Afghanistan poses major threat to post-Soviet security bloc’s countries

The most serious threat to security of the Collective Security Treaty Organization’s member-states is coming from Afghanistan, the post-Soviet security bloc’s deputy secretary-general, Pyotr Tikhonovsky, said on Tuesday.

“For our organization, the Afghan region is not easy,” Tikhonovsky told the 5th high-level coordination meeting between the CSTO Secretariat and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)

“We see everything that is going on in that country. We watch those processes taking place in Syria. We see that a number of militants of the Islamic State are moving to Afghanistan’s soil. This is especially alarming. These hotbeds on Afghanistan’s territory will pose a rather serious threat,” the official warned.

“That’s why our cooperation in the CSTO’s framework for countering these threats is translated into conducting joint drills. One of them was carried out this year in Tajikistan with “the CSTO’s collective rapid reaction force,” he recalled.

The CSTO is a post-Soviet security bloc consisting of six member-states – Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan. Afghanistan and Serbia are observer states.

Source: TASS