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A previously unknown civilisation was using writing in Central Asia 4,000 years ago, hundreds of years before Chinese writing developed, archaeologists have discovered... The discovery suggests that Central Asia had a civilisation comparable with that of Mesopotamia and ancient Iran as far back as the Bronze Age, University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert told the BBC... It is not known what the people of the civilisation called themselves, so researchers have dubbed the society the Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex (B-Mac), after the ancient Greek names for the two regions it covers.

“Brothers, Moscow has become the enemy of Islam and of Muslims these days. It has become the number one enemy of Islam and Muslims”. Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qaradawi is the Sunni’s most respected theological authority. He is also the sole spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the rest of the world. Also a spiritual leader of the Hamas movement, he encouraged suicide bombings. Amit Assa, a former Colonel in the Israeli Security Service (Shabak) told the Voice of Russia: “Such declarations of animosity will be understood by Al-Qaeda, Muslim brothers and other radical organizations as a theological permit...

Recent Chinese diplomatic maneuvers in Central Asia, both bilateral and multilateral, show that Beijing’s strategy treats the region as a corridor for reaching resource bases in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa. Central Asia is thus part of China’s broader blueprint of securing strategic resources and supplies to feed its developing economy (Z. Saipov, China Oil & Gas Monitor, Week 21, Issue 396, News Base, May 31, p. 3–4). Hu Jintao (L) and Islam Karimov Illustratively, Chinese Vice Premier Hui Liangyu’s two-week official tour of Congo, Tanzania, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan on September 1–13 (English.sina.com, September 6) supports the premise that...

April 14, 1999, Wednesday COMMITTEE HEARING SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS: SUBCOMMITTEE ON NEAR EASTERN AND SOUTH U.S. SENATOR SAM BROWNBACK (R-KS) HOLDS HEARING ON THE CRISIS IN AFGANISTAN  WASHINGTON, D.C. SPEAKERS: U.S. SENATOR SAM BROWNBACK (R-KS), CHAIRMAN U.S. SENATOR JOHN ASHCROFT (R-MO) U.S. SENATOR GORDON H. SMITH (R-OR) U.S. SENATOR ROD GRAMS (R-MN) U.S. SENATOR CRAIG THOMAS (R-WY) U.S. SENATOR PAUL DAVID WELLSTONE (D-MN), RANKING MEMBER U.S. SENATOR ROBERT G. TORRICELLI (D-NJ) U.S. SENATOR PAUL S. SARBANES (D-MD) U.S. SENATOR CHRISTOPHER J. DODD (D-CT) U.S. REPRESENTATIVE DANA ROHRABACHER (R-CA) THE HONORABLE KARL F. INDERFURTH ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR SOUTH ...

"Hurry hurry hurry. We can destroy the enemy. Advance." "Hit hit hit the Taliban." "Hit him hit him hit him. Fire, fire." "We're arriving in Khalakhan." "Take care about the troops." "The Taliban are surrendering." "Bring them to me." "One hundred of them are coming to you." "El Ham captured a pickup with their weapons." These were the voices on the radio of the Northern Alliance commanders we have been visiting for weeks. Several other journalists and I were standing with some Afghan soldiers on the roof of a command post--a mud house with a tank's turret and gun jutting ...

Syria will be suspended from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation on Wednesday for its violent suppression of a 17-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, a diplomat said on Monday ahead of an emergency OIC summit in Mecca. "The resolution regarding the suspension of the Syrian membership in the OIC is not facing obstacles ... It will be approved," said the diplomat, speaking on the sidelines of a preliminary foreign ministers meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He said the decision was likely to be formally announced at the end of the second day of the summit, which was called by Saudi...

Azerbaijan-Turkmenistan relations, which experienced a significant thaw since the death of Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov (Turkmenbashi), deteriorated again last week (June 19). The most recent conflict began when Turkmenistan started undertaking seismic work on a disputed oilfield in the Caspian Sea. The oilfield, discovered by Azerbaijani geologists, is called Kapyaz in Azeri and Serdar in Turkmen. Reserves in the oilfield total around 150 million barrels of oil. In response, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry summoned Turkmenistan’s ambassador in Baku, Toyly Komekov, where Deputy Foreign Minister Khalaf Khalafov expressed Azerbaijan`s strong protest over the violation of the agreement. The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry...

Vast stretches of Central Asia feel eerily uninhabited. Fly at 30,000 feet over... Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan -- and there are long moments when no town or road or field is visible from your window. Wandering bands and tribes roamed this immense area for 5,000 years, herding goat, sheep, cattle, and horses across immense steppes, through narrow valleys, and over high snowy passes. They left occasional tombs that survived the ages, and on rare occasions settled down and built towns or even cities. But for the most part, these peoples left behind few physical traces of their origins, beliefs, or ways...

Israel, only 'free' country in the region, ranks 65th in the world for press freedoms Freedom House Report: Israel maintains 'free' status, though just barely By Hillary Zaken and AP May 1, 2012, 12:07Global media freedom showed no overall decline for the first time in eight years, according to Freedom House's annual survey of freedom of the press, released Tuesday. Israel was ranked the only Free country in the Middle East and North Africa, with a rating of 30.The rating ties it with Greece and makes it the 65th most free country in the world for press freedoms.As decades-old authoritarian...

