Iran is a crucial country in Southwest Asia. Not only is it strategically placed with respect to maritime transport, it also has land borders with seven countries. Most of these countries have been in the world news in the last decade, generally in relation to some conflict or other.

Two of these are currently at war with each other: Afghanistan and Pakistan (refer ‘I heard a huge blast’: Afghan journalist describes Kabul rehab hospital strikes, Sky News, 16 March 2026). Two others were at war a few years ago: Armenia and Azerbaijan. And Iraq has been in five separate wars, one against Iran itself, and one against Iran’s near-neighbour Kuwait, two against the wider West, and one against ISIL. Türkiye, by contrast, has been a sea of relative stability, and is indeed the main recipient of Iranian refugees at present.

But what about Turkmenistan, a country which has a 1,000km border with Iran; and important demographic and cultural links with Iran? A country successfully hiding in plain sight.

Korea was dubbed the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ in the nineteenth century, and since the Korean War (ceasefire in 1953) North Korea is not uncommonly still called that. But, at least in our awareness, Turkmenistan makes North Korea seem rather gregarious in terms of its relations with the world. I understand that it’s harder to get a visa to visit Turkmenistan than to visit North Korea.

Google: “Ashgabat, the capital, was rebuilt [after a big earthquake in 1948] in Soviet style in the mid-20th century and is filled with grand monuments honouring former president Saparmurat Niyazov.” This architectural gigantism is reminiscent of North Korea. BBC, 17 Sep 2016: “Turkmenistan has unveiled a gleaming new international airport with a roof in the shape of a flying falcon. … Ashgabat [the capital, and close to the Iranian border] boasts several other unique structures, including a publishing house in shape of an open book [and] two giant golden statues of both Mr Berdymukhamedov and his late predecessor Saparmyrat Niyazov.”

Economy

Turkmenistan, on the southeastern side of the Caspian Sea, has an ancient history in terms of trade along the Silk Road; it was indeed a land of transit in the times of caravans and camels.

In 1881 it was annexed and fully incorporated into the Russian Empire. And, during Soviet Union times, it was a full republic of that Union. Since the Soviet split-up, Turkmenistan, in true Orwellian fashion, has largely denied that it was ever part of the Soviet Union. Its population, believed to be just over six million, is kept in perpetual ignorance of the wider world. There is a relatively large regional diaspora of Turkmen people.

That ignorance is mutual. The West knows as little about Turkmenistan as Turkmen subjects know about The West. Interestingly, I looked up the CIA Factbook – a widely favoured reference resource for political geography – to verify my own knowledge. And I found this; the Factbook was closed last month (though see the wayback machine). Not widely reported, but note this on CNN: CIA terminates its World Factbook, overthrowing reference regime, 6 Feb 2026.

I found some maps still on the CIA website: https://www.cia.gov/resources/map/india/ and https://www.cia.gov/resources/map/turkmenistan/. While the maps on India are reasonably current (2023), this map of Turkmenistan dates back to 2008. Not exactly state-of-the-art intelligence.

Turkmenistan is not a poor country. It has substantial oil reserves, and has huge barely tapped natural gas reserves, comparable to those of Qatar. Despite contrived inequality between rulers and subjects, its people are not as poor as North Korea’s. Its long-distance trade nowadays passes mostly either to The West via the Caspian Sea, then Azerbaijan and Georgia; or to China via just one other country, Kazakhstan. There will also be regional trade with its four land neighbours: Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.

Strategic Matters

For reasons fully beyond its control, Turkmenistan finds its most natural neighbour and most natural ally, Iran, in fullscale war with both regional and global hegemons. I suspect that there are very few Iranian citizens seeking refuge in Turkmenistan, even though many living near Turkmenistan – including in bombed nearby cities such as Mashhad (refer Iran’s Mashhad Airport Targeted Amid Ongoing Israeli Strikes, The Caspian Post, 1 March 2016) – are now living in considerable danger.

Wars typically spill over, in one form or another, into neighbouring countries. Further, Turkmenistan might now become coveted for its geopolitically strategic location and resources. War might come in more than a local spill.

