Only if you’re lucky, will you catch a glimpse of him. He swoops in and then disappears, now giving his blessing to newlyweds at a sunrise shaman wedding, next whispering in the ear of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s loyal allies. Moments later, he reappears on horseback, trotting by in a procession of horsemen in medieval garb — Hungarian flag in hand, his long black hair tied in a low ponytail, — to greet high profile guests from Turkey, Azerbaijan and Central Asia.

Andras Biro is the master of ceremonies for a biennial gathering, in Hungary, of 27 Turkic-speaking tribes called Kurultaj. It is where the right-wing government is promoting a policy of redefining itself as part of the Eastern world. Wrapped in a heavily embroidered silk robe, Biro is the leading ideologue of Hungary’s spin on ethno-nationalism: it asserts that the nation’s true roots are not in a Christian Europe but with Turkey and among the Turkic-speaking people of Central Asia, the descendants of the Huns.

Once banned under communism and pushed to the margins of the far right, this alternative history — known as Turanism — is being revived by the Hungarian government at the highest levels. Some of the central claims of Turanism have already made their way into Hungary’s national school curriculum, presenting an alternative Hungarian origin story. For Orban, Turanism has provided a convenient ideological basis for turning away from the EU and promoting closer ties with authoritarian regimes in Central Asia and with Turkey. In November, he said that “Hungarians are the only Eastern people left in Europe.”

The Kurultaj gathering is a mecca for this anti-establishment movement. The festival is financed by the government and designed for a family-friendly weekend. Kurultaj draws pilgrims from across the political spectrum to a scorching semi-desert in Hungary’s south. Right-wing historians, LARPers, horse-lovers, uniformed members of the banned Hungarian Guard, eco-activists, committed neo-Nazis, yogis and families from the suburbs mill around a vast, dusty field with hundreds of delegates from Central Asia, Turkey and the Caucasus.

The centerpiece is an irrigated, verdant pitch where skilled riders re-enact Byzantine battles and compete in ethnosport. An actor playing Attila the Hun makes regular dashes across the field on horseback to cheers from the crowd in between speeches from a range of special guests — among them youngest son of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, along with the former prime minister of Turkey, speaker of Hungary’s parliament Laszlo Kover and the president of the Organization of Turkic States. The sounds from the field are a constant echo across the festival grounds: heavy metal and Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5, the boom of speakers’ voices intoning the moral corruption of the West and its “woke” culture and the ever-present percussion of horse hooves.

Largely dismissed by Hungary’s liberal elite, Turanism proponents — like Biro — have reinvigorated an ideology that was popular nearly 100 years ago. The idea first appeared in Hungary in the late 19th century, during a time of political collapse, when a circle of Budapest intellectuals began to question Hungary’s fixation with catching up with the West.

Historian Balazs Ablonczy traces the emergence of the word “Turan” in Hungarian to the 1800s, to describe the territory that is divided between modern-day Iran and Central Asian states. Turanism reemerged during the 2008 economic crisis from the margins of Hungary’s ultra-right wing. Over the last decade, Turanism has evolved into an amalgam of ideas bringing together disparate and at times contradictory beliefs. 

In their weaponization of nostalgia, Orban and his political party Fidesz have shown just how well they understand what is often lost on Hungary’s, and Europe’s, left wing: the power of a good story.

“The left wing has left history to Fidesz,” said Adam Kolozsi, a Budapest-based journalist who has been attending Kurultaj for years. Since the first gathering in 2008, event organizers — who refer to themselves as “tradition keepers” — have been fusing together right-wing politics with history, entertainment and horses. 

Turanic messaging expresses a yearning for a lost national greatness and a connection to a much larger role in the world, which a pan-Turkic identity offers. “Even if we’re small at the moment, we are a great nation,” one festival attendee, Mate Herzsenath, told me while drinking a beer. Herzsenath lives in Germany, where he says he can make more money, and was one of many Hungarians I met living outside of the country who returned home for Kurultaj.

“The entire 19th century was all about westernizing Hungary — inventing Hungarians as civilized, liberal, western, constitutional individuals,” said Gergely Romsics, a senior fellow at the Research Center for the Humanities at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Many proponents of Turanism view those efforts as criminally wrongheaded and consider the Hungarian defeat in World War I, which brought the loss of 75% of its territory, as proof.

