Gorno-Badakhshan in the context of "Pamirs"

The Pamir Mountains are a range of mountains between Central Asia and South Asia. They are located at a junction with other notable mountains, namely the Tian Shan, the Karakoram, the Kunlun, the Hindu Kush, and the Himalayas. They are among the world's highest mountains.

Much of the range lies in the Gorno-Badakhshan region of Tajikistan. Spanning the border parts of four countries, to the south, they border the Hindu Kush mountains along Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor in Badakhshan Province, Chitral and Gilgit-Baltistan regions of Pakistan. To the north, they join the Tian Shan mountains along the Alay Valley of Kyrgyzstan. To the east, they extend to the range that includes China's Kongur Tagh, in the "Eastern Pamirs", separated by the Yarkand valley from the Kunlun Mountains.

An autonomous oblast (Russian: Автономная область (АО)) is an autonomous form of an oblast (administrative-territorial structure) in the USSR. Of the post-Soviet states, autonomous oblasts currently exist only in Russia (the Jewish Autonomous Oblast) and Tajikistan (the Gorno-Badakhshan).

There were autonomous oblasts of the Soviet Union and later some federal subjects of Russia were autonomous oblasts: the one remaining is the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Eastern Rumelia was an autonomous province (oblast in Bulgarian, one of its official languages) of the Ottoman Empire. Serb Autonomous Regions are known as oblasts.

Badakhshan (Dari: ولایت بدخشان, romanized: Wilāyat-e Badakhshān and Pashto: د بدخشان ولایت, romanized: Da Badakhshān Wilāyat) is one of the northeastern provinces of Afghanistan and is widely regarded as one of the country's most geographically distinctive and historically significant regions. It borders Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan province to the north, China's Xinjiang province to the east, and Pakistan's northern provinces to the south, while internally it neighbors the Afghan provinces of Takhar and Panjshir. The provincial capital is Fayzabad, which functions as the main administrative, economic, and cultural center of the province.

Covering an area of approximately 44,000 square kilometers and having an estimated population of about 1.2 million people (as of 2025), Badakhshan is defined by its mountainous terrain, dominated by the Hindu Kush and Pamir mountain ranges, as well as by deep river valleys shaped primarily by the Kokcha and Panj rivers. The province includes the Wakhan Corridor, a narrow high-altitude strip that extends eastward between Tajikistan and Pakistan to China, giving Badakhshan a unique geopolitical position as Afghanistan's only land connection to China.

The Pamir River is a shared river located in the Badakhshan Province of Afghanistan and in the Gorno-Badakhshan in Tajikistan. It is a tributary of the Panj River, and forms the northern boundary of Afghanistan's Wakhan District.

The river has its sources in the Pamir Mountains in the far eastern part of Gorno-Badakhshan, Tajikistan. It flows between the Alichur mountain range in the north and the Wakhan District in the south. It starts from the Lake Zorkul, at a height of 4,130 meters, and then flows west, and later southwest. Near the town of Langar, at 2,799 m, its confluences with the Wakhan River forms the Panj River. The Pamir forms the boundary between Afghanistan and Tajikistan along its entire length. Northwest of Langar is the 6,726 m (22,067 ft) high Karl Marx Peak and Friedrich Engels Peak (6,507 m (21,348 ft)). A road runs along the river on the Tajik side to Khargush where it turns north to join the Pamir Highway. A road of lower quality continues east past Zorkul, almost to the Chinese border.

Wakhan National Park is a national park in northeastern Afghanistan. Established in 2014, the park encompasses the entire Wakhan District of Badakhshan Province, extending along the Wakhan Corridor between the Pamir Mountains and the Hindu Kush, bordering the Gorno-Badakhshan autonomous region of Tajikistan to the north, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan to the south, and the Xinjiang autonomous region of China to the east.

Flora and fauna in the Wakhan National Park include some 600 plant species, the snow leopard, lynx, wolf, brown bear, stone marten, red fox, Pallas's cat, ibex, Marco Polo sheep, and urial. Remote and largely above the tree line, poaching and overgrazing, rather than mining and logging, currently pose the main threats. Around 15,000 Afghans of ethnic Wakhi and Kyrgyz background reside in the area. Foreigners must have an Afghan visa to tour the area.

The Pamiris are an Eastern Iranian ethnic group, native to Central Asia, living primarily in Tajikistan (Gorno-Badakhshan), Afghanistan (Badakhshan), Siachen, Pakistan (Gilgit-Baltistan) and China (Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County). They speak a variety of different languages, amongst which languages of the Eastern Iranian Pamir language group stand out. The languages of the Shughni-Rushani group, alongside Wakhi, are the most widely spoken Pamiri languages.

Lenin Peak or Ibn Sina (Avicenna) Peak is a mountain in the Trans-Alay Range of the Pamir Mountains, in the Gorno-Badakhshan and Osh regions on the Kyrgyzstan–Tajikistan border. At 7,134 metres (23,406 ft), it is the second-highest point of both countries (after Ismoil Somoni Peak in Tajikistan and Jengish Chokusu in Kyrgyzstan) and the tallest mountain of the Trans-Alay Range. It is considered one of the least technical 7,000 m peaks in the world to climb and has the most ascents of any peak over 7,000 metres, with hundreds of climbers attempting it annually.

Lenin Peak was thought to be the highest point in the Pamirs in Tajikistan until 1933, when Ismoil Somoni Peak (known as Stalin Peak at the time) was climbed and found to be more than 300 metres higher. Two mountains in the Pamirs in China, Kongur Tagh (7,649 m) and Muztagh Ata (7,546 m), are higher than the Tajik summits.

The Tajikistani Civil War was an armed conflict in Tajikistan that began in May 1992 and ended in June 1997. Regional groups from the Garm and Gorno-Badakhshan regions of Tajikistan rose up against the newly formed government of President Rahmon Nabiyev, which was dominated by people from the Khujand and Kulob regions. The rebel groups were led by a combination of liberal democratic reformers and Islamists, who would later organize under the banner of the United Tajik Opposition. The government was supported by Russian military and border guards.

The main zone of conflict was in the country's south, although disturbances occurred nationwide. The civil war was at its peak during its first year and continued for five years, devastating the country. An estimated 20,000 to 150,000 people were killed in the conflict, and about 10 to 20 percent of the population of Tajikistan were internally displaced. On 27 June 1997, Tajikistan president Emomali Rahmon, United Tajik Opposition (UTO) leader Sayid Abdulloh Nuri and Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General Gerd Merrem signed the General Agreement on the Establishment of Peace and National Accord in Tajikistan and the Moscow Protocol in Moscow, Russia, ending the war.