Tajikistan, officially the Republic of Tajikistan, is a landlocked country in Central Asia. Dushanbe is the capital and most populous city. Tajikistan is bordered by Afghanistan to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north, and China to the east. It is separated from Pakistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor. Tajiks form the ethnic majority in the country and their national language is Tajik, a variety of Persian.
Tajiks are a Persian-speaking Iranian ethnic group native to Central Asia, living primarily in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Tajiks are the largest ethnicity in Tajikistan, and the second-largest in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. They speak varieties of Persian, a Western Iranian language. In Tajikistan, since the 1939 Soviet census, its small Pamiri and Yaghnobi ethnic groups are included as Tajiks. In China, the term is used to refer to its Pamiri ethnic groups, the Tajiks of Xinjiang, who speak the Eastern Iranian Pamiri languages. In Afghanistan, the Pamiris are counted as a separate ethnic group.
Dushanbe is the capital and largest city of Tajikistan. As of January 2022, Dushanbe had a population of 1,201,800 and that population was largely Tajik. Until 1929, the city was known in Russian as Dyushambe, and from 1929 to 1961 as Stalinabad, after Joseph Stalin. Dushanbe is located in the Gissar Valley, bounded by the Gissar Range in the north and east and the Babatag, Aktau, Rangontau and Karatau mountains in the south, and has an elevation of 750–930 m. The city is divided into four districts, all named after Persian historical figures: Ismail Samani, Avicenna, Ferdowsi, and Shah Mansur.
Tajik, Tajikistan or Tajikistani may refer to. Someone or something related to Tajikistan:
Tajik, also called Tajiki Persian or Tajiki, is the variety of Persian spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan by Tajiks. It is closely related to neighbouring Dari of Afghanistan with which it forms a continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of the Persian language. Several scholars consider Tajik as a dialectal variety of Persian rather than a language on its own. The popularity of this conception of Tajik as a variety of Persian was such that, during the period in which Tajik intellectuals were trying to establish Tajik as a language separate from Persian, prominent intellectual Sadriddin Ayni counterargued that Tajik was not a "bastardised dialect" of Persian. The issue of whether Tajik and Persian are to be considered two dialects of a single language or two discrete languages has political sides to it.
Emomali Rahmon is a Tajik politician who has been serving as 3rd President of Tajikistan since 16 November 1994. Previously he was the Chairman of the Supreme Assembly of Tajikistan, as the de facto head of state from 20 November 1992 to 16 November 1994. Since 18 March 1998, he has also served as the leader of the People's Democratic Party of Tajikistan, which dominates the Parliament of Tajikistan. On 30 September 1999, he was elected vice-president of the UN General Assembly for a one-year term.
The Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, also commonly known as Soviet Tajikistan, the Tajik SSR, or simply Tajikistan, was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union which existed from 1929 to 1991 located in Central Asia.
Rahmon Nabiyevich Nabiyev, also spelled Rakhmon Nabiev, was a Tajik politician who served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Tajikistan from 1982 to 1985 and twice as the 2nd President of Tajikistan from 23 September 1991 to 6 October 1991 and from 2 December 1991 to 7 September 1992. He was also partly responsible for the Tajik Civil War. Rising out of the regional nomenklatura, Nabiyev ascended to power in 1982 as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Tajikistan. In 1985, he was ousted in a corruption scandal.
Administratively, Tajikistan is divided into:
The culture of Tajikistan has developed over several thousand years. Tajik culture can be divided into two areas, Metropolitan and Kuhiston (Highland). Modern city centres include Dushanbe, Khudjand, Kulob, and Panjikent.
Khujand, sometimes spelled Khodjent and known as Leninabad from 1936 to 1991, is the second-largest city of Tajikistan and the capital of Tajikistan's northernmost Sughd province.
Jews and Judaism in Tajikistan have a long and varied history. Many of the Tajik Jews were originally Bukharan Jews.
The Vakhsh, also known as the Surkhob, in north-central Tajikistan, and the Kyzyl-Suu, in Kyrgyzstan, is a Central Asian river, and one of the main rivers of Tajikistan. It is a tributary of the Amu Darya river.
Sadriddin Ayni was a Tajik intellectual who wrote poetry, fiction, journalism, history, and a dictionary. He is regarded as Tajikistan's national poet and one of the most important writers in the country's history.
In parallel to what happened in other Soviet republics, a cinema of Tajikistan was promoted by the Soviet state, and declined in the first years after the independence, before being revitalized through the efforts of the new government.
Islam is the predominant religion in Tajikistan.
Prostitution in Tajikistan is legal, but related activities such as soliciting, procuring and brothel keeping are prohibited. Prostitution has increased within the country since the collapse of the Soviet Union. UNAIDS estimate there are 14,100 female sex workers in Tajikistan. Government official figures for 2015 were 1,777 prostitutes and 194 brothels. Prostitution occurs on the streets and in bars, restaurants, nightclubs and saunas, and HIV prevalence is 3.5% amongst sex workers.
Gulmurod Salimovich Khalimov (1975–2017) was a Tajik and Islamist military commander. He was a lieutenant-colonel and commander of the police special forces of the Interior Ministry of Tajikistan until 2015, when he defected to the Islamic State. In September 2016, he was reported to have been appointed as the minister of war of IS in place of Abu Omar al-Shishani; his appointment had not been announced by IS for fears that he might be targeted in airstrikes by the anti-IS coalition. On 8 September 2017, Khalimov was allegedly killed during a Russian airstrike near Deir ez-Zor, Syria. However, the Tajik government, United Nations, and the United States believed that he was still alive by 2019, though his exact fate remained disputed. By 2020, Islamist militants claimed he had died at some point; this source was considered unreliable by the Tajik government. Regardless, the United States had removed Khalimov from their Rewards for Justice Program by 2021.
The COVID-19 pandemic in Tajikistan is part of the worldwide pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. The virus was confirmed to have spread to Tajikistan when its index cases, in Dushanbe and Khujand, were confirmed on 30 April 2020.