Hungary is not alone in its turn east. Turanism is in step with a similar movement called Eurasianism in Russia, a pet project of Russian President Vladimir Putin, that argues that Russia is the heir apparent of the Mongol empire, destined to keep expanding its borders. In promoting kinship with the East and fostering a yearning for a greater past, both Putin and Orban stoke a popular mandate for embracing authoritarianism. The Huns, after all, didn’t conquer the world with democracy.

Since 2008, the crowds at Kurultaj have multiplied, and an entire academic and political apparatus has sprouted around the idea of a Turkic brotherhood.

Hungary's pride

The day before marching out onto the main pitch at the festival in his knee-high leather boots and sparkling silver and turquoise jewelry, Biro spoke before Hungary’s parliament, in a suit, about the importance of preserving traditions. 

For the next three days in the sweltering mid-August heat, I chased the tails of Biro’s floor-length, blue-and-silver robes, hoping he could explain how he managed to bring 200,000 visitors (according to the official event count, though it appeared to be fewer than half this number to me) to a festival celebrating the genetic ties between white European Hungarians and Asian, Turkish and Middle Eastern nations. After all, this year’s Kurultaj festival followed remarks from Orban in which he asserted that Hungarians are not “a mixed race” and that countries where Europeans and non-Europeans mingle are “no longer nations.” It made no sense.

I caught sight of Biro as he prepared the seating arrangements in the VIP section along the main parade pitch. He adjusted the angle of chairs and name tags, giving out directions to an assistant. The biggest names this year were prominent speakers from Turkey and Central Asian countries. But many festival attendees seemed wary of the politicians. The men — all of the invited speakers were men — were easy to spot as they sweated through their crumpling business suits and moved through the festival grounds with entourages and security details.

Many attendees, on the other hand, wore colorful native clothing from various continents. One couple I met had borrowed their elaborate costumes from the local theater where they worked. “It’s difficult to live in modernity,” Balazs Lengyel told me. “It’s gray and empty.” He and his wife Erika Lengyelne attend Kurultaj every year to be reborn at the gathering. Balazs seemed lost in thought as he spoke to me of his longing for a link to a shared past. Erika was more direct: “We are opposed to the EU. We have nothing to do with the West. It’s all a lie made up during communism. Fifty years of communism took away our pride.”

Katrin Kremmler has studied Kurultaj since 2014. She is now finishing her PhD on the subject at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University. Kremmler and I met up in Budapest where she had traveled from Berlin to attend the festival with a Hungarian friend. Before driving over to Kurultaj, she warned the friend to tear off a LGBTQ bumper sticker, worried about the car being vandalized while parked.

As a seasoned Kurultaj attendee, Kremmler had a few other pre-Kurultaj tips. I had asked her about fitting in at the festival, and she kindly sent over a couple addresses for Kurultaj lifestyle shopping in Budapest. 

In one shop in central Budapest I found head-to-toe traditional Hungarian costumes for sale, along with the legendary Hungarian sudar: a bull whip up to eight feet in length. The end of the whip makes a sonic boom as it reaches the speed of sound. Hungarians claim that it’s the first human-made tool to cross the sound barrier, and it’s a staple at Kurultaj for both the professional horse riders and drunk attendees taking a crack.

There were also more modern clothing options: black t-shirts with a Christian cross stenciled next to “HETERÓ,” shirts with the slogan “Europe Belongs to Me” and multiple apparel options showing maps of “greater Hungary.” Orban has been spotted in a scarf that shows a map of Hungary with its imperial territories intact, which includes parts of modern-day Ukraine, Romania, Austria, Serbia and other countries. At another Turanism shop, this time on the Buda side of the city, I looked through a collection of anti-Covid lockdown buttons next to more anti-LGBTQ slogans and adverts for a children’s summer camp.

“Everyone finds something that they like and tunes out what they don’t identify with,” said Kremmler, trying to explain the mish-mashing of ideologies brought together by Kurultaj and Turanism. Her PhD focuses on the contradictions within the right wing’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and its embrace of Eurasia. She noted that Bugac, the village where the festival takes place, is about an hour’s drive from Hungary’s southern border with Serbia, a major corridor for migrants from the Middle East attempting to enter the EU. Men dressed in the all-black uniforms of the Hungarian Guard, a paramilitary group outlawed in 2009, patrolled the festival grounds.

