Asmat Mallick

#Russia warned Friday that a "significant presence of terrorist and extremist groups, along with their training camps and strongholds” in #Afghanistan poses a threat to #Tajikistan, #Uzbekistan, and #Turkmenistan. “Members of these groups are attempting to infiltrate Central Asian countries under the guise of refugees and even tourists,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a Moscow-hosted conference on security in Central Asia and Afghanistan. The main threat, he added, comes from the regional offshoot of the Islamic State group, known as IS Khorasan Province (#ISKP). “Concurrently, the radicals want to use Afghanistan as a launching pad for taking terrorist activity to Central Asia and Russia,” Lavrov said. He stated, without elaborating, that “attempts are being made to smuggle weapons and drugs from Afghanistan into Central Asian countries and then into Russia.” The Russian Foreign Minister's remarks sharply contradicted claims made at the same event by the Taliban’s ambassador to Russia, Gul Hassan Hassan. The Taliban diplomat asserted in his speech that the only threat to the security of Afghanistan and the region comes from Pakistan, accusing its neighbor of harboring Afghan armed opposition fighters and the Islamic State offshoot.