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Eastern Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region—comprising more than half of the historical mountainous region of Badakhshan, which it shares with northern Afghanistan—is one of the most isolated, impoverished and unsettled places in Central Asia. Gorno-Badakhshan was a center of resistance to Dushanbe during the civil war in the 1990s, and the central government has since worked hard to try to bring it to heel, alternating threats of a military crackdown with expanded economic assistance (see EDM, October 18, 2018; Ozodandishon, October 23, 2018).