
The already strained Iran-Tajikistan relationship further deteriorated this week when Tajik state television aired a documentary accusing Tehran of stoking the 1992-1997 Tajik Civil War by providing funds to the Islamist opposition and training militants. The program reportedly featured three Tajiks confessing to a string of assassinations in the mid to late 1990s. The three, according to Reuters, were depicted in handcuffs saying they were funded and trained in Iran.

As Farangis Najibullah wrote for RFE/RL, the documentary is just the latest in “a series of inauspicious moves that threaten to erode ties between two countries whose political and diplomatic relations have rarely matched their cultural and linguistic bonds.”

The Tajik language, notably, is not Turkic like other regional tongues but instead a Persian dialect. The shared cultural heritage betweentouch more nuanced: “[The documentary] represents the first time Dushanbe has openly accused Iran of financing and directing political killings following the civil war.”

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Iran was certainly involved in Tajikistan’s civil war: it hosted three peace conferences in 1994, 1995, and 1997. Iran remained neutral in the conflict itself; but such an accusation — that Tehran was involved — has existed as rumor since the string of killings toward the end of the civil war and after. Indeed, even before the war, Soviet-era media accused Iran (as well as a host of others) of possible involvement in the country.

As Kirill Nourzhanov and Christian Bleuer note in their history of Tajikistan, the IRPT was founded in 1990,