Recently, a briefing held at the Agency for Information and Mass Communications at the Presidential Administration of the Republic of Uzbekistan, dedicated to the participation of the President of Uzbekistan in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in Bishkek and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia in Dushanbe. Director of the Institute for Strategic and Regional Studies (ISRS) Eldor Aripov participated in the briefing.

Director of ISRS emphasized that SCO is a very important structure, which is ensuring security in the region. The SCO Regional Antiterrorist Structure operates in Tashkent, serving to promote cooperation of member states against the three evils: terrorism, separatism and extremism. It forms a single database of blacklisted terrorist organizations and assists in training for the specialists and instructors of the counter-terrorism units, organizes events to combat drug trafficking, etc.

According to the SCO Secretariat, over the past 4 years SCO averted more than 600 terroristic crimes and eliminated more than 500 training bases, while preventing activities of more than 2,000 members of international terrorist organizations.

Eldor Aripov also noted that maintaining stability is the result of smart strategy and tireless efforts of the President of Uzbekistan.

During the event, the director of ISRS also paid attention to the situation in neighboring Afghanistan, where the number of casualties among civilians is growing year by year. From January to April of this year, government forces caused 305 deaths and 300 injuries among civilians. At least 3.7 million children in Afghanistan cannot attend schools - 60% of whom girls”.

According to scholars, 50% of countries that managed to withdraw from the war over the next five years are being involved in armed conflicts again. Returning to the pre-war condition usually requires efforts of more than one generation.

 “Therefore, it is important to understand that paving the way to instability once, it will not be easy to return to peaceful life again. Keeping peace is hard, but losing it very easy,” the head of the Institute concluded.