Word: kyrgyz
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...know when you've arrived by the number of American military aircraft lining the runway. Located 25 km north of the capital Bishkek, the U.S. air base at Manas - Kyrgyzstan's main airport - briefly hit international headlines after the Kyrgyz parliament, under pressure from Russia and China, voted to shut it down in 2009. The U.S government's offer to pay much higher rent meant that the base (now officially called a Transit Center in deference to local sensibilities) survived the threat of closure. It remains today as an embarkation point for troops bound for Afghanistan, and a reminder...
...national sport, ulak tartysh, at the hippodrome on the west side of town. Teams of riders vie to grab the corpse of a headless goat from the ground at full gallop and heave it into a vat. The big contests are held during the Nooruz Festival (March 21) and Kyrgyz Independence Day (Aug. 31), but smaller events take place at other times...
...republics. An increased American interest in the region - if only as a logistical hub for its war effort in Afghanistan - has driven Moscow to reassert itself in its backyard. After the U.S. secured its lease of an air base in Kyrgyzstan this month, Russia now intends to persuade the Kyrgyz government to allow the building of a second Russian base on its soil. Moscow sees its pervasive influence, both economic and political, in the region as a stabilizing force...
...clout in its backyard when Kyrgyzstan announced on June 23 that it would renew an American lease on its air base in Manas, a critical transshipment point for U.S. and NATO military operations in Afghanistan. That decision was a victory for the Obama Administration: just four months ago, the Kyrgyz government had said that the U.S. military had to go. More broadly, Moscow's ability to project its power has been reduced by the fall in the price of oil since last summer; nearly 20 years after the end of communism and the introduction of market reforms, Russia's economy...
...Analysts fear that the deteriorating economic climate, a legacy of ineffectual governance, and an increasingly frustrated population may feed into the designs of established militant groups in the region. The Ferghana Valley, the most densely populated pocket of Central Asia, straddles the Uzbek, Tajik and Kyrgyz borders, and is home to the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a State Department listed terror organization. Militants are known to slip easily across the porous 1,300 km boundary between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, which is also a chief thoroughfare for Afghan opium into the markets of the West. According...