Kremmler believes that for years Hungary’s liberal elite failed to understand Turanism. Today, the festival is able to attract top researchers from the Hungarian National Museum and other academic institutions. This is also the first year she’s managed to convince any of her Budapest friends or colleagues to join her at Kurultaj.

“It’s parallel realities,” said Kremmler. “Urban liberal elites think they can ignore these developments because they consider it pseudoscience. But it’s not fringe. It’s the new mainstream because the government is working hard to make this the new popular mainstream.”

Some of the claims of the Turanism movement have now entered Hungary’s schools. Curriculum updates in 2020 included an intense focus on medieval history and introduced alternatives to Hungary’s accepted consensus on its national origins. Hungarians had learned that their language is most closely related to the languages spoken by the Finno-Ugric people found in Finland and Estonia and by indigenous tribes living in Russia. 

When this was first discovered by scholars in the 18th century, it came as a bit of a shock. Surrounded by German, Slavic and Romanian speakers, some people found it “degrading,” said Gabor Egry, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Political History in Budapest. It also encouraged a sense of ethnic uniqueness. 

The new school curriculum introduces the idea that the origin of the Hungarian language is up for debate and that Hungarians may in fact be closer relatives of the Turkic-speaking tribes originating in Kazakhstan. 

Archaeogenetics, a field of research championed by Biro, is supercharging the argument that Hungarians came from Central Asia. Archaeogenetics relies on gathering a set of historic DNA samples — sometimes centuries old — that the researchers evaluate as representative of an entire population. The research requires expensive equipment that the government has helped to fund, to look at DNA samples from the 9th and 10th centuries. The field often faces criticism on how the results are interpreted. 

“It fits this broader rewriting of history: a more nationalistic, more triumphalist narrative which must emphasize Hungarian victories and greatness,” Egry said. ”Emphasizing these Eastern origins could imply that Hungary belongs to this emerging world and not the declining one.”

The new history was played on repeat at Kurultaj.

“Everything they were teaching at school is not true,” said Malinda Kovacs, who described herself as a proud Hungarian, a mother and a homemaker, is captivated by Native American traditions and had a full-back tattoo showing the busts of several Native American men.

Hungary’s school curriculum changes also included replacing the works of writer Imre Kertsz — a Hungarian Jew who is the country’s only Nobel Prize winner in literature — with the assigned reading of Jozsef Nyiro, an admirer of Joseph Goebels, and Albert Wass, a convicted war criminal. Some teachers have protested online under the hashtag #noNAT, as part of a wider movement of ongoing teacher unrest in the country. 

Memory warfare

Kremmler, the Berlin academic, has studied 21st-century Turanism and its leader, Andras Biro, who has a PhD and is affiliated with the Hungarian Museum of Natural Sciences.

"When Biro started his whole genetics project I guess this could have been contested if someone from the genetics field, in Hungary or internationally, had actually taken the time or energy to review his research,” she told me over lunch in Budapest. Instead, critics of his work came almost exclusively from among scholars in the humanities who didn’t engage with the genetic research he was touting.

“This is about a new construct of ethnicity that the government is producing,” Kremmler said. 

Kremmler, whose mother is Hungarian, first came to Hungary in the 1990s to learn the language and join the academic community. She remembers it as an exciting time, a period of critical research burgeoning in the wake of communism. She’s now watching the pendulum swing the other way.

“It’s all really fascinating, unless it’s happening in your own country,” said Margit Feischmidt, laughing when we met at the Research Center for Social Sciences in Budapest, where she is the head of sociology and anthropology. I told her about some of my Kurultaj-themed shopping earlier that day. “It’s fascinating, and at the same time catastrophic,” said Feischmidt. Over three decades, she has watched an exodus of researchers from Hungary who leave out of an unwillingness to collaborate with the government.

When I finally caught up with Biro at Kurultaj, it was in the large yurt at the festival where the guest speakers convened for meetings. He has just finished a closed session with some of the guests from Turkey and Central Asia, among them President Erdogan’s youngest son.

“There has already been cooperation in the field of science or sport and now it’s on a political level,” Biro said, smiling with his white teeth flashing.

