Editor’s note
From the Karakum
Near modern Mary, on the southern edge of the Karakum, stand the ruins of Merv. In the 11th and 12th centuries it was the capital of the Great Seljuk Empire and, by some counts, the largest city in the world, a place where the northern and southern branches of the Silk Road met and where Omar Khayyam kept an observatory. Its wealth was the wealth of a crossroads. In 1221 the Mongols under Tolui, son of Genghis Khan, sacked it, and it never recovered; today it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The land that is now Turkmenistan has been a corridor for as long as there have been goods to carry across it, worth remembering in a month when the region's routes are again the whole story.
A note on the season: I am easing into a slower summer through the end of August, though the Brief will keep coming. Most of my hours now go to longer work, a book, several journal manuscripts, and a run of shorter pieces, headed to Trade Finance Global, journals with Taylor and Francis and Springer Nature, Horse Life Australia, the Praevisio Institute for Geopolitical Affairs, and others. The journal articles are the part I am most excited about. Since October I have been living inside all things Turkmen, building research across energy, trade corridors, governance, culture, and history, and I am now pulling those threads into work I am proud of. The fuller catalog lives at christopherwizda.com.
Because much of this is happening quietly, my posts here will mostly be reposts for a while, past pieces refreshed where there is something new to add. This first one is about my connection to Turkmenistan, which keeps growing. I am also still working out where I fit next: I am open to consulting, research, writing, and speaking, the right full-time role, fellowships, part-time lecturing, and research posts, and I am weighing a PhD, most likely next year. If you work in Central Asian policy, Caspian energy, Eurasian trade corridors, cultural or historical research, regional analysis, or journalism, or if something here caught your interest, I would welcome the conversation.
The Lead
The Lead
Context. For more than a decade, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have built southern routes through Iran to reach the Persian Gulf and markets beyond Russia. The Gorgan to Incheh Borun railway, opened in December 2014, tied both countries' networks to Iran's along the eastern Caspian, part of the wider Uzen to Bereket to Gorgan line running more than 900 km. That southern outlet has been the counterweight to Ashgabat's deeper dependence on a single customer: China now takes an estimated 80 to 90 percent of Turkmen gas exports.
Observation. In early July 2026, US strikes hit Iranian rail and coastal infrastructure. Reuters verified damage to the Aq Taqeh Khan railway bridge on the Gorgan line after strikes on July 9, and satellite imagery showed damage to the maritime traffic control tower at Chabahar, the port Iran had offered Kazakhstan a role in operating. CENTCOM said its forces struck roughly 90 targets to degrade Iran's ability to threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and later reinstated a naval blockade of Iranian ports. No freight suspension on the Kazakhstan to Turkmenistan to Iran route has been confirmed, but the exposure is now concrete rather than theoretical.
Analysis. Every one of Turkmenistan's outlets to the sea now runs through contested ground. The southern route depends on an Iran under active bombardment; the maritime leg depends on Hormuz. The exception is the one direction that avoids both: west, across the Caspian. The Trans-Caspian, or Middle, corridor carries cargo by ferry from Turkmenbashi and Aktau to Baku, then by rail through Georgia and Türkiye toward Europe. It has long been the "always five years away" project, but the ground has shifted. Freight volumes have grown every year since 2022 and accelerated through 2024 and 2025; in early 2026 the World Bank approved an $846 million guarantee backing $1.4 billion in financing for Kazakhstan's railway operator; Azerbaijan's transit volumes rose 8 percent in 2024. Ashgabat has also revived its support for a Trans-Caspian gas pipeline carrying Turkmen gas west through Azerbaijan and Türkiye, bypassing both Russia and Hormuz.
So What. The case for the westward corridor has never rested on its own merits alone; it is strongest when the alternatives look worst. This month made the alternatives look worst. For Turkmenistan, the logic that was easy to defer in calmer years, diversifying away from a single gas buyer and a single southern outlet, is now hard to argue against. Constraint is doing the work a decade of feasibility studies could not.
What This Doesn't Tell Us Yet. Momentum is not capacity. The corridor still has too few Caspian ferries, slow border crossings, and, by the EBRD's estimate, some 18.5 billion euros in unmet regional infrastructure need. The gas pipeline would additionally require expanding the Southern Gas Corridor, and financing and long-term contracts remain unsettled. Whether pressure converts into pipe and steel, or fades once the Gulf quiets, is what the coming months will answer.
Sources: The Times of Central Asia; Oxford Business Group; American Foreign Policy Council.
The Blotter
Turkmenistan Blotter
Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan sign a protocol at the ninth economic commission.
