Tajikistan

Tajikistan is a landlocked country in Central Asia bordered by Afghanistan to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north and China to the east, separated from Pakistan only by Afghanistan's narrow Wakhan Corridor, and covers 143,100 square kilometers, the 94th-largest country in the world; mountains cover more than 90 percent of its territory, with elevations exceeding 3,000 meters across most regions. Dushanbe, with over 1.2 million residents, is the capital and largest city of a country whose total population exceeds 11 million, about 97.5 percent of them Muslim and most ethnically Tajik, with Tajik as the national language and Russian used for inter-ethnic communication. The territory hosted a succession of ancient civilizations before falling under Russian imperial control in the nineteenth century; it became a constituent Soviet republic after Soviet annexation in 1929, declared independence on 9 September 1991, and then endured a civil war that lasted until 1997. Tajikistan is a unitary presidential republic under the authoritarian rule of President Emomali Rahmon, who has led the country since 1994; its developing, transitional economy depends heavily on remittances, aluminium production and cotton cultivation.