in Afghanistan to fight against Taliban forces would have ended badly, several Afghan soldiers who recently fled to Tajikistan told RFE/RL's Tajik Service.
Afghan authorities say a group of militants from Tajikistan played a key role in the recent Taliban takeover of a district. It prompted Tajikistan to deploy additional troops along the border and launch a campaign using the relatives of the militants to plead with them via video to come home.
Once a go-to town for the young and progressive, the southern Tajik town of Norak was introduced to the world as a terrorist hotbed following a midsummer attack on foreign cyclists.
Tajik authorities are preparing to order migrant laborers to have their blood tested upon their return, and that means no unsafe sex until the results are in.
Top Tajik officials have been warned that they can get in trouble if their wives don't take part in volunteer work.
Tajikistan considers breaking with decades of discrimination against women by punishing men on both sides of the illegal sex trade -- prostitutes and clients.
A quarter-century after the demise of the Soviet Union, tens of thousands of Tajiks, whose ancestors fled their homes into Afghanistan nearly 90 years ago, have yet to return to their homeland and be reunited with their families.