“From several thousands kilometers away, a Kazakh or an Uzbek comes over here and they do everything as we do, they understand everything: the common legends, the names, the ceremonies, the food,” Biro said. “Besides, legends don’t come from nowhere.”

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With over 60,000 subscribers on Telegram and close to 20,000 on Instagram, Narikbi Maksut was used to a constant flurry of notifications. When his phone went silent, he knew something had gone wrong. 

“At first I thought they had just blocked the internet, but they had literally turned it off,” said Maksut, an IT specialist in the Netherlands. “That’s when I started to panic.”

Demonstrations over a hike in fuel prices in early January started to spread across Kazakhstan, where Maksut is from. He had been live streaming on Instagram with friends at the demonstrations, staying in touch with relatives and keeping close watch as events unraveled into some of the worst bloodshed in the country’s 30 years of independence.

Then Kazakhstan hit the kill switch. Over five straight days, the government shut down the internet. Although an unprecedented move by Kazakhstan authorities, the government is a dictatorship, and its monopolistic control over telecommunications is enshrined by law. While some regions across the huge country — the size of western Europe — were able to stay partially online, residents in the largest city, Almaty, were plunged into a total blackout: both wired and mobile internet turned off, and sometimes landline telephone service, too.

What Maksut and a group of his friends did next, however, is a valuable case study on how to survive an internet blackout — an increasingly go-to tactic for authoritarians worldwide. The success of these programmers to set up close to 40 proxy servers over a few days on a shoestring budget speaks to the dilemma facing old-school authoritarian regimes like Kazakhstan: a growing tech-savvy middle class with the know-how to overcome the digital tools of authoritarianism. Based on user traffic provided by Telegram, Maksut estimates the group got between 300,000 to 500,000 people online on the message app during the five-day shutdown.

Like Belarus, where censorship and shutdowns are also favored tools for squashing dissent, Kazakhstan has a flourishing IT sector with experts employed at leading global tech companies. Maksut, a programmer at Booking.com in Amsterdam, sent out a call on his Telegram channel when he saw Kazakhstan had gone offline. About 20 expat Kazakhs answered. They work at offices such as Meta in London, Amazon in Luxemburg, Google in Zurich, all trying to reach their family members in Kazakhstan.

Over the next few days, the loosely organized group set up dozens of proxy servers — first for Telegram and later even for internet browsers like Firefox. Maksut admits their user estimates aren't exact; not all of them had a chance to collect data. But more recently, on January 19, Zharaskhan Aman, a software engineer at Facebook in London, rounded up some of the numbers he had from Telegram analytics showing that the 9 servers he raised alone had 155,762 users from Kazakhstan between January 4 and 11. “I didn’t expect such a flow of people, some of them didn’t even know what a proxy was,” said Aman.

When they realized that there was a way through Kazakhstan’s internet blackout, they formed an ambitious plan. “I realized at that moment that we can scale this up,” Maksut said. “Scale it up to get an entire city, all of Almaty, back online on Telegram.”

To be sure, experts on internet connectivity and those monitoring internet blackouts say what the programmers accomplished is not scalable and is out of reach for the millions of low-tech, everyday internet users knocked offline during blackouts. Data from NetBlocks, a London-based global internet monitor, shows just how effective this particular blackout was, with internet traffic plummeting from 100% connectivity to 2% on January 5.

The graph below does show that traffic slowly rose over the next few days, with authorities restoring connections at select times before lifting the blackout on January 11.

“Of course you can’t say that they supplied all of Kazakhstan with a connection. For the ordinary user, it wasn’t just complicated, it was super complicated,” said Mikhail Klimarev, director of the Society for the Defense of the Internet. “I’m not saying anything against them, they are great guys and did things exactly the way they should: people have to do research like this. And if the shutdown had continued, it’s possible what they made would be in demand.”

Nevertheless, the frequency of global shutdowns is growing exponentially and Coda spoke to four of the programmers to understand how it worked.

A senior software engineer at LinkedIn in Toronto, Maksat Kadyrov jumped into action when he lost touch with his brother in Almaty. He went live on Instagram, looking to crowdsource a way to reach his family. Surprisingly, a few IT specialists in Kazakhstan were able to connect and report that four or five of their VPNs were still working inside the country. “If the internet is blocked, this shouldn’t be working,” Kadyrov remembers thinking. “This violates the entire logic of an internet blackout.”

