Tajik president’s son goes to Iran as one of Kerman bombers identified as Tajik citizen

The speaker of the Tajik parliament’s upper house, Rustam Emomali, on Monday left for Iran on a visit — days after the Iranian authorities said one of the two suicide bombers involved in the Kerman attack was a Tajik citizen.

The attack on the commemoration ceremony for the late Major General Qasem Soleimani on 3 January killed 89 people. Soleimani, a senior Revolutionary Guards commander, had been assassinated by the US four years ago.

Iranian authorities said the attack had been carried out by two Islamic State members, one of whom was a citizen of Tajikistan, and they are working on determining the identity of the second bomber.

The Iranian authorities have also arrested 11 people for allegedly helping the bombers to enter Iran, they said.

The Islamic State has taken responsibility for the bombing.

The official Tajik reports on speaker Rustam Emomali’s trip to Iran did not give any details about the visit. Emomali is also mayor of the capital Dushanbe and President Emomali Rahmon’s son.

According to Iranian reports, Emomali is expected to meet the speaker of the Iranian Islamic Council and other officials.

“We hope the visit will lead to an expansion of relations and a new chapter in our bilateral cooperation,” the Islamic Council was quoted as saying.

Tajikistan, the only majority Persian-speaking nation in Central Asia, was after independence keen to expand relations with Iran, seeing it as a counterweight to Russia’s influence.  

However, the ties deteriorated in the 2010s after Tehran accused Tajik banks of involvement in a scheme to steal Iranian oil money, and after the Iranian government invited an exiled Tajik opposition leader to a conference.

Relations have improved in the past two years, with President Rahmon visiting Tehran in May 2022, and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi paying a return visit to Dushanbe in November. 

In December, Iran unilaterally abolished entry visa requirements for citizens of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, along with nationals from another 29 countries, in a move aimed at countering “Iranophobia”.

Due to economic issues and political suppression at home, thousands of Tajiks have since independence joined various militant Islamist groups based in neighbouring Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere.

In another development, on Christmas eve German authorities arrested a native of Tajikistan over a suspected plot to carry out “a series of terrorist attacks” during the holiday period, according to reports.

Several days later, German police arrested three more Tajiks linked to the first suspect, who was named as 30-year-old Muhammad Rajab B. They said all four were members of the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), an IS offshoot in Afghanistan.

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