Afghan crisis draws China and Russia closer on Central Asian stability as both step up army drills

Name: ‘We will hunt you down and make you pay’, Biden tells Kabul airport attackers
Uploaded: 2021-08-27T15:00:08.000Z
Duration: 1 min 30 s
Description: ‘We will hunt you down and make you pay’, Biden tells Kabul airport attackers

PLA and Russian troops to take part in anti-terror drills under SCO banner amid rising worries over security fallout in Central Asia after US exits Afghanistan

Beijing and Moscow driven by shared US rivalry and concerns about spillovers from the Afghan crisis, now compounded by the Isis-K bombings in Kabul

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Troops fast-rope out of a Chinese military helicopter during joint war games with Russia in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region in northwestern China on August 13. Photo: Handout via AP

Minnie Chan

Published: 11:00pm, 27 Aug 2021Updated: 11:00pm, 27 Aug 2021

China and Russia are gearing up for anti-terror and peacekeeping drills next month amid rising security concerns over Afghanistan that received a deadly boost from Thursday’s suicide attacks in Kabul, in a spiralling crisis that will push Beijing and Moscow to strengthen bilateral security cooperation, analysts said.

People’s Liberation Army soldiers will join Russian troops for two weeks of anti-terror drills from September 11 for a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) exercise in southwest Russia’s Orenburg region.

The “Peace Mission-2021” drills will also include the rest of the eight-nation group led by China and Russia. India, Pakistan, and four of the five countries in Central Asia – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – are all concerned about regional security in the aftermath of the US troop withdrawal from war-torn Afghanistan.

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‘We will hunt you down and make you pay’, Biden tells Kabul airport attackers

This year’s SCO counterterrorist drills would include reconnaissance and surveillance missions, fire strikes, containment and control, elimination of remnants, drone attacks and other countermeasures, a Chinese defence ministry statement said.

Chinese and Russian troops earlier this month took partin a five-day drill in northwestern China and faced off in Russia’s International Army Games. The flurry of military exercises comes as the two nations are drawn closer by a shared rivalry with the US and worries about stability in Central Asia in view of the worsening security situation in Afghanistan.

Eagle Yin, a research fellow at the China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies in Beijing, said the suicide bombings at Kabul airport could foreshadow a civil war in Afghanistan, heightening security concerns for all neighbouring countries. Isis-K, an Afghanistan-based offshoot of extremist group Islamic State, claimed responsibility for the attack which killed 13 US service members and at least 90 Afghans.

“China, Russia and other Central Asian countries are worried that an unstable Afghanistan would become a sanctuary for all extremist forces because most of them share common political and religious values,” Yin said.

“The SCO is a good platform to bring all the countries together under the leadership of China and Russia, to come up with useful measures to counter terrorist attacks.”

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