Transnational smuggling routes throughout Central Asia are not a new problem: the region has served for centuries as a vast transit hub for both legal and illicit trade to Europe and the Middle East.
More recently, China’s new transnational One Belt, One Road (OBOR) strategy, which seeks to revive Central Asia as a nexus of regional trade, was linked to the facilitation of illicit trade and transnational crime in a report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
This fear was exemplified on 7 March, when the Kyrgyz Republic arrested several drug control officers for illegally possessing over 7 kg of heroin. In a region where state security services actively participate in a lucrative opiate trade out of Afghanistan, this is hardly surprising.
What is less clear is the extent to which these same drug trafficking methods and routes are being used to smuggle bomb-grade nuclear material from former Soviet states to terrorist groups.
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