OREANDA-NEWS. Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon said during an online summit of the CSTO Council that events in Kazakhstan confirm the importance of strengthening the common fight against terrorism. In this connection, he requested that special attention be paid to what is happening in Afghanistan, and noted that the CSTO has not yet adopted a number of security measures.

"We are particularly concerned that the targeted inter-state programme for strengthening the Tajik-Afghan border has not been adopted yet,"- he said. The situation on the Tajik-Afghan border is becoming more difficult every day, with fighting taking place right along the border between the Taliban (a banned terrorist group) themselves,"- Rakhmon said.

In the past week alone, more than 11 people were killed along a section of the Afghan-Tajik border, he said.

Overall, there are more than 40 terrorist training camps and centres in the north-eastern provinces of Afghanistan bordering the CSTO, where up to 6,000 militants are trained, Rakhmon said.

"The CSTO member states need to take very seriously the fact that some of our citizens, seeing terrorists' positions in Afghanistan strengthened and gaining their support, might resort to the most extreme measures,"- the Tajik president said.

In this connection, Rakhmon suggested creating a "security belt.

International terrorist groups were involved in Kazakhstan's turmoil January 5, Tajik President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said before he appealed to CSTO leaders for support during the crisis. He justified the request by saying that Kazakhstan has been exposed to external threats, according to Kazakhstani officials.

The Secretariat of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) confirmed that the Kazakh side's request for assistance regarded the situation in that country as an "incursion by bandits trained from abroad".

The Kazakh authorities had not previously specified where exactly they believed the external attack was coming from and where exactly the militants were being trained. Anatoly Antonov, the Russian ambassador to the United States, linked the protests in Kazakhstan to Afghanistan. "I would note that all of this is taking place after the American flight from Afghanistan and the rapid development of extremist ideas and currents in the region against this background,"- Antonov said. At the same time, he described what is happening as an attempt at a 'coloured revolution'.