Against the background of the Islamist Taliban coming to power in Afghanistan, China is building a new base for special forces in its neighboring country Tajikistan.

The Chinese government will set up a base for a special unit to fight organized crime of the Tajik Interior Ministry, the agency announced on Wednesday in the capital Dushanbe.

Beijing will also provide the technical equipment for the base.

It is to be built in an area bordering both China and Afghanistan.

A Tajik MP assured the national service of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty that only their own security forces were deployed on the base, not Chinese ones.

From Beijing there was initially no comment.

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.

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Friedrich Schmidt

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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However, there have long been reports of a Sino-Tajik encampment in the far east of Tajikistan on the border with the Afghan Wakhan Corridor.

The Washington Post reported on it in 2019.

A reporter from the newspaper inspected the military base and saw Chinese emblems on the buildings.

He also met a group of Chinese soldiers or paramilitaries with badges from a unit based in the Xinjiang region of China.

They have confirmed that they have been stationed in the region for three to four years.

Both China and Tajikistan had denied the existence of the camp.

Russia sees China as a rival here

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty reported that the Tajik ruler Emomali Rachmon had offered the Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe, during his visit to Dushanbe last July, to transfer ownership of the military base to China.

China had already made funds available to Tajikistan in recent years to strengthen security measures, for example for border fortifications and centers for the fight against terrorism, extremism and separatism.

Russia has its largest foreign military base in Tajikistan;

it traditionally counts the former Soviet republic to its “forecourt” in Central Asia and sees China as a rival here.

The increased cooperation with Tajikistan underscores that China is watching the security situation in Afghanistan with great concern. Only on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in talks with Taliban leaders in Doha, reiterated the demand that they must take action against Uyghur extremists and "other terrorist groups that pose a threat to China's stability" in their own country. The Taliban leaders had made appropriate commitments. China's greatest concern is that battle-hardened Uighur fighters from the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group could travel from Syria to Afghanistan and infiltrate into Tajikistan from there.

Beijing fears they could attack Chinese facilities in Central Asia.

Both the IS and the so-called Pakistani Taliban have expressed sympathy with the Uyghur minority in China in their propaganda and threatened Beijing.

A few hundred Uyghur fighters were recently suspected of being on the side of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

China also fears that drug trafficking from Afghanistan will destabilize its western border.