How Iran Lost Tajikistan

In late December 2015, Iran hosted its 29th Islamic Unity Summit. The moment, ironically, marked a breaking point between Iran and Tajikistan that has, in the subsequent three years, widened into a gulf. Iran’s most ardent opponent – Saudi Arabia – has maneuvered itself into Tajikistan’s good graces while Iran has been squeezed out.

How did Tajikistan and Iran fall apart? The 2015 summit, at which Iran sat Tajikistan’s official delegation beside Muhiddin Kabiri, leader of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT), was certainly a pivot point in the relationship. Dushanbe had spent much of 2015 hounding the IRPT, the vestige of the government’s civil war opposition, brought into legitimacy in a 1997 peace accord; a peace accord Iran helped bring to life. Dushanbe squeezed the IRPT out of parliament in spring 2015, forced the closure of its offices over the summer, and in the fall tied its leadership to a burst of violence when a deputy defense minister mutinied and took up arms. By December, the IRPT was banned as an extremist group, its leaders fled into exile or awaiting trial.

Kabiri was wanted on terrorism charges by the Tajik authorities so seating him next to the official Tajik delegation was nothing short of provocative. But Tajik-Iranian relations had already begun to sour over bad business deals and under the weight of improving Tajik-Saudi relations. 2015 may have been a turning point but Iran and Saudi Arabia have been competing for influence in Central Asia since the Soviet Union’s collapse.

The Influence Game

In modern usage, the term “Tajik” refers, as Kirill Nourzhanov and Christian Bleuer

note in Tajikistan: A Political and Social History, narrowly to “sedentary, Persian-speaking Sunni Muslims in Central Asia and Afghanistan.” The other modern states of Central Asia – based on those formed under Soviet guidance in the 1920s along loose ethnic lines – share a Turkic linguistic and tribal background, whereas the Tajiks remain linguistically part of the Persian world. Some may be tempted to point to a divergence in Islamic branches – Shia for Iran and Sunni for Tajikistan – but this divide loomed less large in the past than it does in the present.

When Tajikistan emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union as an independent state, Iran was among the first countries to recognize it. In December 1991, amid the just settled dust of collapse, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati visited Dushanbe. In January 1992, Iran became the first country to open an embassy in the Tajik capital.

A Newsweek article outlining the contest for influence in Central Asia in February 1992 quoted a Saudi official as saying, "Iran would like nothing better than to have five mini-Irans, completely under their sway.” Iranian efforts in Central Asia were tied, inextricably for Saudi Arabia and its ally, the United States, to the export of revolutionary Islamic zeal.

To promote its own brand of Islam, Saudi Arabia reportedly poured $1 billion into Central Asia and promised to deliver a million Qurans. But Tajikistan wasn’t a focus of Saudi largess or diplomacy at the time, even if countering Iranian influence was a top priority. Dushanbe didn’t have a Saudi embassy until 2010.

Tajikistan, after independence, quickly fell into a devastating civil war. Dushanbe’s new allies in Tehran remained engaged, but impartial. The civil war, simply put, pitted a Soviet-era elite against a coalition of overlapping groups: democrats, Garmis and Pamiris from the country’s east, and Islamists. These groups that had been previously excluded from power and saw independence as an opportunity to grab the reins.

French scholar Stephane Dudoignon noted Iranian influences on the  IRPT in the 1990s, but in revolutionary rather than Islamic terms. As Nourzhanov and Bleuer write, “Obviously, the Shia Islamist ideology of the Iranian rulers would have limited applicability to a Sunni party like the IRP[T]; but the Islamic revolution in Iran did provide a demonstration effect.”

Iran hosted three Tajik peace conferences in 1994, 1995, and 1997. In 1997, a peace accord was signed between the opposition – of which the IRPT was a core part – and the government.

The Cracks Appear

The IRPT incident in 2015 was perhaps a turning point, but Iran-Tajikistan relations had already begun to cool by then.

If growth in trade is a measure of the health of a bilateral relationship, Iran and Tajikistan enjoyed burgeoning relations from independence through about 2013. In 2013, bilateral trade crested at $295 million, up from $40 million in 2000. In 2014 bilateral trade slid to $228 million and by 2016 to $171 million.

In the years after the civil war, Iran invested heavily in Tajikistan. For example, in the early 2000s Iran invested $31 million, according to a Eurasianet report, in a tunnel to bypass the Anzob pass. Reportedly $10 million was given as a grant and $21 million as a loan. The Anzob tunnel – also known as the Istiqlol (Independence) tunnel –  built by Sabir International, an Iranian firm, allows Tajiks to reach the northern part of the country in winter, when the pass is snowed in. Construction began on the 5 kilometer (3.1 mile) tunnel in 2003; it opened in 2006 to traffic, albeit without lighting, ventilation, or fire-prevention systems.

