Takeover in Tajik Capital Ends as Foes Reach Accord

The U.S. Embassy in war-torn Tajikistan was evacuated Sunday, but by nightfall the militants who had seized key government buildings the day before in Dushanbe, the capital, were withdrawing and local television was saying that “the attempted putsch has failed.”

Leaders of the two factions fighting for power in the poorest former Soviet republic, acting President Akbarsho Iskandarov and former Parliament Speaker Safarali Kenjayev, agreed to call an emergency session of the Central Asian nation’s Parliament as early as today, news reports said.

Significantly, the Interfax news agency said the rivals agreed to hold the Parliament session in Khudjant, formerly Leninabad, the hometown and a key power base of the longtime Communist hard-line leader whose cause Kenjayev champions, Rakhman Nabiyev, who was forced to resign as president Sept. 7.

In a written accord, the rivals also stipulated that 150 of Kenjayev’s supporters who stormed the Parliament building Saturday should be allowed to leave unharmed, but without their arms, Tajikistan state television said in a news flash.

Forces loyal to the acting president also regained control of the Council of Ministers headquarters and other government agencies in Dushanbe, Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency reported.

The pullback of the insurgents followed a day and a half of bitter fighting in which hundreds in the city of 800,000 were killed, according to Interfax.

Interfax said the warring factions had agreed on a cease-fire by Sunday night and that police officials were trying to set up a corridor in the mountain-ringed city to disengage the belligerents.

The bloody struggle for power in Tajikistan, cloaked in ideological rhetoric, also has a clan basis: Nabiyev is supported by Tajiks from the more industrialized Kulyab and Khudjant regions, and he was ousted by members of other clans under the dual banner of democracy and Muslim revival.

Intense gun battles were reported overnight in Dushanbe’s downtown, and starting early Sunday morning, skirmishes with automatic weapons, heavy-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers raged in the center as Iskandarov’s forces tried to dislodge the insurgents.

U.S. Ambassador Stanley Escudero had alerted the State Department on Saturday that heavy fighting, including tank and machine-gun fire, was under way around the hotel that houses the U.S. Embassy and its staff.

Given the “increasingly volatile security situation,” the decision was made to temporarily evacuate the embassy, State Department press officer Julie Reside said in Washington.

It was the first time a U.S. mission to a former Soviet republic has been shut because of violent unrest.

With Russian army units providing a protective screen, Escudero and his staff, also accompanied by some Canadian and British nationals, drove without incident Sunday afternoon to Dushanbe’s airport and boarded a U.S. military plane that had ferried in humanitarian aid that morning, the Russian Embassy in Dushanbe reported.