And the Taliban does have a presence in Darzab district. The border is defined by the course of the Amu Darya River. Khan said he told Turkmen Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov that "weapons [sent] to Herat are supplied from Turkmenistan." Central Asia's Anxious Watch On The Afghan Border Violence increased noticeably across northern Afghanistan after their arrival.
The Taliban has overrun Afghanistan’s Khamyab District and is now Turkmenistan’s immediate neighbor.
But since they are not on the frontier with Central Asia, they are also excluded from this review.The length of the Turkmen-Afghan border is 744 kilometers, although, as is the case with the Tajik-Afghan border, there are other figures for this frontier.The Amu Darya River forms about the first 100 kilometers of the eastern Turkmen-Afghan border before turning sharply north, heading toward the Aral Sea.From there, the Turkmen-Afghan border dips toward the southwest through relatively flat, sandy land, much of which is in or on the edges of the Gara-Gum (Kara-Kum) Desert. In any case, it is not part of this review.The situations in Bahglan, Samandar, and Sari Pul, which are just south of Takhar, Kunduz, Balkh, and Jowzjan, and east of Faryab, are arguably worse than in those provinces bordering Central Asia. The border runs from the Tajikistan-Uzbekistan-Afghanistan tripoint to the tripoint connecting the two countries to Turkmenistan.
The Turkmen population in Afghanistan is concentrated mainly along the northern border with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The same two groups were Badghis has not seen the intensity of fighting witnessed in the Faryab and Jowzjan provinces recently, but it has become the second-largest area of opium-poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, according to a In addition to the problems in Jowzjan, Faryab, and Badghis, the biggest concern for Turkmenistan at the moment just came from Herat. (There has been fighting for weeks in Herat's southern Shindand district. The originally Uzbek-dominated group now includes several nationalities and is under Tajik command.This group has maintained its alliance with the Taliban, unlike an IMU group in northwestern Afghanistan.In late September 2016, the Taliban and Jundallah launched an attack on the provincial capital, Kunduz, briefly seizing it as they had done almost exactly one year earlier. Afghan Channel 1 TV reported on February 28 that Russia was supplying arms to the Taliban units in Kunduz's Qala-e Zal, Iman Sahib, and Dasht-e Archi districts.The same accusation has been made to justify Afghan government forces' failure to retake the Darqad district of Takhar Province.And some Afghan officials have gone so far as to claim Tajikistan was allowing Taliban vehicles entry onto its territory for repair, allowing wounded Taliban to be treated at medical facilities in Tajikistan, and turning a blind eye to militants sheltering on heavily wooded islands in the Pyanj River.Tajik authorities deny all this, and Russia denies giving weapons to the Taliban.
)During that late September offensive, the Taliban also briefly captured two central districts in Badakhshan -- Wardoj and Baharak. The two districts bordering Turkmenistan -- Qarqeen and Khamyab -- where the government exerts at best tenuous control, have been relatively quiet in recent months, possibly due to an offensive that Afghanistan's vice president, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, led in Jowzjan and Faryab provinces in October.An earlier security operation led by Dostum in October 2015 in the Khamyab district chased militants to an island in the Amu Darya, where the latter encountered border guards from Turkmenistan.
The IMU sheltered with the Taliban in Pakistan's tribal areas in the first years after the U.S.-led operation started in late 2001.IMU fighters have been trickling back in northeastern Afghanistan to link up with Taliban units for more than a decade, and several times during this period conflicts with Pakistani tribesmen or Pakistani military operations pushed groups of IMU fighters back into Afghanistan.