Drug dealers and Islamic extremists have made Afghanistan a center of international terrorism that threatens former Soviet states in central Asia, a Russian diplomat said here on Wednesday.
"Afghanistan, with its drug dealers and its extremists has become a base for international terrorism and threatens security in the entire region," Moscow's ambassador to Dushanbe, Maxim Peshkov, told reporters in the Tajik capital.
He was commenting after closed-door talks between Russian deputy foreign minister Vyacheslav Trubnikov and Tajik officials in the capital of the former Soviet republic that borders Afghanistan.
"The situation in Afghanistan is the number-one problem for central Asia and Russia," Peshkov said.
Moscow holds Afghanistan's Taliban hardline Islamic militia responsible for destabilizing several former Soviet states, particularly Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan where armed radicals tried last summer to topple the governments.
Russian officials also charge that the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban, which controls around 90 percent of Afghanistan, has trained Chechen guerrillas fighting Moscow's forces in the breakaway republic.
Taliban leader Mulla Mohammad Omar said on Wednesday that "infidel powers" like the United States and Russia are trying to destroy Islam, as Afghanistan celebrated the Muslim feast of Eid el-Fitr in the shadow of UN sanctions -- DUSHANBE (AFP)
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