Tajikistan said on Monday foreign Islamist militants were responsible for killing at least 25 troops in an ambush near the Central Asian republic's border with Afghanistan.
"According to information from the troops, the number of dead as of this morning is 25 soldiers, with up to 20 injured, some of them critically," a senior Tajik military officer told AFP under condition of anonymity.
The defense ministry said in a statement earlier that 23 troops had been killed and another 10 wounded.
Defense Ministry spokesman Faridoon Makhmadaliyev said Sunday’s "terrorist act" had been carried out by militants linked to former warlords who fought against the government in a civil war in the 1990s.
"These are mercenaries of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the Chechen Republic of the Russian Federation who, under the guise of the sacred religion of Islam, are attempting to turn Tajikistan into an arena for feudal wars," he said.
President Emomali Rakhmon, in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, told his government to take all measures necessary to "normalize the situation in this part of the country", a government statement said.
The defense ministry said it had launched a sweeping military operation in response to the attack, sending in special forces and helicopter gunships to a region long thought to serve as a haven for Islamist militants.
"We’ve begun a sweep of this vast mountainous area to detect the militants and either detain or destroy them," Makhmadaliyev said.
Growing radicalism
Tajikistan, a secular but mainly Muslim country which shares a porous 1,340-km (840-mile) border with Afghanistan, is battling growing Islamist radicalism and has imprisoned more than 100 members of banned groups this year alone.
The ambush occurred in the Rasht district, 50 km (30 miles) from Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan and 180 km (110 miles) east of the capital, Dushanbe.
Troops had been travelling to the region to reinforce roadblocks in the north of the country, a month after prisoners including organizers of an alleged coup plot escaped from a detention centre in Dushanbe.
In August, 25 al-Qaeda-linked militants escaped from a prison in a brazen nighttime getaway that killed six guards. They were believed to have been headed towards the Rasht Valley region where the latest attack occurred.
Since then, two more attacks have been carried out: a suicide bombing against a police station in Khujand that killed two people and wounded 25, and a bomb explosion in a Dushanbe disco that wounded seven.
A shadowy group calling itself Jamaat Ansarullah said it had carried out the bombing in the northern city of Khujand to avenge attacks against Muslims, raising fears of a campaign of violence by international militant groups.
Tajik authorities blame the attacks on the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a militant group affiliated with al-Qaeda that is branded a "terrorist" organization by the United States.
The IMU was founded in the late-1990s in Tajikistan with the goal of overthrowing Uzbek President Islam Karimov and creating an Islamic Sharia law state in the ex-Soviet republic.
The group later moved to northern Afghanistan under the Taliban regime and was thought to have been depleted during NATO’s fierce bombing campaign at the opening of the U.S.-led invasion of that country in 2001.
Tens of thousands were killed in the 1992-1997 civil war between factions reflecting overlapping political, religious and clan loyalties.