Tajikistan can't afford to take in Afghan refugees without help -police chief

FILE PHOTO: An internally displaced Afghan girl looks on as she attends a class inside a shelter at a refugee camp in Kabul, Afghanistan May 31, 2016. REUTERS/Mohammad Ismail

DUSHANBE (Reuters) - Tajikistan cannot afford to take in large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers from neighbouring Afghanistan as it promised to do in the summer, the police chief of Central Asia's poorest country said on Thursday.

The government of Tajikistan, an ex-Soviet state allied to Moscow and part of the Russian-led CSTO military alliance, said in July that it could take in 100,000 refugees from Afghanistan but that it needed to create infrastructure for them.