• Tajikistan’s authoritarian government has cracked down hard in recent weeks on the restive region.
• At least 17 people were killed and over 200 arrested during what the authorities call “an anti-terror operation”.
• Critics argue that the real aim of the crackdown is to crush local leaders.

Mountainous Gorno-Badakhshan province in Tajikistan is home to a rickety highway that is one of the world’s great road adventures.

However, the region known for its lunar landscapes and lush valleys has a darker side.

Tajikistan’s authoritarian government has cracked down hard in recent weeks on the restive region, which borders China and Afghanistan and attempted to break away from Dushanbe in 1992.

At least 17 people were killed and over 200 arrested during what the authorities call “an anti-terror operation”, with a communications blackout limiting information coming out of the region.

Critics, however, argue that the real aim of the crackdown is to crush local leaders, who in the past have resisted veteran President Emomali Rakhmon’s rule.

State information bulletins have trumpeted the operation as a success.

On Friday the state information service Khovar said that “12 leaders of organized criminal groups” had been detained during the operation and 16 people “neutralized” after resisting arrest.

“The activities of organized terrorist groups on the territory of Badakhshan have been completely stopped,” the service reported.

Read More: Tajikistan says govt opponent detained in restive east

Authorities had said in May that one member of the security services was killed during fighting.

Raids in the region known by its Russian-language acronym GBAO followed anti-government protests in May and triggered a joint statement of “deep concern” from the United States, France, Britain and Germany.

The internet blackout has been criticized by rights groups, while private media outlet Asia-Plus said it ceased reporting on the situation “under threat of closure” by authorities.

Hemmed in by the towering Pamir mountains and further isolated by poor transport infrastructure, Gorno-Badakhshan accounts for around half of Tajikistan’s territory but only two percent of the nation’s 9.5 million population.

Its peoples mostly speak languages distinct from the official Tajik spoken elsewhere in the ex-Soviet republic and follow Ismaili Shia Islam, rather than the nationally prevalent Sunni Islam.

Yet it is the isolated region’s penchant for political opposition, stretching back to a civil war in the 1990s, that rankles with the regime in the capital, activists argue.

“They want to impose the same order on us that they have imposed elsewhere in Tajikistan. The order of one corrupt family,” Alim Sherzamonov, an opposition leader who fled to Europe, told AFP, referring to Rakhmon and his powerful family members.

Sherzamonov, deputy chairman of the diaspora-led National Alliance of Tajikistan, is one of several activists the government has accused of fomenting protests that set the stage for the operation.

The pro-autonomy demonstrations followed tensions between locals and centrally appointed officials, accused of carrying out campaigns of persecution.

Dozens of citizens of Pamiri descent living in Tajikistan have since been arrested “on ethnic grounds”, Sherzamonov claimed.

He denied that he had any role in the protests and added that his brother, who is not politically active, had been detained in the sweeps.

“This operation really started over a decade ago. They have reached their aim,” said Sherzamonov.

“Many people are losing the will to keep fighting for their freedom.”

The violence is the worst in the region since 2012 when dozens died during clashes between government forces and fighters loyal to local informal leaders.

China — Tajikistan’s top foreign investor and largest creditor — has reportedly set up a base in the strategic region.

Beijing has not officially acknowledged the facility’s existence but Tajikistan said last year that China was helping it build a separate base where Tajik special forces will be stationed.

The men named in Tajik state media reports of the latest deaths and arrests are recognized as informal leaders in Gorno-Badakhshan, which sits along the heroin trail that heads north from Afghanistan across the Panj River.

Some of them fought against troops loyal to President Rakhmon during the civil war and were later handed government security posts as part of a peace deal that Tajikistan’s ally Russia helped broker.

None of the men held state positions at the time the new operation began, however, an indication, observers say, that the government grew tired of power-sharing.

One particularly popular local leader Mamadbokir Mamadbokirov, was killed “as a result of internal clashes of criminal groups”, police said in May, contradicting opposition reports that claimed Mamadbokirov was slain by government forces.

Zafar Abdullayev, a Tajik journalist who lives in the United States, said in a YouTube broadcast in May that authorities’ simultaneous descriptions of the men as gangsters, terrorists and narcotics kingpins “do not withstand scrutiny”.

Read More: Tajikistan protests; Pamir minority attacked by security forces

“They throw in all these different terms to say: they are bad guys,” said Abdullayev.

Tajikistan’s “authoritarian approach to conflict management,” according to John Heathershaw of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, has done little to alleviate tensions in the troubled region.

“(The regime) systematically takes out rivals that challenge its domination over the economy, political space and public discourse,” Heathershaw told AFP.