Turan Research Center

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla.

The 2026 war involving Iran has drawn attention to Iranian military-technological activity well beyond the Middle East. Tajikistan, the only Persian-speaking state in Central Asia, is a natural focus: it has sharply deepened its security, military-technical, and logistical cooperation with Tehran in recent years. The clearest symbol of that rapprochement was the 2022 announcement of an Iranian drone production facility on Tajik soil. This report weighs the expert debate over that project, examines what Tehran and Dushanbe each sought from it, and assesses the risk it poses of pulling Tajikistan into the conflicts and sanctions standoffs around Iran.

The Expert Debate on Iranian Drone Production in Tajikistan

 The status of Iran’s announced drone production in Tajikistan remains genuinely disputed among analysts—a question made more urgent by the 2026 war between Iran and a U.S.–Israeli coalition and its potential to spill into Central Asia.

 On May 17, 2022, Iran announced the opening of a drone manufacturing plant in Tajikistan, marking Iran’s first overseas drone production facility. The plant was designed to produce Ababil-2 drones. The opening ceremony was attended by the Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Mohammad Bagheri, and the Minister of Defense of Tajikistan, Sherali Mirzo. Bagheri was subsequently received by President Rahmon, who officially welcomed the "defensive and military cooperation" between Tajikistan and Iran. Neither principal remains in place: Bagheri was killed in June 2025 during the 12-day Israel–Iran war, and Mirzo was removed from his post in a January 2025 reshuffle.

 Crucially, the Ababil-2 is by no means Iran's most advanced drone. These are simpler and cheaper UAVs than the Shahed models currently employed by Iran. The Ababil-2 is a multi-role platform with both reconnaissance and strike capabilities, an approximate range of 200 km, and a relatively simple design well-suited for mass production.

 Tajikistan’s motives are clear. A developing state, it needs access to technology, military hardware included, and the project promised localization: on-site manufacturing, possible technology transfer, and with them a production base, investment, and jobs. The drones are meant largely for domestic use—patrolling the Afghan border and countering the radical Islamist groups based across it—but Dushanbe also needs to strengthen an army operating in a region thick with conflict and with organized crime networks that move Afghan narcotics into the post-Soviet space and on into Europe. Producing Iranian drones lets Dushanbe diversify its security partners and lean less heavily on Russia, China, and the West, while the cultural and linguistic affinity between the two countries eases both the politics and the transfer of technology.

 Skepticism and Conflicting Reports

 However, several Tajik experts believe the plant was never actually opened in 2022, suggesting it may be one of many corruption schemes in Iran-Tajikistan relations. They note that satellite imagery has failed to detect an active enterprise. Another view suggests that the Tajik leadership, later realizing the potential for Western sanctions, ensured the plant did not become operational and quietly dismissed the Defense Minister who initiated it. In this scenario, Iran was satisfied with the propaganda effect, and Iranian officials reported a successful foreign policy operation to their leadership.

 A competing reading points the other way. In March 2026, Tajikistan dispatched a large humanitarian aid shipment to Iran — 3,610 tons of cargo on 110 trucks that, according to Dushanbe, carried medicines, hygiene products, clothing, food, and construction materials. Open-source and Israeli-linked accounts alleged the trucks might instead be carrying drones produced in Tajikistan, noting that the convoy was unusually large for a country with Tajikistan's limited resources and went without independent verification. The suspicion rests on a documented precedent: Reuters, citing nine Syrian, Iranian, Israeli, and Western sources, reported that Tehran had been using humanitarian channels to transfer weapons to allies in Syria after the 2023 earthquake—an account Iran denied. The Tajik allegation remains unverified, but it fits a tactic Iran has used elsewhere.

 The Tajik Drone Project as Part of Iranian Geopolitical Strategy

 At the 2022 opening, General Mohammad Bagheri stated the plant was a "turning point" and that Iran would produce drones in the Tajik capital "both for its own needs and for supplies to allied and friendly countries". Currently, Iranian supplies to the "Axis of Resistance" fighting the US, Israel, and Gulf monarchies include the Yemen-based Houthis and Lebanese Hezbollah. This suggests Iran originally intended to link Tajik production to its global drone export network.

 That ambition is precisely what risks turning Tajikistan from a beneficiary of the partnership into an instrument of Iranian strategy.

 The pattern is familiar from Iran’s typical military-technological export strategy. Tehran generally exports basic systems first before gradually upgrading the level of technology, as was specifically the case with short-range missiles and UAVs in Syria and Yemen.

 On this logic, Tajikistan was likely meant to serve as an infrastructure bridgehead — for training personnel, building out logistics, and upgrading production over time — with the plant eventually moving to more complex, modern UAVs.

Tehran treated the Tajik factory as a breakthrough. Iran had long supplied drones to Middle Eastern allies and helped them produce, maintain, and upgrade the systems, but an official plant in a neutral state with an internationally recognized government marked a new export model for its military-industrial complex.

 Seen this way, Tajikistan offered Iran a relatively "safe territory" for its military industry: far from Israel and the United States, under less international scrutiny than Middle Eastern states, and so at lower risk of direct strikes, sabotage, or heavy sanctions pressure.

 That arrangement carried a real risk of pulling Tajikistan into Middle Eastern conflicts — and the exposure was not confined to the Middle East. Against the backdrop of Tajikistan’s deep corruption, Western and Russian outlets leveled competing accusations at Dushanbe over the sale of Iranian-designed drones to Russia or, conversely, to Ukraine.

