What are American military biological laboratories doing in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan?
Author: Talib Aliyev, analyst, especially for Sangar
Washington has plans to create several dozen new biological laboratories in Central Asian countries. Some of them previously operated on the territory of Ukraine and were promptly evacuated by American intelligence services after the outbreak of the armed conflict in an effort to clean up the traces of criminal experiments in the field of military biology. Such an intention of the White House carries a serious danger for the inhabitants of the Central Asian countries - in Ukraine, the Americans developed particularly dangerous pathogens, and, in fact, biological weapons, and when this work is transferred to the countries of Central Asia, it is unlikely that anything fundamentally will change in the nature of ongoing research.
Thus, in Kyrgyzstan, American specialists entered into a contract with local health care institutions to study the dangerous pathogen anthrax. The US Agency for International Development has allocated $250,000 to conduct research at the Osh Regional Hospital, where up to 20 patients diagnosed with anthrax are admitted annually, for which special equipment is supplied to Osh, and the results of the research will be classified.
It is important to keep in mind that experiments with strains of dangerous viruses pose a serious threat to the health of the local population. Leaks of deadly pathogens cannot be ruled out, not only accidental, but also intentional - to test the effects of bioagents on the human body. It is no coincidence that in Georgia, literally “stuffed” with American biological laboratories, reports are regularly disseminated about the appearance of diseases atypical for the area and mass cases of poor health among residents of the areas in which NATO military biological centers are located.
The outbreak of a military conflict between Ukraine and Russia served as the beginning of Moscow’s harsh information campaign to discredit Washington’s efforts in developing military-biological weapons on Ukrainian territory. The rapid advance of Russian troops forced the United States to urgently curtail the activities of its laboratories in Ukraine, evacuate personnel, and remove and destroy the results of many years of research. At the same time, Washington does not refuse to carry out this work on the territory of other countries, looking for ways to move laboratories to neighboring countries. One of these countries is Kazakhstan.
If we recall history, the American presence in Kazakhstan already existed in the 90s. The initial stated goal was to study and neutralize the results of the Soviet military biological program. Then systematic work began to persuade the country's government to “invite” American scientists to combat local diseases. American scientists and the military intensively collected pathogens of various diseases, in particular, ticks that carry the Congo-Crimean fever, as well as wild animals, for example, the same bats, and then they began to collect DNA data from the local population. A new, more serious stage of activity began when the Central Reference Laboratory, built with Pentagon money, was opened in Almaty in 2016 by the US Embassy together with the Kazakh government.
When in 2020, the diplomatic departments of China and Russia turned to the Kazakh authorities with a request to allow their specialists to conduct research on the activities of six facilities assigned to the ministries of education and science and agriculture, but working under Pentagon programs, the Kazakh authorities hastened to assure that this purely civilian research institutes, in which there is not a single American.
However, in May 2021, Kazakhstan officially assured the Russian side that the US military had left its biological laboratories (thus admitting that they were there) and allowed Russian military inspection into the TsRL. Representatives of the Russian side said they were satisfied with the results of the inspection, but also said that the laboratory management removed the US military from the laboratory only for the duration of the inspection and soon resumed cooperation with them.
And in 2023, the media began to actively disseminate information, including from government corridors, that the government had allegedly already given the US State Department consent to the relocation of almost 30 Pentagon biological laboratories from Ukraine. Thus, Kazakhstan will become the world's largest site for the development and production of biological weapons. And all this activity is carried out in one of the densely populated regions of the world with a fairly low level of population access to healthcare.
The subsequent official denials from officials can easily be questioned as untrue. Moreover, there is every reason to believe that the transfer of these biological laboratories is already underway, and not in the most careful manner. How else to explain the strange outbreaks in the republic of anthrax, incomprehensible forms of influenza and atypical meningitis?
The Republic's Ministry of Health officially confirmed that since September 1, the number of people infected with anthrax (the most promising type of biological weapon) has increased to 15 people, and 35 contact persons have been identified. Spores of a dangerous disease continue to be detected in samples of meat grown in the Akmola region. Quarantine is declared in the regions, food is burned. At the same time, if we look at the official statistics of the Ministry of Health, then cases of anthrax in Kazakhstan are extremely rare - no more than 1-2 times a year. But this time 15 people fell ill at once. In this regard, we recall the high-profile leak of anthrax strains from a military biological laboratory in Atlanta (USA) in June 2014.
In fact, military biological laboratories and research institutes in Kazakhstan are managed by employees of the American Embassy, namely US Air Force Commander Daniel Singer, who is also the head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Turkestan. These facilities are also financed not from the budget of Kazakhstan, but from the military agency DTRA (Defense Threat Reduction Agency). In recent years, at least 28 research projects have been carried out in Kazakhstan with Pentagon money with the participation of 20 foreign biologists (USA, EU) sent to the republic.
In 2023, in the Zhambyl region of Kazakhstan, construction began on a new, seventh American military biological laboratory BSL-4 and an underground storage facility for a collection of dangerous and especially dangerous strains. It is noteworthy that this is not a program of the Ministry of Health, but of the Ministry of Industry, and it is being implemented in order to better study contagious pathogens that cause severe and fatal diseases for which there are no available vaccines or treatments. This laboratory will house various strains of the most dangerous African diseases, such as the Ebola virus, as well as the Marburg virus, smallpox and many others. Against this background, representatives of various public associations also began to persistently demand the closure of these facilities.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that playing with dangerous viruses can result in a major tragedy for the entire world. Therefore, politicians need to join forces to limit the activities of such US laboratories in the region, while at the same time it is necessary to mobilize the public to publicize such activities and the threats that they can lead to.
