TALIBAN TO UNLEASH A FLOOD OF REFUGEES, DRUGS

A sweeping Taliban military offensive across the mountains of northern
Afghanistan threatens to spark a refugee crisis and unleash a wave of
Islamic insurgency and drug smuggling through central Asia.

Four years after seizing power, the Taliban Islamic militia has made crucial
gains in the past two months in the only area of Afghanistan still outside
its control. Now with Taliban troops sitting along western parts of the
1600-kilometre border with Tajikistan, the Tajik Government and its backers
in Russia are increasingly apprehensive.

Tajikistan has barely recovered from a five-year civil war that began only
months after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unemployment runs at more
than 50per cent and most factories have collapsed into ruin. This year a
devastating drought threatens half the population.

So far Tajikistan has kept its Afghan border closed, fearing the impact of a
flood of refugees. Aid agencies in Dushanbe, the capital, say up to 100,000
Afghans would descend on the southern provinces, the area worst affected by
drought, if the Taliban made further advances.

"The large humanitarian catastrophe could be greater than that in Kosovo,
one of the biggest in the world," Sergei Ivanov, the head of Russia's
security council, said last week. Moscow makes no secret of its opposition
to the Taliban and is keen to increase its influence in central Asia.
Radical Islamic groups in Tajikistan would be inspired if the Taliban seized
the remaining 10per cent of Afghanistan it does not now control.

Islamic militants are believed to be moving from Afghanistan through the
narrow strip in the centre of Tajikistan and north into Kyrgyzstan and the
Ferghana valley, where hardliners have long wanted a separate Muslim
homeland. "There is a very real threat of a spread of Islamism in
Tajikistan," said an aid worker in Dushanbe. "There are a lot of different
divisions of radical Islamists."

One of the leading rebel groups, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which
has bases in the mountains of Tajikistan and wants to overthrow the secular
Uzbek Government, was added to the US State Department's list of terror
groups last month. Uzbekistan accuses one of the Tajik Government coalition
partners, the United Tajik Opposition, of supporting the rebels. In August,
Islamic Movement rebels fought their way to within 96kilometres of the Uzbek
capital, Tashkent.

In the northern Tajik province of Leninabad, the Hiz-ut Tahir movement, an
Islamic group structured around small, independent cells, has been pushing
for a separate state. Leninabad is cut off from the rest of the country
during winter when snow blocks the only pass.

Although 25,000 Russian soldiers guard the Tajik border, drug smuggling from
Afghanistan, which produces 70per cent of the world's heroin, has increased
five-fold this year. Rival factories in Afghanistan compete to refine the
purest heroin, whose price rises dramatically on the trail through
Tajikistan to Russia.

Some of the most vulnerable parts of the border are guarded not by the
Russian army but by soldiers from the United Tajik Opposition, the Islamic
group that fought against the government in the civil war. The Taliban
relies on opium production as a major source of income; this year alone it
brought in at least $US9 million ($A17 million).

The most immediate threat remains the drought and the danger of a flood of
refugees. At least 70,000 people fled the Afghan city of Taloqan when it
fell to the Taliban last month. Up to 100,000 more would flee if the Taliban
took the last opposition town, Faizabad.

In villages across southern Tajikistan people are on the brink of
starvation. The UN's World Food Program is launching a $62 million emergency
operation to feed one million of the worst-affected villagers over the next
nine months.