Already in touch with Maksut, Kadyrov and a handful of other specialists realized this must mean there were cracks in the blackout that could be exploited, a backdoor still open to internet traffic. Said Kadyrov: “It was as if the internet hadn’t been turned off after all, but a curtain had been draped over, with a few bits of light still shining through.”

Kadyrov went hunting for any ports that were still working, rallying with others as he worked. Ports in computer networking act almost as mail sorting tubes, directing data to where it should go. He live streamed on Instagram for hours as they scanned some of the more than 65,000 existing ports. During the live stream, they found five open ports, tested them and were able to establish a connection. They later learned that it was a bug in outdated Cisco equipment, used widely by Kazakh telecom operators, which had accidentally kept these ports open. Kadyrov, Maksut and the others used these open ports to support their operation, crowdsourcing funds or footing the cloud computing bill themselves from service providers like Digital Ocean and Amazon.

Sharing connection instructions by Telegram, email and text, members of the group said they were overwhelmed with demand. Within 24 hours Kadyrov said he had more than 2,000 requests for access to his servers, which he had been sending out one-by-one. Maksut was also overwhelmed with requests for access: “They went like hotcakes.”

For those outside the country, the totality of the blackout was unnerving. Just as reports of chaos, gunfire and an unfolding terrorist attack broke in international headlines, messages stopped delivering. Calls simply didn’t go through. For the nearly 19 million people living in Kazakhstan, the chaos was far more immediate. Loudspeakers in city centers, leftover remnants of the Soviet past, were used to broadcast ominous messages for residents to stay indoors and away from windows, no further context given. Television stations and even radio broadcasts stuck to entertainment programming or were simply not working.

Over the following five days, internet connections were restored periodically, in some cases tied to certain government announcements. People were able to place calls again. The government’s official messaging has been that a mass terrorist attack, largely led by foreigners, was underway across the country. Authorities have presented scant evidence to back up their claims, while scores of activists and supporters of the protest have been detained, some reporting beating and torture in prisons.

In response to the government’s pronouncements, opinions within the VPN group had split on what to do next. Kadyrov shut down his VPNs. “My position was that it was important to stand with the government against these terrorists. Then I saw people were starting to use my VPNs for Torrent and for mining bitcoin. I said, ‘Thanks everyone, I’m out.’”

Others, like Maksut, kept their VPNs going, reasoning that if there really was a sophisticated terrorist attack underway, they weren’t waiting around to use his VPN connection to communicate, especially as periodic throttling during protests have been common practice for years in Kazakhstan. The priority was to keep people informed.

“People died because they didn’t have information or a connection,” said Aman, the engineer in London. In the following weeks dozens of stories emerged of life in an information void where many carried on unaware of the violence. A 12-year-old boy was reportedly killed by a stray bullet while walking to buy bread with his mother; a four-year-old girl was shot dead when her father drove into the city center with his three children, straight into a shootout.

“There is really no benefit to a shutdown,” said Natalia Krapiva, tech legal counsel at Access Now. “It doesn’t help governments maintain security, it doesn’t help them maintain order, it doesn’t help misinformation from spreading, it’s actually the opposite: shutdowns are usually associated with more violence. People are left with whatever pieces of rumors they can find.”

Supported by the Russian-Language News Exchange

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The Darvaza crater is believed to have been the consequence of a natural gas drilling operation accident, where the ground collapsed into a void under the Karakum desert. 

Despite having an isolated dictatorship hostile to outsiders ruling the country, Turkmenistan has a history of marketing the country’s bizarre spectacle to tourists, like a 246 foot tower in the capital Ashgabat dedicated to geopolitical neutrality. Or a gigantic, rotating golden statue of the country’s former dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov. And a newer, 16-foot statue of the current president’s favorite dog breed (The Alabay, a Turkmen variety of the Central Asian shepherd dog).

Putting tourism aside, last week President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov ordered the Gates of Hell to be extinguished. He had abruptly given the same command in 2010, without stating any clear reasons, but it was never completed.