In Ashgabat, a delegation under Azerbaijan's economy minister Mikail Jabbarov met Turkmen counterparts and President Berdimuhamedov, signing a protocol on energy, transport and transit, and customs cooperation. The talks built on June's state visit and pointed toward the Trans-Caspian route.
President and National Leader receive US Senator Steve Daines.
Serdar Berdimuhamedov and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov separately met Daines, a Montana Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who conveyed greetings from President Trump. Talks stressed energy, transport corridors along the East to West and North to South routes, and TAPI.
Wheat harvest closes above target at more than 1.4 million tons.
The 2026 grain campaign, which began June 3, ended with a state celebration marking delivery of over 1.4 million tons to state granaries. Officials tied the result to the 2,000 manat per ton procurement price and a standing food-security push.
Turkmen delegation courts ASEAN and Indonesia in Jakarta.
Deputy Foreign Minister Ahmet Gurbanov met ASEAN Secretary-General Kao Kim Hourn and Indonesian officials, holding the first Turkmenistan to Indonesia political consultations and promoting a "Central Asia + ASEAN" format, with transport connectivity, energy, and trade diversification the throughline.
US Embassy tours the Founders Museum across five regions.
Marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the embassy sent mobile exhibitions to American Corners in Mary, Dashoguz, Turkmenabat, and Turkmenbashy, with Ambassador Elizabeth Rood at the openings; the display is now at the American Center in Ashgabat.
A young Turkmen singer takes the stage at Slavianski Bazaar.
At the 35th International Arts Festival in Vitebsk, Belarus, Shirin Jumaeva represented Turkmenistan in the International Children's Song Contest, performing Maksim Dunaevsky's "Winds of Change" on one of the region's biggest cultural stages.
The Watch
Caspian & Central Asia Watch
Turkic states post their Q1 2026 economic scorecard.
The Organization of Turkic States and Azerbaijan's CAERC released the first-quarter 2026 Turkic Economic Review in eight languages, reporting combined member and observer GDP of about 673.6 billion dollars, roughly 2.34 percent of the world economy, and trade turnover above 326 billion dollars. Turkmenistan, an OTS observer, sits inside that bloc.
The EAEU shows its limits as Central Asia looks elsewhere.
At the May 29 Supreme Eurasian Economic Council in Astana, talks were shadowed by speculation over Armenia's possible exit, while observer Uzbekistan stayed supportive. Analysts read the Russia-led union as nearing the ceiling of its current form, even as Turkic and Central Asian frameworks, including a widening Organization of Turkic States, gain ground.
The Iran link in the North-South corridor stalls, then restarts.
The Rasht to Astara railway, the missing Iranian segment of the International North-South Transport Corridor, was due to be contracted on April 1 but slipped after the spring conflict. In early July the railway chiefs of Russia, Azerbaijan, and Iran signed a trilateral protocol in Moscow and surveys resumed, though construction stays behind schedule.
Pakistan opens six overland routes to Iran, and Central Asia takes note.
With Hormuz shipping disrupted, Pakistan's April transit order operationalized six road corridors linking Karachi, Port Qasim, and Gwadar to Iranian border crossings, letting landlocked Central Asian cargo reach warm-water ports by a new path. Analysts frame it as a pragmatic workaround that also widens the region's options beyond Russia and Afghanistan.
A three-country effort takes aim at Caspian pollution.
The World Bank approved an 8.24 million dollar project, "Blueing the Caspian Sea," backed by a Global Environment Facility grant, to help Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan monitor pollution and protect biodiversity, including the endangered Caspian seal and sturgeon. The five-year effort supports commitments under the Tehran Convention.
Deep Dive
Monthly Deep Dive
In keeping with the season, this month's Deep Dive turns to something lighter than trade corridors: Turkmen cinema. It is a small but genuinely rewarding canon, and the first thing to know about it is that seeing it is harder than admiring it.
Turkmenistan's cinematic strength lies in its Soviet-era films, roughly the 1960s to the 1980s, when a generation of VGIK-trained directors made poetic, humane pictures at the Turkmenfilm studio. The best entry point is Bulat Mansurov's The Contest (Şükür Bagşy, 1963), in which a dutar master, learning his brother is held hostage by a Persian khan, arrives not with a weapon but with his instrument and wins the man's freedom in a musical duel. It is an anti-war parable of real beauty, and one of the very few classics available with English subtitles. A natural companion is Hojaguly Narliev's Daughter-in-Law (Gelin, 1972), widely called the film that put Turkmen cinema on the map. Between them, they largely exhaust the subtitled canon.