In 2010, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Reconnecting Asia project, additional work ceased due to a lack of funds. In 2011, work began again and in 2015 the tunnel was again “complete.” Nevertheless, in 2016 Tajik authorities again reached out for Iranian assistance to complete the tunnel. A decade after it was first “completed” the Anzob tunnel was again completed.

Another point of tension was the Babak Zanjani affair. Zanjani, an Iranian billionaire with business interests in Tajikistan, was arrested in 2013 and accused by Tehran of pilfering billions from the Oil Ministry. Rumor had it that he was assisting in the circumvention of sanctions. Officially, he was charged with corruption. Zanjani’s assets in Tajikistan included a bank, an airline, a taxi service, and a bus terminal. Iranian authorities claimed he used his Tajik bank to funnel money out of Iran.

While on trial in 2016, Zanjani claimed to have transferred $2 billion to Tajikistan’s National Bank. Tajikistan denied that such a transfer ever took place. While Iran claimed in 2015 that when international sanctions were repealed it would retrieve Zanjani’s assets, in reality Tajikistan has seized them and it seems unlikely Iran will regain them in any meaningful fashion.

Saudi Arabia Steps In

Iran’s hosting of IRPT leader Muhiddin Kabiri in December 2015 strained a relationship that was cooling off. Beyond a note of protest, the Tajiks retaliated by restricting the import of food products from Iran, including tea and poultry, and in July 2016 the Tajikistan branch of the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee (IKRC) – an Iranian government-supported charity organization – had its operations suspended. Several other Iranian organizations were also forced to close.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia – and more importantly Saudi Arabia’s ample funds – have flowed freely into Tajikistan. Initially, Saudi investment in Tajikistan amounted to what Eurasianet called “giveaways” such as grants and loans to build schools and government buildings. But Saudi “giveaways” aren’t pocket change in Central Asia’s poorest state. For example, in May 2017, Riyadh reportedly pledged a $200 million grant to build Tajikistan a new parliament and in October 2017 Tajikistan’s parliament ratified a loan agreement in which Saudi Arabia would provide a $35 million loan for the building of schools.

In May 2018, Saudi Arabia’s Tajikistan interests solidified when Saudi Investment Group announced a deal to acquire a 51 percent stake in Tajikistan’s deeply troubled Tojiksodirotbank.

Tojiksodirotbank, based in Dushanbe, found itself deep underwater by 2015, at which point the Tajik Finance Ministry bought an 85.9 percent stake in, as Eurasianet reported, “an operation it paid for by issuing bonds and selling them to another branch of the government, the National Bank.” The details remain unclear but reportedly, as of 2018, Tojiksodirotbank still owes its customers $102 million.

Why Saudi Arabia would willingly enter into such a sketchy deal is best explained by politics, as common finance sense cannot explain the situation. Saudi Arabia will go to greath lengths to wrest Iran’s allies from the powers-that-be in Tehran.

Conclusion

Last summer, Tajik state television aired a documentary during prime time in which the Tajik Interior Ministry claimed Iran had interests in fomenting a civil war in Tajikistan and provided financial assistance to the IRPT. In the documentary, three Tajiks confessed to killing a number of politicians and other prominent figures between 1994 and 2000 on behest of Tehran. The allegations, though whispered before in the rumor mills, were the first public airing of such accusations.

In May 2018, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon reaired the rumors about Iran stoking the civil war. Without directly naming Iran, he ranted about an opposition militant whose pockets “were filled with dollars from that country, which called itself our so-called friend...He himself admitted that he accepted the Shiite faith and carried out the orders of the security services of that country against the Tajik nation.”

Rahmon reportedly also claimed that the IRPT had converted to Shia Islam – never mind that Rahmon has also, in recent years, alleged that the IRPT has links to the Islamic State, a decidedly and violently Sunni group. Then again, reality often takes a backseat in Dushanbe.

As Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Farangis Najibullah noted last summer, political and diplomatic ties between Iran and Tajikistan “have rarely matched their cultural and linguistic bonds.” While relations have never achieved their potential, the Iran-Tajikistan relationship has eroded considerably in the last few years, burdened by the stress of uneven financial dealings, corruption, religious politics, and Saudi pressure.

Where Iran’s influence recedes, Saudi Arabia’s surges.