VERIFIED QUOTE · reported 2026-10-17
“The interest is mostly geopolitical and military-strategic, considering the region’s location in the zone of Russia’s and China’s interests,”
Alisher Ilkhamov · said date not stated · reported 2026-10-17
Ilkhamov told Al Jazeera that US interest in Central Asia is mostly geopolitical and military-strategic, given the region's location within Russia's and China's zones of interest.
This quote was mechanically extracted from the cited article and verified as an exact substring of the source text before publication. Attribution follows the article's own wording.