Russian Copters Attack Tajik Rebels : Central Asia: Bloody combat on border near Afghanistan raises questions in Moscow about deployment of troops abroad.

Russian helicopters launched two rocket attacks Tuesday against Islamic rebels in Tajikistan in a flare-up of a civil war that has embroiled Russian troops in unusually fierce combat beyond their borders.

Scores of rebels and at least 29 soldiers from a Russian-led force of border guards backing the Tajik government have been reported killed in the last five days near the border with Afghanistan.

The fighting at a remote command post in southeastern Tajikistan has opened a new front in the former Soviet republic’s 3-year-old civil war and is the most serious breach of a cease-fire brokered last fall by the United Nations.

It also marks some of the most intense bloodshed involving Russians outside their post-Soviet borders.

In a Russia traumatized and drained by its own 4-month-old war to subdue the secessionist republic of Chechnya, the battle reports from distant Central Asia raise new anxiety about the stationing of troops abroad.

“Why are our boys being killed?” Russian lawmaker Ramazan Abdulatipov asked Tuesday.

Abdulatipov, the deputy Speaker of the upper house of Parliament, called for urgent hearings “to find out what our border guards are used for on the Tajik-Afghan border, what Russian interests they are protecting, and who should be held responsible for their deaths.”

Russia has sent 25,000 troops, now its largest external contingent, to defend Tajikistan’s Communist-led government against a coalition of democrats and Islamists who had seized and then lost power in bloody street fighting in 1992.

Defending a policy of projecting military might throughout much of the former Soviet Union, Kremlin leaders say the troops--Russians, Tajiks and Kazakhs under Russian command--are in Tajikistan to stop the flow of guns, illegal drugs and Islamic fundamentalism into Russia.

The defeated Tajik coalition now has most of its military bases in Afghanistan but maintains some strength in Badakhshan, an eastern Tajik region 1 1/2 times the size of Switzerland that stretches high into the Pamir Mountains. The region is somewhat autonomous from the Tajik capital, and rebel control there has barely been challenged.

Guerrilla leaders say the Tajik army and Russian-led border guards provoked the latest fighting by gradually moving hundreds of fighters into Badakhshan and seizing rebel arms since the cease-fire took effect Oct. 20, violating a provision against troop relocation.

Fighting erupted Friday after the Tajik army and a Kazakh contingent of the border guards set up a base in the village of Dashti-Yazgulem, near the city of Khorog. Rebels retaliated by attacking a nearby government command post and mining the main road to it.

By Saturday, Russian units had joined the battle, prompting rebels to shell Russian positions from Afghanistan. Kabul Radio said Sunday that four Russian jets bombed Afghan territory in retaliation--an assertion Moscow denied.

Moscow did report that its helicopters rocketed rebel positions in Badakhshan twice Tuesday, killing 47 people. Russian officials put the five-day rebel losses at 170; Russian news media said 40 rebels had been killed before Tuesday.

Russian Lt. Gen. Anatoly Chechulin, commander of the border guards in Tajikistan, described the rebel attacks as “the start of a well-prepared, coordinated spring offensive.”

The top U.N. mediator for Tajikistan, Ramiro Piriz-Ballon, rushed there over the weekend.

Piriz-Ballon, a Uruguayan special envoy of U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, called for a quick resumption of peace talks in Moscow. The Tajik government accepted. There was no immediate response from the guerrillas.

Momentum toward a peace settlement has waned since the fall, when Tajik President Emamali Rakhmonov won a new term.

And Russia’s war in Chechnya, launched in December, has deflated its once-vigorous effort to promote the U.N.-led peace talks.

While agreeing to new talks, Rakhmonov has called for more Russian military aid. But his request, and the fighting that prompted it, has only stirred new doubts in Russia about whether there should be any military aid in the first place.

“If our servicemen leave Tajikistan, Russia’s influence over the whole of the Central Asian region would weaken and southern borders of Russia would be practically open,” the Russian army newspaper, Red Star, commented Tuesday.

“If they stay,” the paper asked, “will Russia be economically and militarily capable of carrying the burden of a war in Tajikistan, on top of its other problems? And even if it can, will it not become ‘Enemy No. 1’ for the whole of the Islamic world?”