ABSTRACT
Turkmenistan borders on the Caspian Sea in the west, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the north, and Afghanistan and Iran in the south. The five million population lives along the coastline and in the Amu-Darya river valley (the Kalahari Desert is by and large uninhabitable). Turkmens are of Mongol and Turkish origin and have lived in today’s Turkmenistan since the eighth century. They have then been fighting with Persian tribes for power, lost to the Mongols in the thirteenth century and then conquered by the Turkmen leader Timur Lenk in the fourteenth century. The Turkmens never managed to create a state of their own; instead, the southern part belonged to Persia and the northern part belonged to the khanates in Chiva until the eighteenth century, when also the northern tribes came under Persian rule. Russia conquered the country only in the late nineteenth century, and after the Russian revolution and its civil war, the Red Army re-conquered Turkmenistan only in 1922 when the Central Asian autonomous republic of Turkestan (including Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) was created. Today’s Turkmenistan was founded in 1936. Islam is the major religion, but fairly secular in the clan-based society.