After that, watching becomes a scavenger hunt. Titles like The Decisive Step, Magtymguly (1968), and Jemalyň bagy (1981) surface on YouTube and OK.ru in Turkmen or Russian, subtitles rare and uploads impermanent. A reading knowledge of Russian, or a willingness to use fan subtitles, roughly doubles what is within reach.
For this horse-minded edition, there is even a fitting title: Meniň dostum Melekuş (1972), a comedy about a young hippodrome worker trying to keep an Akhal-Teke stallion from being sold abroad, a rare on-screen tribute to the national horse.
The post-1990 era is more accessible in places. Usman Saparov's Little Angel, Make Me Happy (1993), a tender drama about a German boy left behind in a Turkmen village during the war, won a Grand Prize at the Berlin Film Festival and streams with English subtitles. The German and Turkmen co-production Karakum (1994), a cross-cultural desert adventure about a German boy and a Turkmen boy who build a sand-sailing rig, is available on Google Play.
The contemporary state studio, the Oguzhan Türkmenfilm Association, has been making features again since around 2010, including historical and folkloric titles like Çapar (2022), Gyzyl kürte (2022), and the Turkmen and Uzbek co-production Magtymguly Pyragy (2024), which took the top prize at Ashgabat's Gorkut Ata festival. These travel mostly on the Turkic-world festival circuit and fan uploads, usually in Turkmen only, with Magtymguly Pyragy the most likely to surface online. Fittingly, 2026 marks 100 years of Turkmen cinema, and the studio is marking it with a documentary on the industry's founding figures.
Two outside touchstones round out the picture: White Sun of the Desert (1970), the Soviet "Red Western" shot in the Karakum near Merv and so beloved that Russian cosmonauts still watch it before launch, and the Darvaza "Door to Hell" crater, which has become the country's most exported image, appearing in Transformers and countless documentaries.
The through-line is a cheerful one: Turkmen cinema is real, often excellent, and a summer afternoon is a fine excuse to go looking for it. When you find a good upload, save it, pop some popcorn, and enjoy the watch.
From the LinkedIn Feed
The Three Threads
The three tracks, Signal on Mondays, Overhead on Wednesdays, and Karakum on Fridays, are quiet on new material this summer. Instead, I am reposting every one of my past LinkedIn posts, one a day, through the end of August, while the longer work takes priority. A preview of that work:
This summer I have been busy with a run of commissioned pieces due out over the coming months: a book, a book chapter, a journal article, an analytical magazine article, a children's dictionary, several publications for a think tank, and a few articles for a trade outlet. I will share each as it appears.
From the Desk
From the Desk
Published recently
Central Asian Survey (Taylor and Francis), July 7, 2026
Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires
My review of David Chaffetz's history of how mounted power shaped Eurasia, from the steppe to the Silk Road, with the Turkmen and the Akhal-Teke recurring throughout. A fitting read for a horse-heavy summer.
Trade Finance Global, published May 11, 2026, updated July 10, 2026
The last pipeline: How three crises opened the Trans-Caspian corridor
This month's Trade Monitor: Turkmenistan column, and the fuller argument behind this edition's Lead. It traces how three shocks, the Russia to Ukraine war, disruption at Hormuz, and the resolved Caspian legal dispute, moved the long-deferred Trans-Caspian gas pipeline from perennial punchline to plausible project, while financing, long-term contracts, and politics remain the real obstacles.
From the Archive. How Should Turkmenistan Maximize Gas Export Revenue, 2027 to 2037? An earlier AI experiment on Turkmen gas strategy that surfaced a $15 billion principal-agent trap across the Line D, Trans-Caspian, and TAPI options. Worth revisiting now that the Trans-Caspian question, front and center in this edition, has turned from hypothetical to live. LinkedIn post
Also reading
- Cinema in Central Asia: Rewriting Cultural Histories, by Michael Rouland and others, which devotes a chapter to The Contest and pairs naturally with this month's Deep Dive. Find it
Source Spotlight
Source Spotlight
This month's source is an unexpected one: AsiaNews, the official press agency of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME), a Catholic missionary organization. It grew out of a print initiative in the 1980s, moved online around 2003, and now publishes in several languages from Italy. Its Catholic and Vatican ties are direct: PIME is a pontifical institute answering to the Holy See, and AsiaNews has long been a sister outlet to Agenzia Fides, the Vatican's own missionary news agency, with editors who have run both. The religious framing is therefore explicit, so read it with that in mind, but the reporting itself is genuinely useful. AsiaNews covers the whole continent, politics, economics, culture, and society, with a standing interest in religious freedom and human rights, and it regularly follows social stories that the secular wires skip.