 In April 2022, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Stop Iranian Drones Act, House-passed legislation that amended the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act to cover combat drones, extending the threat of sanctions to foreign entities that supply, sell, transfer, or support Iranian UAVs. Joint drone production with Iran therefore raised Dushanbe’s exposure to U.S. sanctions in Tajikistan. Dushanbe almost certainly understood the danger and worked to manage it, though how far it actually stalled the Iranian project remains unclear — as the conflicting assessments above make plain.

 Sanctions Risks and "Plausible Deniability"

 This raises the operative question: could a facility — non-functional by some accounts, barely functioning by others — still serve Iran as a means to circumvent sanctions and international agreements, and in doing so expose Tajikistan to the covert operations of the IRGC?

 The actions of the Iranian military and intelligence services in Tajikistan are facilitated by the fact that in April 2025, Iran and Tajikistan signed a memorandum on expanding security cooperation. The memorandum covers cooperation against terrorism, drug trafficking, organized crime, the smuggling of nationals, and human trafficking. The scope for Iranian use of Tajik territory matters more now that the 2026 war with the U.S. and Israel may leave Tehran bound by new commitments. As experience with such agreements shows, it will likely seek ways to bypass the restrictions imposed upon it.

 Suppose Iran commits to abandoning aggressive expansion in the Middle East — the terrorist acts and military operations of the so-called "Axis of Resistance." The IRGC would then need to continue that policy informally, without breaching the agreement, and moving the activity offshore becomes the obvious answer. Remote Tajikistan could serve as exactly that bypass channel.

Iran operates under extensive international sanctions and monitoring. Even a nominally functioning plant in Tajikistan could therefore help obscure the true origin of military goods, complicate supply-chain tracing, and route activity through a “third-country jurisdiction.”

The most straightforward scenario would involve Iranian drones or other military equipment being exported to third countries or non-state actors under documentation formally identifying Tajikistan as the point of origin or intermediary. A more realistic possibility is a form of “soft” sanctions evasion. For example, a drone assembled in Tajikistan could formally be classified as locally manufactured and carry Tajik labeling. From there, particularly given Tajikistan’s high levels of corruption, such systems could potentially be transferred to virtually any conflict zone worldwide. This would create a degree of plausible deniability, making it considerably more difficult to prove direct Iranian involvement in the export process.

Such a mechanism could in turn evolve into a more sophisticated “fragmented supply chain”: components sourced from several countries, final assembly in Tajikistan, the drone’s true origin blurred both legally and logistically, and Iranian involvement that much harder to prove. Exposure, though, would put Tajikistan itself at serious risk, secondary international sanctions included.

Dushanbe is aware of these risks and will try to avoid them. But given the scale of Tajik corruption and Iran’s demonstrated willingness to exploit corrupt networks abroad, whether the government can fully insulate itself remains an open question.

Corruption and the Iranian Exploitation of Tajik Infrastructure 

Evidence shows Tajikistan was previously used by the IRGC to launder funds from illegal oil trade. Businessman Babak Zanjani admitted to using a network of 64 companies to bypass sanctions and transfer nearly $17.5 billion to Iran. Some of these funds moved through Tajikistan’s Kont Investment Bank in Dushanbe and other Zanjani’s properties in this country, including an airline, a taxi company, and a bus terminal. Zanjani had close ties to the Tajik elite, though the government later distanced itself from him. The Basel Institute on Governance’s AML Index has ranked Tajikistan among the world’s highest money-laundering risks. It topped that index as recently as 2018, though Tajikistan’s score has since improved.

 The U.S. Department of the Treasury noted that the Zanjani group was used by the Iranian government to facilitate global oil sales and highlighted Zanjani’s links to Khatam al-Anbiya, the engineering arm of the IRGC. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) explicitly included the Zanjani-linked Kont Investment Bank in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in its list of sanctioned entities on April 11, 2013, designating it under the regime covering proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). U.S. Treasury filings thus confirm that the IRGC has used Tajik territory for oil-sales operations whose proceeds could, among other things, have financed Iran’s nuclear program or its terrorist activity.

The corruption involved was so severe that Zanjani was later accused by Iran of embezzling $2.7 billion that was supposed to return to the treasury. While Zanjani claimed the money was in a Tajik bank, Tajik authorities called his documents "fake". Although initially sentenced to death by Iranian court, Zanjani resumed economic activity in 2025, suggesting the Iranian authorities still value his expertise in money laundering and exploitation of corruption schemes abroad.

Strategic Risks of Iran–Tajikistan Military Cooperation

Whether or not a single Ababil-2 was ever assembled in Dushanbe may be the least important question here. The factory’s real significance is as a template: proof that Iran will site military-industrial capacity — or merely its paperwork — in weakly governed states far from Israeli reach and Western scrutiny. For Western policymakers, that reframes the target. Sanctions enforcement designed for Iranian soil will miss a model built on third-country labeling, corruption, and the kind of IRGC influence documented in Tajikistan. And for Dushanbe, the lesson is sharper still: the same neutrality and opacity that attract Iranian investment are what could one day place Tajikistan, not Iran, on the receiving end of secondary sanctions.

Dr. Andrei Kazantsev-Vaisman is a Research Fellow at the Turan Research Center specializing in international relations and security in Eurasia. He is also a fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University and has held academic appointments at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, the Eurasian National University in Astana, and Narxoz University in Almaty. During the war on terror in Afghanistan, he directed the Center for Central Asian and Afghan Studies at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and served on the Russian–American Working Group on Counterterrorism in Afghanistan under the East–West Institute. He is the author of over 100 publications, including 25 peer-reviewed articles indexed in Scopus, and his expert analysis has been cited by major international media including The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, The Washington Post, BBC, and Deutsche Welle.