AFP/Bishkek

Kyrgyz troops have been dispatched to the border with Tajikistan, police stand guard at power stations and suspected militants have been gunned down in the country’s volatile south.

When Kyrgyzstan heads to the polls on Thursday it will be under what the government says is a surging threat from Islamist militants, whose aim is to destabilise the Central Asian state.

“It is a bomb which can explode at any minute,” the ex-head of Kyrgyzstan’s National Security Council, General Miroslav Niyazov, told AFP. “The situation is very disturbing. The territorial integrity of the countries in the region is under threat.”

Kyrgyzstan - an impoverished ex-Soviet state bordering China - has a long history of battling home-grown militants, particularly in the volatile Fergana Valley region it shares with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Tensions have been surging here since May, when Uzbekistan said a suicide bomber who entered the country from Kyrgyzstan had blown himself up in the Uzbek city of Andijan.

Shortly thereafter Kyrgyzstan - which had denied involvement in the Andijan incident - began publicising the Islamist threat both publicly and privately, through leaks to the domestic and foreign news media.

“We don’t rule out the possibility that there could be a terrorist act in a hospital, marketplace or public thoroughfare in the time leading up to the election,” a security services source told AFP on condition of anonymity.

But opposition forces and experts accuse the state of hyping the threat and using the spectre of terrorism as a political weapon to cow the opposition and pacify the population ahead of the elections.

“The announcements of the KNB (ex-KGB) about terrorist acts were made to sow fear amongst the people and to intimidate the opposition,” political analyst and career military officer Toktogul Kakchekiyev told AFP. “The Soviet security services used to have a saying: ‘If you want to stay in power, find yourself an enemy’.”

In early June, government forces killed five suspected militants during a gun battle near Jalal-abad, just a handful of kilometres from the border with Uzbekistan.

Kyrgyzstan says the group belonged to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) - a feared group with ties to the Taliban often cited as a threat by governments here - but little evidence was provided to substantiate the claim.

Still, experts are increasingly concerned that insurgents fleeing security operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan could be crossing over the porous borders into Central Asia in search of safe havens.

Kyrgyzstan, which hosts a key US military base used to re-supply coalition forces fighting in Afghanistan, is a likely target for fleeing Afghan insurgents due to its co-operation with the US, experts say.

That may be one reason Bishkek has chosen to fortify its border with southern neighbour Tajikistan, which is currently engaged in fighting with militants in the remote Rasht Valley region near the border.