For Central Asia, that fills a real gap. Its regional page carries pieces you rarely see elsewhere, such as a recent report on the challenges of caring for an aging population across Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, where dementia is rising and families are largely left to cope on their own. For a researcher, it works best as a lead and a human-interest counterweight rather than a primary authority: note the perspective, follow the on-the-ground detail, and verify specifics against other sources. Source: asianews.it
Methodology Bench
Methodology Bench
Fieldwork in Turkmenistan is sometimes hard to arrange, and for anyone who has not yet had the chance to travel there but would like to experience it virtually, this summer I have been leaning on a quieter method: museums, and increasingly their virtual versions. Objects tell a country's story, a carpet's motifs, a Bronze Age seal, a Parthian drinking horn, and you can now walk among them from a laptop.
The find this month is virtualmuseum.gov.tm, which offers free, ticketless tours, no login required, in Turkmen, Russian, and English, and it now covers far more than one building. The flagship is the State Museum in Ashgabat, where you move room to room through the Ancient World; Margush, the Bronze Age civilization of the Murgab delta that rivaled Mesopotamia; Antika, the Parthian halls with their finds from Nisa; the Middle Ages; and the Carpet gallery. From there you can cross into the capital's other museums: the Museum of Fine Arts, with Turkmen painting, sculpture, and applied art; the Museum of the Sacredness of the Motherland, at the Halk Hakydasy (People's Memory) complex, which honors the nation's fallen across the 1881 defense of Gökdepe, the Second World War, and the 1948 Ashgabat earthquake; and the Museum of Magtymguly Fraghi, devoted to the eighteenth-century national poet and opened around his 300th anniversary. Four regional museums round out the tour, one each for the Balkan, Dashoguz, Lebap, and Mary velayats, each telling its province's own story of archaeology, ethnography, and nature.
It is, in short, the closest thing to touring Turkmenistan's museums without a visa and a plane ticket, and a genuinely pleasant way to spend a summer afternoon exploring the country from wherever you are. Source: virtualmuseum.gov.tm
Resources
Resources Desk
Datasets and tools
- History and Anthropology of Central Asia (abashin.org). An open, free library assembled by the ethnographer and historian Sergei Abashin, gathering several thousand books, articles, and albums on the history, ethnography, archaeology, philology, and geography of Central Asia. No registration, no paywall, weighted toward Russian-language scholarship with some English and French. A rare single home for material otherwise scattered across journals and out-of-print volumes. abashin.org
- Russian National Corpus (ruscorpora.ru). A vast, annotated collection of Russian-language texts, more than 13 billion tokens spanning the 11th to the 21st century, with powerful search tools. For anyone working through Russian sources on Central Asia, it is invaluable for checking usage, tracing how a term or place name was written across eras, and finding texts by genre. Russian National Corpus
Archival curiosity
- History of Russia in Photographs (russiainphoto.ru). A photo-chronicle from the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, more than 200,000 images drawn from museums, archives, and private collections, running from the dawn of photography to the end of the twentieth century. Searchable by date, place, photographer, and source, and mapped where locations are known, it is a deep well for imperial and Soviet-era Central Asian and Turkestan photographs, and an easy place to lose an afternoon. russiainphoto.ru
Announcements
Announcements & Events
Upcoming.
- Kids Expo, All for Kids 2026. August 19 to 22, Ashgabat. An international children's-industry fair run by Turkmen Expo and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, spanning toys, education, children's fashion and furniture, health and sports, and family services, with an open invitation to foreign exhibitors and a possible German national pavilion. Turkmen Expo
- Ahal-Teke Horse: A Perfect Example of Beauty. September 4 to 6, Kronenberg, Netherlands. An international art exhibition and competition celebrating the Akhal-Teke, staged alongside an Akhal-Teke horse championship and organized by the Ministry of Culture of Turkmenistan, the State Academy of Arts, "Turkmen Atlary," and the International Akhal-Teke Horse Breeding Association, with the Union of Artists of Turkmenistan and GTnArtGallery. Works span painting, sculpture, jewelry, carpet art, and photography, a rare showcase of the national horse on an international stage. GTnArtGallery
- Exhibition of Economic Achievements of Turkmenistan. September 17 to 19, Ashgabat. Tied to the 35th anniversary of independence, a read on how the state frames its own economic story. oilgas.gov.tm
What to Watch
What to Watch
Whether the poultry push cracks egg self-sufficiency.
