Tajikistan

Tajikistan, officially the Republic of Tajikistan, is a landlocked country in Central Asia. Dushanbe is its capital and most populous city with a population of 1.24 million people. Tajikistan borders Afghanistan to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north, and China to the east and is narrowly separated from Pakistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor. It has a population of more than 10.7 million people. The territory was previously home to cultures of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, including the Oxus civilisation in west, with the Indo-Iranians arriving during the Andronovo culture. Parts of country were part of the Sogdian and Bactrian civilisations, and was ruled by those including the Achaemenids, Alexander the Great, the Greco-Bactrians, the Kushans, the Kidarites and Hephthalites, the First Turkic Khaganate, the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the Samanid Empire, the Kara-Khanids, Seljuks, Khwarazmians, the Mongols, Timurids and 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 constitutionally secular, Islam is nominally adhered to by 97.5% of the population. In the Gorno-Badakhshan oblast, there is a linguistic diversity where Rushani, Shughni, Ishkashimi, Wakhi, and Tajik are some of the languages spoken. Mountains cover more than 90% of the country. It is a developing country with a transitional economy that is dependent on remittances and on the production of aluminium and cotton. Tajikistan is a member of the United Nations, CIS, OSCE, OIC, ECO, SCO, and CSTO, and a NATO PfP partner.