Berdymukhamedov is known for puzzling initiatives like fumigating public spaces with smoke from an indigenous grass to protect against Covid. He has said that he wanted the pit extinguished because it’s a waste of profitable resources and it adversely affects the health of people living nearby and damages the environment.

But closing the Darvaza crater would have negligible mitigation for Turkmenistan's emissions problem. Rich in oil and gas resources, the country is one of the top emitters of methane, the largest component of natural gas and is significantly more detrimental to the environment than carbon dioxide. Methane leaks can be reduced with the help of regulations and infrastructure, and over a hundred countries made cut-down pledges at COP26, the climate conference last year in Glasgow. Turkmenistan’s had only made vague promises at COP26. 

In the past couple years, Turkmenistan has been on the radar of energy data analytics organizations like Kayrros or International Energy Agency, as methane footprint awareness evolved to become a top climate concern. But the contribution of the Gates of Hell to the problem does not rank among the chief causes of the country’s methane crisis.

“It's actually a tourist attraction. I don't think it can be considered the main cause of Turkmenistan's emissions. If you want to reduce methane emissions in Turkmenistan, it's probably not the place you want to start,” said Antoine Halff, chief analyst at Kayrros. “I think there's a lot of scrutiny over emissions from Turkmenistan and this looks like an attempt by the government to be proactive about emissions.”

Darvaza crater, in fact, draws many adventurers' interest.

“If you'd never seen this place before and were asked to draw a picture of a hole in the ground as a doorway to hell, this is exactly what it would look like,” said George Kourounis, a professional explorer and the only man known to ever go down in the pit. “I've described it as being in a coliseum of fire.”

If the reasons why the president of Turkmenistan wants to extinguish the fiery pit right now is open to speculation, so is how it became a burning hole in the ground in the first place. The most widely circulated theory is that in 1971 geologists ignited the hole, hoping to burn off seeping dangerous methane over a few days. 

But Kourounis says the Turkmen geologists that accompanied his expedition had a slightly different memory. 

“They tell me that the crater bubbled with mud and gas for years and that the mud actually overflowed the top of the crater and spilled into the surrounding desert and didn't catch fire until the 1980s.” 

Kourounis says nobody in the country knows what happened either. “I tried to get any kind of official reports, something on paper, but you know, it was the Soviet era, it was either classified or destroyed, or maybe no good records were taken. So I don't have any proof other than what we witnessed ourselves and the testimony from two geologists on the scene.”

Extinguishing the burning hole won’t be a straightforward task, according to Giuseppe Etiope, a geologist and researcher at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy and the author of book called Natural Gas Seepage: The Earth’s Hydrocarbon Degassing.

Etiope said the accident seems to have exposed an accumulation of gas, or a gas pocket, below the surface, opening a Pandora’s Box. Closing it would require a comprehensive geological and geophysical study of not only the crater but the whole area.

“The Pandora’s Box is not only the shallower gas pocket, but is all the sequence of the pockets below that are probably connected,” he told me.

Long-term burning craters are not a new phenomenon tied to the petroleum industry. These “eternal fires” relegated as tourist attractions have had a special role in ancient cultures, driving mythological legends, religious traditions, and contributing to human civilization. Like the burning Baba Gurgur in Iraq, or eternal fires in Iran and Azerbaijan, like the Yanardag, worshiped by Zoroastrians.

Besides attempting to turn the Gates to Hell into a tourist attraction, Berdymukhamedov also gained attention for the site when, after months of rumors that he was dead, he appeared on a state-owned TV channel in a video, driving around the fire pit doing doughnuts.

Since November, the government has banned Turkmen from visiting the pit without special permission. And although the ban has not applied to foreign tourists, it appears Berdymukhamedov hasn’t welcomed them to visit the pit either.

It’s doubtful that the plan to close the Gates of Hell will succeed, according to Stefan Green, a microbiologist that accompanied Kourounis on his Darvaza expedition and gathered soil samples from the crater. 

The president “is certainly right that the crater is pretty bad for the environment. But it is better off burning than as an uncontrolled methane release. Methane is a terrible greenhouse gas, much worse than CO2. Better to burn it than to let it go into the atmosphere as methane,” he said. 

According to Green, the right solution would not be inexpensive: “You could put out the fire easily but that would create an explosion hazard. It needs careful engineering. My guess is that they decide it isn't worth the effort.”

