The Taliban who banned poppy cultivation when it ruled Afghanistan, now takes control over the war-torn country’s heroin production line, providing insurgents with billions of dollars.
In 2016, Afghanistan, which produces 80 percent of the world’s opium, made around 4,800 tonnes of the drug bringing in revenues of three billion dollars.
The Taliban has long taxed poppy-growing farmers to fund their years-long insurgency, but Western officials are concerned it is now running its own factories, refining the lucrative crop into morphine and heroin for exporting abroad.
Obviously, the country is dealing with very loose figures, but drug trafficking amounts to billions of dollars every year from which the Taliban is taking a substantial percentage.
Poppies, which are cheap and easy to grow, make up half of Afghanistan’s entire agricultural output.
Farmers are paid about $163 for a kilo of the black sap — the raw opium that oozes out of poppy seed pods when they are slitting with a knife.
Once it is refined into heroin, the Taliban sells it in regional markets for between $2,300 and $3,500 a kilo.
By the time it reaches Europe it wholesales for $45,000, according to a Western expert who is advising Afghan anti-narcotics forces and asked not to be named.
He said an increase in seizures of chemicals required to turn opium into morphine, the first step before it becomes heroin, such as acid anhydride, points to an escalation in Taliban drug activity.
Seizures of morphine have also increased. Fifty-seven tonnes were discovered in the first half of 2017 compared to 43 tonnes for the whole of 2016, added the expert, who said that only about 10 percent of what is produced is actually discovered.
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