Ten people were killed by a mudslide in Tajikistan on Friday while working on an irrigation project in the mountains outside the capital Dushanbe, authorities said.

"At noon on Friday they were laying an irrigation pipe when they were struck by wet rockfall during their work," Orif Nozimov, spokesman for Tajikistan's state emergencies committee, told AFP.

Tajikistan is seeking to evacuate some 100 medical workers and their families from Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition has launched air strikes against rebels, the foreign ministry said on Friday.

"All possible measures are being taken for the emergency evacuation of Tajik citizens from war-torn Yemen," Abulfaiz Atoev, a foreign ministry spokesperson, told AFP.

Post-Soviet Tajikistan's authoritarian President Emomali Rakhmon said Friday that Tajiks fighting in the ranks of ISIS and other extremist organisations in Iraq and Syria would burn in hell.

Rakhmon, whose secular government is frequently accused of cracking down on religious believers, spoke in the capital Dushanbe ahead of International Women's Day on March 8, which Tajikistan renamed the Day of the Mother in 2009.

An opposition leader from the Central Asian nation of Tajikistan was shot dead by an unknown gunman on a street in Istanbul late Thursday, Turkish media reported on Friday. 

Umarali Kuvvatov, head of the "Group 24" opposition group, was killed with a gunshot wound to the head in Istanbul's conservative Fatih district, said the Dogan news agency. 

Tajikistan's ruling party swept weekend legislative elections, while the main Islamic opposition group failed to make parliament, according to results Monday from a poll Western observers called flawed.

With 65 percent of the vote, the People's Democratic Party of Tajikistan (PDPT) chaired by President Emomali Rakhmon was on course to take the vast majority of the legislature's 63 seats.

An opposition Islamic party in ex-Soviet Tajikistan says the government has cracked down on its politicians ahead of March 1 parliamentary polls in the mainly Muslim but secular country.

Tajikistan, the poorest state to emerge from the Soviet Union, has been led by strongman President Emomali Rakhmon since 1992 and his National Democratic Party of Tajikistan is expected to sweep the polls.

A female doctor from Tajikistan kidnapped three months ago in violence-plagued Yemen was freed on Tuesday, her country's embassy in Saudi Arabia said.

Gul Rukhsor, in her mid-30s, will return to Tajikistan, said a diplomat at the mission who did not want to be named.

Up to four thousand people from Muslim former Soviet Central Asian countries are believed to have joined Islamic State jihadists, a report published on Tuesday said.

Often driven by poverty, some "2,000 to 4,000 have in the past three years turned their back on their secular states to seek a radical alternative," the International Crisis Group said in a briefing on the region.

One border guard was killed and two wounded in an armed attack close to Kyrgyzstan's volatile border with Central Asian neighbor Tajikistan, official said Saturday.

Authorities in the ex-Soviet state were probing the incident after unknown assailants opened fire late Friday on a border guard base some 25 kilometers from the frontier, Kyrgyzstan's deputy prime minister Abdyrakhman Mamatiliev said.

Tajikistan's prosecutors said Wednesday that nearly 50 young men from banned Islamist groups have been arrested on grounds they were preparing to join jihadists in Syria.

The men, aged between 20 and 30 and allegedly members of banned groups, were accused of "organising a criminal group for participating in armed conflicts or warfare in other countries," a statement by the regional prosecutor's office in northern Sogd region said.