![Scary smile](https://loka.nahovitsyn.com/204.jpg)
and international troops, ending a 20-year presence that began shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, which were orchestrated by al Qaeda from its sanctuary in Afghanistan.Īddicts wait at a drug treatment center in Kabul on Nov. The Taliban have been rapidly expanding their presence across Afghanistan in recent months, in an offensive coinciding with the departure of U.S. It’s just money, the money is ridiculous, and it goes back to organized crime or the Taliban, who are organized crime,” the official said. “If you send 10 one-kilogram lots into Australia, and only one makes it through, you still face a massive windfall. Increased e-commerce activity in the 18 months since the COVID-19 pandemic began had also given traffickers a route into new markets, he said, as the number of parcels arriving through national postal systems has exploded. Just to get that user base started, and then they will start swamping you,” an international counternarcotics officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They will send you in 100 kilograms of heroin and add 5 kilos of meth for free-there you go, give it a go. Taliban traffickers are opening new markets by including what one official described as starter packs of meth in heroin shipments.
![top heroine poducer top heroine poducer](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f4/c8/d4/f4c8d400b13bd3e73c3917a89329bd59.jpg)
By comparison, the cheaper-to-produce methamphetamine is worth $700,000 a kilo, experts said. In Australia, which alongside Japan is a major market for the Taliban’s new product, a kilogram of Afghan heroin is valued at around $250,000. Cesar Guedes-Ferreyros, the representative in Kabul for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said at least 85 percent of the world’s heroin is sourced to Afghanistan. The relative costs of heroin and methamphetamine make meth an attractive diversification for the Taliban, who are said to earn around $3 billion annually trafficking opium and heroin produced principally in southern Afghanistan. The officials described the Taliban as the world’s biggest drug cartel and said the group-which is fighting a fierce insurgency against the Afghan government-is using heroin transshipment routes to push methamphetamine into new markets in Australia, Asia, North America, Europe and Africa. KABUL-The escalating war in Afghanistan is directly linked to the multibillion-dollar global trade in illicit drugs, as the Taliban seek to expand and consolidate control over the production and trafficking of narcotics and to diversify from heroin into methamphetamine, in what an Afghan counternarcotics officer called “a coming catastrophe for the world.”Īfghan and international counternarcotics experts said violence in Afghanistan has spiked in recent years alongside increased cultivation of opium poppies, used for heroin production, and ephedra, a plant that grows wild across the country and is being used to make methamphetamine.
![Scary smile](https://loka.nahovitsyn.com/204.jpg)