<p>WASHINGTON – The Russian military anticipates that an attack will occur on Iran by the summer and has developed an action plan to move Russian troops through neighboring Georgia to stage in Armenia, which borders on the Islamic republic, according to informed Russian sources.</p>

ISLAMABAD -- Pakistan will shoot down any U.S. drone that intrudes its air space per new directives, a senior Pakistani official told NBC News on Saturday. According to the new Pakistani defense policy, "Any object entering into our air space, including U.S. drones, will be treated as hostile and be shot down," a senior Pakistani military official told NBC News. The policy change comes just weeks after a deadly NATO attack on Pakistani military checkpoints accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, prompting Pakistani officials to order all U.S. personnel out of a remote airfield in Pakistan. Pakistan told the U.S. to...

The USSR might have imploded two decades ago, but debris from its headlong industrialization drive litter the post-Soviet landscape, and nothing more unsettles the population of the fifteen new nations carved out of the Soviet Union than its nuclear legacy. The poster child for Caucasian nuclear concerns is Armenia’s aging Metsamor nuclear power plant, which provides nearly 40 percent of the country’s electricity. The facility has not only alarmed neighboring Georgia, Turkey and Azerbaijan but begun to receive international notice as well - on 11 April National Geographic ran a story entitled “Is Armenia’s Nuclear Plant the World’s Most Dangerous?”...

ABADAN, Turkmenistan (AP) — Police guarded a smoldering blast site near the capital of Turkmenistan on Friday, a day after a series of mysterious blasts severely damaged hundreds of houses in the town.

One of Washington’s key policy tenets since the 1991 collapse of Communism has been to pry out from under Moscow’s control as much of the energy assets of the post-Soviet space as possible. Nowhere has this policy been more evident than in the Caspian basin and the energy riches of the new post-Soviet states of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. To the north lies Russia, with whom Washington jostles for these assets while Iran rings the Caspian’s southern shore, a rogue “axis of evil” member state that Washington has been punishing with sanctions on its energy sector since well before the...

In an unexpected benefit of the cold war's end, Russian and American archaeologists say they have discovered an ancient civilization that thrived in Central Asia more than 4,000 years ago, before being lost in the sweep of history. The people of that area, the archaeologists say, built oasis settlements with imposing mud-brick buildings and fortifications. They herded sheep and goats and grew wheat and barley in irrigated fields. They had bronze axes, fine ceramics, alabaster and bone carvings and jewelry of gold and semiprecious stones. They left luxury goods in the graves of an elite class. The accomplishments of those...

Recent events in Tunisia, Lebanon and Egypt spell a dangerous new trend in the region. There have been major developments in Tunisia, Lebanon and Egypt, each of which is of tremendous importance. In Tunisia, a popular uprising fueled by unemployment, economic suffering and long-term discontent has overthrown the dictator, but not necessarily the dictatorship. In 55 years of independence, the country has been governed by two dictators, the current one being Zine al-Abedin Ben Ali, who has been president for 23 years and was a key power in the regime even before that. Is this going to spread? Does it...

By Peter Zeihan STRATFOR often discusses how Russia is on a bit of a roll. The U.S. distraction in the Middle East has offered Russia a golden opportunity to re-establish its spheres of influence in the region, steadily expanding the Russian zone of control into a shape that is eerily reminiscent of the old Soviet Union. Since 2005, when this process began, Russia has clearly reasserted itself as the dominant power in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Ukraine, and has intimidated places like Georgia and Turkmenistan into a sort of silent acquiescence. But we have not spent a...

The fifth season of excavations at Akdepe settlement in Chandybil district of the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat, has come to an end. Deputy Director of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of Turkmenistan Professor Ovez Gundogdiev led the first national expedition. According to the Neitralny Turkmenistan newspaper, during the excavations the age of the settlement was defined. Until recently, Akdepe was dated to V-IV century BC, i.e. the Eneolithic age. However, the archeologists of the national expedition found pottery belonging to the Neolithic period (VI millennium BC), which corresponds to the Jeitun culture. "Our white-marble capital...

AFGHANISTAN: PRESIDENT CLAIMS ISLAMIC MILITANTS USING HELICOPTERS TO MOVE INTO NORTHERN AREAS " Islamic militants operating in northern Afghanistan are being dropped in by helicopter, Afghan President Hamid Karzai says. The provincial governor of Kunduz added separately the fighters are members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. According to Karzai, militants used unidentified helicopters to move fighters into position along the border with Tajikistan over the past five months. The same technique may be used to transport men to the north-western frontier with Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, he added."

WASHINGTON, March 31, 2009 – A meeting of chiefs of defense here re-emphasizes the shared commitments of Central Asia and the United States to security and stability in the region, the commander of U.S. Central Command said here today. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus told the defense chiefs from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan that the meeting will help all involved better address their common interests. Combating extremism and the spread of extremism from Afghanistan and Pakistan is at the top of the list of priorities, the general said. “[This means] that all of us have to...