Everything about The Wakhan Corridor totally explained
The
Wakhan Corridor or
Wakhan Salient is a narrow (in some places less than 10 mi. wide)
corridor in the
Wakhan in the
Badakhshan province of
Afghanistan. It is located in the
Pamir mountain region, with
Tajikistan to the north,
Pakistan and the disputed territory of the
Northern Areas of
Jammu and Kashmir to the south and
China to the east. It was created at the end of 19th century by the
British Empire, to act as a buffer against potential Russian ambitions in
India during
the Great Game.
Historically the Wakhan has been an important region for thousands of years as it's where the Western and Eastern portions of Central Asia meet. Before the advent of Islam the region was disputed between
Tibet and China.
At the eastern end, the
Wakhjir is a pass through the
Hindu Kush at 4,923 m, and has the sharpest official change of clocks of any international frontier (in Afghanistan to
UTC+8,
China Standard Time, in China). The border here with China is among the highest in the world.
According to the paper by J.Townsend (2005), the pass "is closed for at least five months a year and is open irregularly for the remainder."
The Corridor is sparsely populated. The main people present in the corridor are the
Wakhi, along with smaller numbers of
Kyrgyz.
J. Townsend (2005) discusses the possibility of
drug smuggling from Afghanistan to China via Wakhan Corridor and Wakhjir Pass, but concludes that, due to the difficulties of travel and border crossings, even if such trafficking occurs, it's minor compared to that conducted via
Tajikistan's
Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast or even via Pakistan, which both have much more accessible connections into China.
Alastair Leithead on
BBC News 24 on the 26th December 2007 presented a half hour feature about the corridor focusing particularly on the work of expatriate British Doctor Alexander Duncan which provided a significant piece of extended media reporting from this inaccessible area. The programme seems a follow up to this
BBC Radio 4 piece accessible at http://www.mininova.org/tor/964145 . He has also covered the Pamir Festival in the area traceable through http://pamirtimes.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/pamir-festival-mehboob-aziz/.
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