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Over the past months, hundreds of Afghan soldiers have fled next door to Tajikistan. Over the weekend, dozens of military servicemen also escaped to Uzbekistan, desperate for medical assistance.

But, as thousands of Afghans attempt to flee, governments in the five Central Asian nations have not yet made definitive decisions about their approach to an impending refugee crisis. Kyrgyzstan declared on August 16 that it would issue 500 student visas for Afghans, but has not made public any further plans. Despite rumors on social media that Kazakhstan was preparing to receive displaced people, a spokesperson for President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev stated, via Facebook on Monday, that no decision had been reached. Uzbekistan is similarly hesitant, while Turkmenistan has made no announcements since the Taliban takeover.

To make more sense of what the events in Afghanistan means for Central Asia, I spoke to Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, a director of the Center for Governance and Market at the University of Pittsburgh, and the author of two books about the country.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity

Coda Story: What is your assessment of the speed with which the Taliban has managed to regain control of Afghanistan? 

Jennifer Murtazashvili: Afghanistan is a very decentralized society. The former government tried to centralize everything and many of the generals who were in charge of fighting around the country were not from the regions that they were protecting. They made decisions to surrender.  

You have soldiers who haven't gotten paid, who, due to corruption, had limited ammunition and support. When you're asking people who have been fighting for 40 years to engage in another huge offensive, you're asking them to fight for a state they don't believe in. It's one thing to fight against something you don't like. But if you don't have something to fight for, it's very difficult.

It has been going on for a very long time. We have seen districts fall throughout the country over the past 10 years. If we look at northern Afghanistan, for example, it was always the home of the opposition to the Taliban. 

What do the Taliban want from Central Asia countries? 

They want normalization. They want to be able to tax customs authorities. If trade stops, that's a big source of their revenue. So they want that trade to continue. They've been skimming off customs for a very long time. So, trade is very important to them. 

Getting narcotics out of the country is also vital. Most of the opiates produced in Afghanistan go out through Pakistan, but there's a good amount that goes through Central Asia and there's a pretty well organized scheme. They don't want those borders to close. 

What are the challenges that Central Asian countries face now — and what lies ahead?

I think the concern from Central Asia is about ISIS fighters, the remnants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan — a militant group active in the region — and other groups that might be associated with al-Qaida, who might not like the Taliban. 

Central Asian fighters have been going into northern Afghanistan and Pakistan for two decades now. If you remember, there were many Central Asians that went to fight with ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Well, imagine, now, that the opportunity to fight is right next door. I think this should be a concern. I don't want to exaggerate it, but it doesn't take a lot of people to cause a lot of trouble.

Recently, Uzbekistan’s foreign ministry made an announcement in which the country "firmly declares its commitment to maintaining traditionally friendly and good-neighborly relations with Afghanistan and the principles of non-interference in the internal affairs of a neighboring country.” What does that tell us?

They have been talking for many years now. In fact, the Uzbek government has hosted Taliban delegations, so they're quite familiar with the Taliban leadership. Uzbeks have also been very active in Doha, engaging with the movement’s leadership. This was a very smart strategy, because they understood that, regardless of who would be in power in Kabul, they could do business with the Afghan government. And what is Uzbekistan interested in? It’s interested in infrastructure projects, railways, gas pipelines, things that connect Uzbekistan with lower transport costs. Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country. And so economically, the fastest way to a seaport is through Afghanistan and then into Pakistan.

What is the general attitude toward the Taliban among people in Central Asia?

I think there's a lot of fear. I've actually gotten some requests from the Uzbek media to speak, because there's a lot of uncertainty and people are scared about whether the Taliban are going to come take over their country. There's just uncertainty about who the Taliban is made up of and the scope that it has. That's the sense that I'm getting, just fear and uncertainty.  

What kind of role does the U.S. have in the region? If the Biden administration is able to come to some agreement with the Taliban, how significant would that be to Central Asian nations? 

The U.S. doesn't seem to have a strategy, quite frankly, and Biden has made it very clear that he's not that interested. The U.S. doesn't have very much of a strategy or a presence in Central Asia right now, either. I think the big players are China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, which is very interesting. Seeing how these local dynamics are taking place, I think politics in the region will become much more localized and not so much about great power rivalries.

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