Turkmenistan's largest poultry producer, Nurly Meýdan in Balkan velayat, has deepened its partnership with the US layer-genetics firm Hy-Line International, buying 16,000 parent-stock pullets (8,000 of the W-80 line and 8,000 Sonia) under its "Enelik towuk" program, with Hy-Line providing on-farm technical support for holding flock performance through summers that run 40 to 47 degrees. The complex is built for up to 12 million chicks, tens of millions of eggs, and 8,000 tons of chicken meat a year. Watch whether that converts into a real dent in egg and poultry imports, the stated goal, or stays a showcase. Turkmenistan Government and Hy-Line International
Whether the new FAO office delivers.
In January 2026 Turkmenistan and the FAO signed a host-country agreement to open the country's first FAO Representative Office in Ashgabat, ending its standing as the last state in the region without one. It anchors a 2026 to 2030 country programming framework and four new Global Environment Facility projects worth 15 to 20 million dollars, atop some thirty joint projects spanning agricultural digitalization, cotton, and animal health. Watch whether a permanent presence moves food-security and land-restoration work from pilots to durable programs. nCa
The Caspian fisheries file, with Turkmenistan in the chair.
At the ninth session of the Caspian bioresources commission, held in Ashgabat in November 2025 under Turkmenistan's chairmanship, the five littoral states extended the commercial sturgeon-fishing moratorium through 2026, keeping catches to science and restocking, and began drafting unified fishing rules for the open Caspian, with Russia preparing a draft to circulate through Ashgabat. Watch whether Turkmenistan uses the chair to push those basin-wide rules forward, and whether sturgeon restocking holds against a shrinking sea. Caspian Post
Magtymguly
Magtymguly of the Month
This month, poem 106, Aty gerek (He Needs a Horse).
At gazanar goç ýigidiň
Owwal bedew aty gerek.
Gelene garşy çykmaga
Ýagşy muhapbeti gerek.
Mert gerek jepa çekmäge,
At gerek dere sökmäge,
Supra ýaýyp, nan dökmäge
Köňlüniň hümmeti gerek.
El götergil ham hyýaldan,
Saňa yssyg ýokdur maldan,
Ruzygär geçse halaldan,
Aryflar söhbeti gerek.
Ýöriseň gulluk kylmaga,
Pygamber ýolun bilmäge,
Derwüşler köňlün almaga,
Elinde döwleti gerek.
Magtymguly bir gedaýdyr,
Barçany saklan hudaýdyr,
Eger misgin, eger baýdyr,
Gelene hyzmaty gerek.
My own rendering:
The valiant youth who'd win a name,
first needs a fine, swift steed.
To go out and greet the one who comes,
warm hospitality he'll need.
A true man's needed to bear hardship,
a horse, to cross the ravines,
and to spread the cloth and lavish bread,
a generous heart is what one needs.
Lift your hand from idle dreams,
no warmth comes to you from wealth.
If your daily bread is earned through honest means,
the company of the wise is what you need.
If you'd set out to render service,
to know the path the Prophet trod,
to win the hearts of the dervishes,
you need good fortune in your hand.
Magtymguly is but a beggar;
it is God who sustains us all.
Be he wretched, be he wealthy,
he must serve the one who comes.
Translator's note. The register is quietly Sufi: hümmet is high-minded spiritual magnanimity, not mere generosity; aryflar are the gnostics and söhbet their enlightened company; halal marks lawful earnings and döwlet the God-given fortune to do good.
Why this one, this month. The poem runs through what a young man needs to make his name and puts the horse first, ahead of hospitality, hardship, and generosity. The opening even turns on it: at means both "horse" and "name," so to earn a name and to need a horse are, in Magtymguly's Turkmen, nearly the same breath. For an edition threaded with horses, from Bruschetta in the Mongolian countryside to the Akhal-Teke honored as "a perfect example of beauty" in the Netherlands, it is a fitting reminder that the Turkmen have placed the horse at the center of a good life for as long as anyone has counted the essentials.
Connect
Let’s talk
If you work in Central Asian policy, Caspian energy, Eurasian trade corridors, cultural and historical research, or regional analysis, or if something in this edition sparked an interest of your own, I would welcome the conversation. And on a side note, I'm open to consulting, research, and speaking engagements, as well as the right full-time opportunity, and I'm especially keen to explore fellowships, part-time lecturing, and research roles.
Interested in more? For weekly posts on Turkmenistan and the broader Caspian and Central Asian region, connect with me on LinkedIn. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to The Karakum Brief, my monthly LinkedIn newsletter delivering focused analysis of Turkmenistan, the Caspian region, and Central Asia, grounded in field experience, Russian and Turkmen language source access, and fifteen years of engagement with the region.
If you enjoyed this post and would like to feature it in your publication, or parts of it, I'm open to collaboration, including writing on other topics tailored to your audience.