Khorog at rush hourTHE region of Badakhshan, which covers most of the eastern half of Tajikistan but hosts barely 3% of its population, is probably the poorest bit of the former Soviet Union’s poorest country. Scraping a living at the rugged western end of the Pamir mountains, its people feel remote from the government in Dushanbe. Their biggest town, Khorog, where anti-government violence has broken out twice in the past four years, is slap on the border with turbulent Afghanistan to the south. Warlords and drug-traffickers, often one and the same, frequently hold sway on both sides of the frontier. The inhabitants, most of whom follow the Ismaili version of Shia Islam, were generally on the losing side of the vicious civil war that ravaged Tajikistan from 1992 to 1997.
Their biggest benefactor by far is the Ismailis’ hereditary leader, Prince Karim Aga Khan. A Swiss-born British citizen, he is resident mainly in France; one of his horses recently won the Epsom Derby, one of the grandest British races of the year; he also skied for Iran in the 1964 Winter Olympics.
His most ambitious educational project in...Continue reading
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