MOSCOW. June 14 (Interfax-AVN) - Tajik border guards on Tuesday assumed control over the country's border with Afghanistan, taking over supervision from their Russian colleagues, the border service of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) told Interfax.
"On Tuesday, the last frontier post of the Pyandzh unit was handed over to the Tajik border guards. Thus the entire 1,344 kilometer long Tajik-Afghan border is under the control of the Tajik Border Service Committee," spokesman for the Federal Security Service border department in Tajikistan Colonel Alexander Kondratyev told Interfax from Dushanbe.
He said that Russian border guards would soon hand over two cantonments in the Moscow and Pyandzh border units together with the infrastructure.
Kondratyev said his department would be reformed into an operational force that would start operating as of January 1, 2006.