Tajikistan

Tajikistan, officially the Republic of Tajikistan, is a landlocked country located in Central Asia. Dushanbe is the capital and largest city of the country, with a population of over 1.2 million. Tajikistan borders Afghanistan to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north, and China to the east; it is narrowly separated from Pakistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor. Its total population exceeds 11 million. The territory was previously home to cultures of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, including the Oxus civilisation in the west. Parts of the country were part of the Sogdian and Bactrian civilisations, and were ruled by the Achaemenids, Alexander the Great, the Greco‑Bactrians, the Kushans, the Kidarites, the Hephthalites, the First Turkic Khaganate, the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the Samanid Empire, the Kara‑Khanids, the Seljuks, the Khwarazmians, the Mongols, the Timurids, and the Khanate of Bukhara. The region was later conquered by the Russian Empire, before becoming part of the Soviet Union. Within the Soviet Union, the country's borders were drawn when it was part of Uzbekistan as an autonomous republic, before becoming a constituent republic of the Soviet Union on 5 December 1929. On 9 September 1991, Tajikistan declared itself an independent sovereign state as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. A civil war was fought after independence, lasting from May 1992 to June 1997. Since the end of the war, newly established political stability and foreign aid have allowed the country's economy to grow. The country has been led since 1994 by Emomali Rahmon, who heads an authoritarian regime and whose human rights record has been criticised. Tajikistan is a presidential republic consisting of four provinces. Tajiks form the ethnic majority in the country, and their national language is Tajik. Russian is used as the official inter‑ethnic language. While the state is...