Airspace

Once upon a long time ago, the most strategic spaces in the world were land-spaces, especially central Asian steppes such as those of Turkmenistan. The last incursions from the East into Europe came from these lands: those invasions by Genghis Khan in the twelfth century, and Tamerlane in the fourteenth.

The last incursion from the East into Western Europe was that of Attila the Hun in the fifth century. Since those invasions – and since earlier western conquests, eg those of Alexander the Great – there have been many Western megalomaniacs invading Asia. The main opportunity for the West arose from the strategic development of seaspace trumping landspace.

Nowadays, airspace to a considerable extent trumps both landspace and seaspace. There are two components of this. The first is the military exploitation of airspace, a form of warfare favoured by most modern tyrants. The second is the civilian – and peaceful economic – use of airspace for long-distance transit and trade.

My guess is that, at least up until now, long-haul flights will have avoided overflying Turkmenistan. (Avoidance of countries’ airspace is not uncommon: in 2008 I flew Cathay Pacific from Hong Kong to Seoul return, and the flights avoided Chinese airspace. And I flew from Shenyang in China to Seoul by Korean Airlines, a flight that took a wide circle route to avoid North Korea.)

As it is now, if civil flights want to avoid both Turkmenistan and all countries currently at war, a flight from Singapore to London (say) would have to fly over Nepal, China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and then over the Black Sea. That’s a very narrow corridor for two-directional long-haul flying. Turkmenistan airspace would ease this constraint somewhat. But how safe can we expect any of Iran’s neighbours to be in the future? Certainly, with airspace now being the geopolitically dominant space today, Turkmenistan comes at a premium; potentially a new aerial Silk Road.

Safe national airspaces are important, not only to avoid being shot-down as Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was in 2014, but also as potential emergency landing sites. How will long-distance civilian air travel function during a twenty-first century world war?

Conclusion

Most of us have some geographical blindspots and many historical blindspots. Some places and historical events are blind to most of us. If democracy is to survive in any form, we need populations – not just ‘experts’ – with more knowledge of the world. And, if not unbiased knowledge (very difficult to achieve), then at least knowledge with relatively balanced biases.

Turkmenistan is a strategically placed nation towards which most better-informed people have almost no knowledge. For us in the West, that lack of geographical knowledge is ignorance by choice, or by having priorities determined by our not knowing what we don’t know, even when those places are in plain sight. For the Turkmen subject people, their ignorance is different; it’s by design.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

A View from Afar – In this podcast, political scientist Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning will examine the Implications of the Russia-Ukrainian conflict and how it impacts on regional security architecture.

In particular, we will assess Finland and Sweden’s move to become NATO members and whether Turkey will prevent this from occurring.

Also, this week, Russia’s Vladimir Putin hosted the leaders of Russia’s equivalent to NATO – the CSTO, which stands for the Collective Security Treaty Organization and includes: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan.

Belarus’ authoritarian leader, Aleksandr Lukashenko, was the only leader of the CSTO to speak persuasively about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Paul and I will analyse the CSTO meeting and discuss its relevancy from a security and geopolitical perspective and what implications all this has on the East Asia region.

Join Paul and Selwyn for this LIVE recording of this podcast while they consider these big issues, and remember any comments you make while live can be included in this programme.

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The violent protests which erupted in major cities across Kazakhstan over the past week, fueled by the people’s fury over high gas prices, grew into a monumental anti-corruption movement with the hope of changing the country’s direction.

The Kazakh people are reportedly fed up with the country’s immense wealth, owed to large oil reserves, being held by a small number of corrupt elites.

However, as with so many revolutions, the battle has intensified into a bloody clash between the people and the military.

Last Sunday, the rebellion began in western Kazakhstan, a region known for its natural resources and oil richness, against a significant surge in fuel prices. Despite the Kazakh government’s promise to lower them­­, the protests spread throughout the country with a broader demand for better social benefits and less governmental corruption.

The Kazakh president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, issued a statement on Wednesday night calling, without offering evidence, protesters “a band of terrorists” who had been “trained abroad” – alluding to possible foreign interference.

Tokayev declared a state of emergency in Kazakhstan and requested the intervention from Russia’s version of NATO, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), to which Kazakhstan and Russia are members. Others include Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

The chairman of the CSTO, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, also blames “outside interference” for the mass protests.

Russian-led troops
As promised by the military pact between Russia and Kazakhstan, Russian-led CSTO troops have stormed into Kazakhstan’s largest city, Almaty, and were being met by large groups of demonstrators setting fire to trucks, police cars, and barricading themselves.

Some protesters wielding firearms were caught on camera looting shops and malls and setting government buildings on fire (including Almaty’s City Hall and the president’s former office).

Local demonstrators also captured the Almaty airport. Flights in and out of airports in Almaty, Aktau, and Aktobe were suspended until further notice.

Much of the violence and scale of the chaos can be witnessed on social media applications such as Instagram, Facebook, and Tik Tok. However, with the government’s internet shutdown on the entire country, many current reports are unconfirmed.

Kazakh locals, such as Galym Ageleulov, who has been witnessing the events of the past few days, states that throngs of criminals had co-opted the “movement that was calling for peaceful change”.

Suddenly, the protesters morphed into groups of primarily young men posing with riot shields and helmets captured from police officers.

According to Ageleulov, these groups of men had replaced the Almaty police force and were “highly organised and managed by gang leaders”.

Three police beheaded claim
Further unconfirmed reports sent in by locals on the ground in Almaty have stated that these men have beheaded up to three police officers.

The Kazakh interior ministry stated that at least eight police officers and national guard troops were killed during the protests while 300 were injured and more than 3800 protesters were arrested.

Kazakh Americans have flocked to social media to spread awareness of what is going on in the influential Central Asian nation.

One source on Tik Tok powerfully declared that “the revolution has started” and that the Kazakh people are calling for President Tokayev to “step down”.

In response to the people’s demands for a sincere governmental anti-corruption, Tokayev simply sacked the country’s cabinet — and this did little to ease dissent and infuriated the protesters.

Tokayev’s request for foreign military troops to help quell the protests has only further angered the Kazakh people, who feel deeply betrayed that their government would beckon foreign military groups to gun down Kazakh protestors chanting for their country’s freedom.

The nation’s fury with their authoritarian leader is exacerbated by Tokayev’s recent statement in a televised address that “whoever does not surrender will be destroyed. I have given the order to law enforcement agencies and the army to shoot to kill without warning”.

Locals line up for bread
Almaty’s commercial banks have been ordered to shut down, forcing Kazakhs to withdraw all their cash from ATMs. Stores and markets have been forcibly closed as well, causing locals to line up for rations of bread — a heartbreaking sight that has been unseen in Kazakhstan since the country’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Almaty’s City Hall, a famous white building that once served as the Communist Party headquarters, is charred black from protestors’ flames set on it.

Kazakhstan has been long been praised as being one of the most successful post-Soviet republics. The country has by far the highest GDP per capita in the Central Asian region and plenty of oil reserves, driven mostly by its western region.

Additionally, Kazakhstan accounted for more than 50 percent of the global uranium exports in 2020.

Kazakhstan is also the second largest country for bitcoin mining. Due to the Kazakh government’s shutdown of the internet, crypto markets have seen a considerable loss.

Despite the country’s abundance of natural resources, most of Kazakhstan’s enormous wealth has not been equally spread among the populace.

Corrupt elites live in style
Since the country’s independence, corrupt elites and officials have been living in luxury while the vast majority of the Kazakh people survive on paltry salaries.

The current dire situation in Kazakhstan can be interpreted as a significant warning for neighbouring Russia. Presidential succession creates unrest in authoritarian countries.

In 2019, former president Nursultan Nazarbayev hand-picked his successor, Tokayev. While this change may have seemed refreshing on the surface, the Kazakh people are well aware of Nazarbayev’s shadow-emperor hold on the country’s political power.

An invaluable lesson must be learned from Kazakhstan’s present state: a raging sea of anger and discontent might be storming beneath a thin veil of regional stability.

A petition posted on Change.org, which 36,000+ people have signed, calls to remove foreign military troops from Kazakhstan.

Ella Kelleher is a Kazakh American at English major graduate at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, US. She is the book review editor-in-chief and a contributing staff writer for Asia Media International. Republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz