CRIME-Magazine_Monthly-Edition by Shanjida Kibria

CRIME Drugs in the Middle East 1

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

6 8

12 14

34 38 40

Underground Threat: Tunnels Pose Trouble from Mexico to Middle East Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A. No Cure For Fake Drugs: The Middle East Struggles with an Influx of Counterfeit Medicines Propping Up a Drug Lord, Then Arresting Him Syriaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Breaking Bad: Are Amphetamines Funding the War? Taliban set to double opium profits this year? Tasked With Combating Opium, Afghan Officials Profit From It Penetrating Every Stage of Afghan Opium Chain, Taliban Become a Cartel Stories from ISIS Recruits: Drugs, Money and Preying on Youth Scaling Up a Drug Trade, Straight Through ISIS Turf

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A Letter from the Editor

here is crime going on all around us. The most fascinating thing about crime is that it is never just black or white. There is always two sides to a story that we do not always notice. In the end, it is better we seek out both sides of a story than to make a decision based on one. In this edition of CRIME magazine, we tackle drug based crime and focus in on the Middle East. To this day, the large opium production in places like Afghanistan is no longer something that can be ignored. Groups like ISIS are making so much profit off the sale and manufacturing of this drugs that it has been deeply imbeded into the economy. Through the years we have seen various government attempts to combat the â&#x20AC;&#x153;War on Drugsâ&#x20AC;? in the Middle East. But, we have also seen government corruption. Government officials have been found assiting people with illegal drug trade because of how profitable it has become. Workers who cultivate the opium in Afghanistan rely on it as their means of profit. Even children are found going to the farms after class to help out because there is so much to harvest. Getting involved in the drug market has obvious consequences. Not only is it breaking the law, but it can cause people to inflict harm on others. Terrorist groups have been caught using drugs as a means of control over people. Drugs become a tricky topic to assess because of how many people rely on them and how many people are suffering from them. Through this magazine issue, I hope that readers will be able to form their own opinions on the Middle East and drug crime. Thank you for reading CRIME magazine.

Shanjida Kibria, Editor

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Underground Threat: Tunnels Pose Trouble from Mexico to Middle East By Ken Stier MAY 2, 2009 Time Magazine

ith swine flu frenzy gripping the U.S., the threat coming from south of the Mexico border may seem more real to many Americans than ever before. But the U.S. border authorities who patrol that 1,969 mile long border have another stealth threat to worry about. This month, they will begin installing the first small, 50 mile segment of a “virtual fence” on the dividing line with Mexico. By 2014 most of the border will be home to sensor-equipped towers that are linked to a central communications network. But while proponents argue that the system will help stem the flow of illegal immigrants, drugs and arms coming over the border, most experts admit it will do little to guard against people making their way under it. And as above ground border defenses and patrols get tougher, that subterranean vulnerability is becoming a growing problem. Since 2001, more than 100 tunnels have been discovered by U.S. law enforcement, compared with just 15 in the 1990s, and the pace is accelerating. Most of those have been uncovered through human intelligence, since there are no currently available

technical means to reliably detect tunnels. The Department of Homeland Security started spending research money on detection technologies two years ago. But even the most promising ones — primarily adapted from mining and petroleum exploration industries — are several years from proving reliable. “We see this as one of those frontier threat areas that have to be mitigated but it is a very, very difficult problem area,” says Rick Miller, a leading expert at the Kansas Geological Survey. Most of the tunnels are pretty crude, what law enforcement call gopher holes. Typically just a few feet down and only long enough to get under a fence or two, they can be dug with a pick axe and shovel in the span of just a few nights. Some of them tap into existing infrastructure, using paved roads as roofs, or by punching their way into extensive storm drainage systems that are sometimes shared by border towns, such as with the town of Nogales, Mexico and its northern neighbor in Arizona — also called Nogales. Far more worrisome are the increasingly sophisticated tunnels that display mining engineering expertise

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Though the authorities have many sophisticated tools at their disposal — by 2014, it is projected that most of the border aboveground will be monitored by sensor-equipped towers — most tunnels are uncovered through human intelligence. There is, as yet, no easy way to detect the tunnels below ground.

and significant investments of money. A tunnel discovered in 2006 believed to have been financed by the Tijuana Cartel led by the family of Ramon Arellano Felix was around 2,400 feet long and about nine stories deep. It had concrete floors in certain sections, ventilation, electricity and a water drainage system. It went from an industrial area of Tijuana across the border to a warehouse in Otay Mesa, the main commercial port of entry near San Diego. “The technology it used was shocking,” says Brian Damkroger, who heads the Borders and Maritime Security programs at Sandia National Labs in New Mexico. (View pictures of high seas border patrol near San Diego.)

In some respects, though, it was predictable. Drug cartels certainly have the money to build these tunnels, and Mexico’s sizeable mining sector means there is plenty of tunnel engineering expertise available, willing or not. There have been at least nine very sophisticated tunnels discovered over the years, some equipped with rails to move contraband more efficiently. Authorities believe at least six cartels are thought to be capable of building major tunnels, and three have already undertaken them. “I would certainly think that [tunneling] would be the preferred way to go for drug smugglers,” says Neil Anderson, Professor, Geological Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology Rolla, who has worked on the issue for the military. Still, even for cash flush traffickers, these narco-tunnels are not small undertakings. The Otay Mesa tunnel could easily have cost more than a million dollars; several hundred truckloads would have been needed to carry away the excavated soil. Covert tunneling entails more security risks that cost extra to conceal. On top of that, US officials believe they caught the latest sophisticated tunnel soon after it came online. “That’s a huge hit,” says Michael Unzueta, special agent in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Investigations [in San Diego]. “Drug trafficking organizations don’t want to lose money, narcotics, houses and the same goes for tunnels — and if they spent a year a digging a tunnel and then to loose that asset so quickly, that has to have some crippling setback effect.” But for a business worth some $25 billion a year, that’s debatable. “The cartels can afford to dig ten tunnels, have nine of them get discovered, one doesn’t and the money they make off of that one tunnel pays for all ten, and then some, so why not,” counters Austin Long, a security expert, and associate political

scientist at the Rand Corporation, who points to all the other exotic and expensive ways cartels have devised to bring drugs into the US, including submarines and ultra-light aircraft. Tunnels have been a factor in conflicts and escapes for millennia; only after the Vietnam War did the world came to appreciate the engineering marvel the Vietnamese Communists accomplished in the Cu Chi tunnel networks, which was as extensive as the New York City subway system. But in today’s age of asymmetric conflict tunneling seems to have a new cachet. The US military is finding this out in Iraq and Afghanistan, where there have been numerous successful and nearly successful underground breaches at bases and prisons where suspected terrorists are held. “Protecting underground perimeters is the next capability gap to be bridged in the force protection arena,” Lt Colonel Robert Tucker, of the Army’s Maneuver Support Center at Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri, wrote in a recent journal article. Israel was jolted into awareness of the threats tunnels pose one early Sunday morning in June of 2006, when Palestinian militants popped up from the earth in the middle of a military outpost near the border, killing two soldiers and wounding four others. Twenty year old Gilad Shalit, whose hand broke when an RPG hit his tank, was dragged into the tunnel and back to Gaza. Almost three years later, Shalit is still being held by Hamas, which has offered to exchange him for 450 Palestinians prisoners. Even more vexing are the estimated 800 tunnels linking Gaza (from the town of Rafah) with Egypt, whose border is closed due to friction between Cairo and Hamas. The tunnels are critical conduits not only for weapons but also medicine and food, including live goats and sheep. The occasional bomb-

ing along the border is not thought to accomplish much; Israel’s US-made bunker-busting bombs would not do much damage to tunnels that are 70100 feet deep. If tunnels are located — as they were in Israel’s latest ground operation in Gaza in January — they are not easily disabled for long. By the end of March some 70 tons of weapons was smuggled in to replenish Hamas stocks, according to Israel’s security chief, Yuval Diskin. Back at the Mexico-Texas border, the new fence does include some underground sensors. But in reality, it basically stitches together currently available commercial technology which experts acknowledge is far from adequate to detect stealth tunneling. The overall problem is that soil conditions vary widely and some environments pose particular challenges. Acoustical and electromagnetic techniques, for instance, are seriously compromised in urban environments, which are noisy and have lots of other metal around. That’s important because most tunnels so far have been found in or near cities, which provide the “cover” to help obscure the infrastructure needed, like warehouses, for tunnels to thrive. “We fully expect that our well-financed adversaries, will take whatever steps they feel they need to take that they think might defeat our mechanisms…both above and below the ground,” says Mark Borkowski, a retired Air Force colonel who is now executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Border Initiative, which oversees the physical and virtual fences on the Mexico border. “We are seeing all kinds of technologies that these people are using to get around some of the fences we are putting in place.”

UNDERGROUND THREAT: TUNNELS POSE TROUBLE FROM MEXICO TO MIDDLE EAST

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A. By Dexter Filkins Mark Mazzetti and James Risen October 27, 2009 The New York Times

ABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials. The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home. The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House. The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America’s increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed Ahmed Wali Karzai, right, the brother of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, at a campaign event in Kandahar in August. Credit Banaras Khan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BROTHER OF AFGHAN LEADER SAID TO BE PAID BY C.I.A.

by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban. More broadly, some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful figure in a large area of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, undermines the American push to develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw. “If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves,” said Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan. Ahmed Wali Karzai said in an interview that he cooperated with American civilian and military officials, but did not engage in the drug trade and did not receive payments from the C.I.A. The relationship between Mr. Karzai and the C.I.A. is wide ranging, several American officials said. He helps the C.I.A. operate a paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, that is used for raids against suspected insurgents and terrorists. On at least one occasion, the strike force has been accused of mounting an unauthorized operation against an official of the Afghan government, the officials said. Mr. Karzai is also paid for allowing the C.I.A. and American Special Operations troops to rent a large compound outside the city — the former home of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s founder. The same compound is also the base of the Kandahar Strike Force. “He’s our landlord,” a senior American official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Karzai also helps the C.I.A. communicate with and sometimes meet with Afghans loyal to the Taliban. Mr. Karzai’s role as a go-between between the Americans and the Taliban is now regarded as valuable by those who support working with Mr. Karzai, as the Obama administration is placing a greater focus on encouraging Taliban leaders to change sides. A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article. “No intelligence organization worth the name would ever entertain these kind of allegations,” said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman. Some American officials said that the allegations of Mr. Karzai’s role in the drug trade were not conclusive. “There’s no proof of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s involvement in drug trafficking, certainly nothing that would stand up in court,” said one American official familiar with the intelligence. “And you can’t ignore what the Afghan gov-

“And you can’t ignore what the Afghan government has done for American counterterrorism efforts.” ernment has done for American counterterrorism efforts.” At the start of the Afghan war, just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, American officials paid warlords with questionable backgrounds to help topple the Taliban and maintain order with relatively few American troops committed to fight in the country. But as the Taliban has become resurgent

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

and the war has intensified, Americans have increasingly viewed a strong and credible central government as crucial to turning back the Taliban’s advances. Now, with more American lives on the line, the relationship with Mr. Karzai is setting off anger and frustration among American military officers and other officials in the Obama administration. They say that Mr. Karzai’s suspected role in the drug trade, as well as what they describe as the mafialike way that he lords over southern Afghanistan, makes him a malevolent force. These military and political officials say the evidence, though largely circumstantial, suggests strongly that Mr. Karzai has enriched himself by helping the illegal trade in poppy and opium to flourish. The assessment of these military and senior officials in the Obama administration dovetails with that of senior officials in the Bush administration. “Hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money are flowing through the southern region, and nothing happens in southern Afghanistan without the regional leadership knowing about it,” a senior American military officer in Kabul said. Like most of the officials in this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the information. “If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck,” the American officer said of Mr. Karzai. “Our assumption is that he’s benefiting from the drug trade.” American officials say that Afghanistan’s opium trade, the largest in the world, directly threatens the stability of the Afghan state, by providing a large percentage of the money the Taliban needs for its operations, and also by corrupting Afghan public officials to help the trade flourish. The Obama administration has repeatedly vowed to crack down on the drug lords who are believed to per-

meate the highest levels of President Karzai’s administration. They have pressed him to move his brother out of southern Afghanistan, but he has so far refused to do so. Other Western officials pointed to evidence that Ahmed Wali Karzai orchestrated the manufacture of hundreds of thousands of phony ballots for his brother’s re-election effort in August. He is also believed to have been responsible for setting up dozens of so-called ghost polling stations — existing only on paper — that were used to manufacture tens of thousands of phony ballots. “The only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone,” General Flynn said. In the interview in which he denied a role in the drug trade or taking money from the C.I.A., Ahmed Wali Karzai said he received regular payments from his brother, the president, for “expenses,” but said he did not know where the money came from. He has, among other things, introduced Americans to insurgents considering changing sides. And he has given the Americans intelligence, he said. But he said he was not compensated for that assistance. “I don’t know anyone under the name of the C.I.A.,” Mr. Karzai said. “I have never received any money from any organization. I help, definitely. I help other Americans wherever I can. This is my duty as an Afghan.” Mr. Karzai acknowledged that the C.I.A. and Special Operations troops stayed at Mullah Omar’s old compound. And he acknowledged that the Kandahar Strike Force was based there. But he said he had no involvement with them. A former C.I.A. officer with experience in Afghanistan said the agency relied heavily on Ahmed Wali Karzai, and often based covert operatives at compounds he owned. Any connections Mr. Karzai might have had to the drug trade mattered little to C.I.A. offi-

cers focused on counterterrorism missions, the officer said. “Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade,” he said. “If you are looking for Mother Teresa, she doesn’t live in Afghanistan.” The debate over Ahmed Wali Karzai, which began when President Obama took office in January, intensified in June, when the C.I.A.’s local paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, shot and killed Kandahar’s provincial police chief, Matiullah Qati, in a still-unexplained shootout at the office of a local prosecutor. The circumstances surrounding Mr. Qati’s death remain shrouded in mystery. It is unclear, for instance, if any agency operatives were present — but officials say the firefight broke out when Mr. Qati tried to block the strike force from freeing the brother of a task force member who was being held in custody. “Matiullah was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Mr. Karzai said in the interview. Counternarcotics officials have repeatedly expressed frustration over the unwillingness of senior policy makers in Washington to take action against Mr. Karzai — or even begin a serious investigation of the allegations against him. In fact, they say that while other Afghans accused of drug involvement are investigated and singled out for raids or even rendition to the United States, Mr. Karzai has seemed immune from similar scrutiny. For years, first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration have said that the Taliban benefits from the drug trade, and the United States military has recently expanded its target list to include drug traffickers with ties to the insurgency. The military has generated a list of 50 top drug traffickers tied to the Taliban who can now be killed or captured.

Senior Afghan investigators say they know plenty about Mr. Karzai’s involvement in the drug business. In an interview in Kabul this year, a top former Afghan Interior Ministry official familiar with Afghan counternarcotics operations said that a major source of Mr. Karzai’s influence over the drug trade was his control over key bridges crossing the Helmand River on the route between the opium growing regions of Helmand Province and Kandahar. The former Interior Ministry official said that Mr. Karzai was able to charge huge fees to drug traffickers to allow their drug-laden trucks to cross the bridges. But the former officials said it was impossible for Afghan counternarcotics officials to investigate Mr. Karzai. “This government has become a factory for the production of Talibs because of corruption and injustice,” the former official said. Some American counternarcotics officials have said they believe that Mr. Karzai has expanded his influence over the drug trade, thanks in part to American efforts to single out other drug lords. In debriefing notes from Drug Enforcement Administration interviews in 2006 of Afghan informants obtained by The New York Times, one key informant said that Ahmed Wali Karzai had benefited from the American operation that lured Hajji Bashir Noorzai, a major Afghan drug lord during the time that the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, to New York in 2005. Mr. Noorzai was convicted on drug and conspiracy charges in New York in 2008, and was sentenced to life in prison this year. Habibullah Jan, a local military commander and later a member of Parliament from Kandahar, told the D.E.A. in 2006 that Mr. Karzai had teamed with Haji Juma Khan to take over a portion of the Noorzai drug business after Mr. Noorzai’s arrest.

BROTHER OF AFGHAN LEADER SAID TO BE PAID BY C.I.A.

No Cure For Fake Drugs: The Middle East Struggles with an Influx of Counterfeit Medicines By BENOIT FAUCON from The Wall Street Journal FEB. 15, 2010

AMASCUS -- A recent seizure of counterfeit drugs and the shutdown of the ring that provided them shows how Syria is stepping up its response to a problem that remains widespread in the Middle East. Piled up in huge plastic bags, the haul netted millions of dollars worth of breast cancer, leukemia and other medicines, along with tens of thousands of anticoagulant pills that purported to treat heart attacks and other diseases. At least 65 people were detained; it couldn't be learned if they were charged. A trial date hasn't yet been set. All were fakes with no medicinal value, copies of legitimate medicines made by Novartis AG, Sanofi-Aventis SA, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Roche Holding AG and Pfizer Inc. The bust, which also seized equipment used to make and package fake drugs, stopped one ring’s lucrative trade of counterfeits to Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, Iran and Egypt, according to pharmaceutical-company managers and a Syrian official familiar with the investigation. Pfizer, Bristol-Myers,

Novartis and Sanofi-Aventis confirmed the Syrian seizures. A spokeswoman for Roche confirmed cases of counterfeiting in the Middle East but didn’t provide further details. Smuggling of drugs remains a widespread and dangerous problem. Figures from the World Health Organization show it can reach 35% of all drugs in the Middle East, compared to less than 1% in the U.S. and Western Europe. One confiscated shipment by the Syrian ring to Egypt contained counterfeit copies of one brand of a leukemia drugs with a street value of over $4 million -- equivalent to 50% of the annual sales of the brand. Distributors not only sold the fake life-saving drugs to private pharmacies but also moved deep into the public heath-care system, particularly in Iraq. A huge plastic bag seen amid the Damascus counterfeit haul contained hundreds of boxes of a treatment for mouth ulcers, all bearing the logo of the Iraqi health ministry, witnesses say. Authorities claim that the ring busted in Syria was the main one operating in that country. A pharmaceutical-company

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Piled in huge plastic bags, at left, the haul contained breast cancer drugs with a possible resale value of about $500,000 and leukemia medicine valued at just over $1 million, along with tens of thousands of other pills to treat heart disease and other conditions. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

manager said it was the main network for Egypt as well, but others are still operating in other Middle-Eastern countries. One reason why drug counterfeiting has thrived in the Middle East is that authorities were unprepared for the sheer scale and sophistication of counterfeits and had neither the appropriate law enforcement framework nor the legislation to tackle them. “When we started the investigation, we had no idea of the scale of these counterfeit networks,” the Syrian official said. Syria stepped up its response, with Syrian president Bechar Al-Assad -- a trained medical doctor - asking to be informed, a person familiar with the probe said.

But despite arresting 65 suspects in various raids between April and At left as photographed by a source familiar with the investigation, all the October, 2009 -- including smugglers drugs seized in Syria in the 2009 and pharmacists - Syria lacked the raids between August and October legislation to effectively prosecute were fake, with no medicinal value. them, a problem that has also arisen Counterfeit copies of Novartis, Sanofi- in neighboring states. Since the arrests, Aventis, Pfizer and others were found. the Syrian president has approved a THE WALL STREET JOURNAL law that will carry heavy penalties for distributors of fake medicine, Syrian Health Minister Reda Saed said. A great proportion of the fake drugs smuggled by the network to Egypt and Syria came from China, according to Syrian Health Minister Reda Saed, Some time around 2007, the ring started making its own fake drugs, using technology mostly imported from

China, the Syrian officials and the pharmaceutical-company managers said. Many of the ingredients--such as huge drums of generic painkiller paracetamol (known as acetaminophen in the U.S.) --also came from China. In China, a spokesman for the State Food and Drug Administration declined to comment, but the agency has previously said China has taken a series of measures to crack down on the manufacture and sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals, including strengthening international cooperation. Spokespersons for the Ministry of Public Security and the Customs Department declined to comment.

NO CURE FOR FAKE DRUGS: THE MIDDLE EAST STRUGGLES WITH AN INFLUX OF COUNTERFEIT MEDICINES

Propping Up a Drug Lord, Then Arresting Him By JAMES RISEN DEC. 11, 2010 The New York Times

ASHINGTON — When Hajji Juma Khan was arrested and transported to New York to face charges under a new American narco-terrorism law in 2008, federal prosecutors described him as perhaps the biggest and most dangerous drug lord in Afghanistan, a shadowy figure who had helped keep the Taliban in business with a steady stream of money and weapons. But what the government did not say was that Mr. Juma Khan was also a longtime American informer, who provided information about the Taliban, Afghan corruption and other drug traffickers. Central Intelligence Agency officers and Drug Enforcement Administration agents relied on him as a valued source for years, even as he was building one of Afghanistan’s biggest drug operations after the United States-led invasion of the country, according to current and former American officials. Along the way, he was also paid a large amount of cash by the United States. At the height of his power, Mr. Juma Khan was secretly flown to Washington for a series of clandestine meetings with C.I.A. and D.E.A. officials in 2006. Even then, the United States was receiving reports that he was on his way to becoming Afghanistan’s A poppy field in Afghanistan. Credit David Guttenfelder/Associated Press

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

PROPPING UP A DRUG LORD, THEN ARRESTING HIM

Confiscated opium is destroyed. Opium and heroin production soared after the fall of the Taliban. Credit Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

most important narcotics trafficker by taking over the drug operations of his rivals and paying off Taliban leaders and corrupt politicians in President Hamid Karzai’s government. In a series of videotaped meetings in Washington hotels, Mr. Juma Khan offered tantalizing leads to the C.I.A. and D.E.A., in return for what he hoped would be protected status as an American asset, according to American officials. And then, before he left the United States, he took a side trip to New York to see the sights and do some shopping, according to two people briefed on the case. The relationship between the United States government and Mr. Juma Khan is another illustration of how the war on drugs and the war on terrorism have sometimes collided, particularly in Afghanistan, where drug dealing, the insurgency and the government often overlap. To be sure, American intelligence has worked closely with figures other than Mr. Juma Khan suspected of drug trade ties, including Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half brother, and Hajji Bashir Noorzai, who was arrested in 2005. Mr. Karzai has denied being involved in the drug trade.

The case of Mr. Juma Khan also shows how counternarcotics policy has repeatedly shifted during the nine-year American occupation of Afghanistan, getting caught between the conflicting priorities of counterterrorism and nation building, so much so that Mr. Juma Khan was never sure which way to jump, according to officials who spoke on the condition that they not be identified. When asked about Mr. Juma Khan’s relationship with the C.I.A., a spokesman for the spy agency said that the “C.I.A. does not, as a rule, comment on matters pending before U.S. courts.” A D.E.A. spokesman also declined to comment on his agency’s relationship A Shifting Policy with Mr. Juma Khan. Afghan drug lords have often been His New York lawyer, Steven useful sources of information about Zissou, denied that Mr. Juma Khan the Taliban. But relying on them has had ever supported the Taliban or also put the United States in the posi- worked for the C.I.A. tion of looking the other way as these “There have been many things said informers ply their trade in a country about Hajji Juma Khan,” Mr. Zissou that by many accounts has become a said, “and most of what has been said, narco-state. including that he worked for the C.I.A.,

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

is false. What is true is that H. J. K. has never been an enemy of the United States and has never supported the Taliban or any other group that threatens Americans.” A spokeswoman for the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which is handling Mr. Juma Khan’s prosecution, declined to comment. However, defending the relationship, one American official said, “You’re not going to get intelligence in a war zone from Ward Cleaver or Florence Nightingale.” At first, Mr. Juma Khan, an illiterate trafficker in his mid-50s from Afghanistan’s remote Nimroz Province, in the border region where southwestern Afghanistan meets both Iran and Pakistan, was a big winner from the American-led invasion. He had been a provincial drug smuggler in southwestern Afghanistan in the 1990s, when the Taliban governed the country. But it was not until after the

Taliban’s ouster that he rose to national prominence, taking advantage of a record surge in opium production in Afghanistan after the invasion. Briefly detained by American forces after the 2001 fall of the Taliban, he was quickly released, even though American officials knew at the time that he was involved in narcotics trafficking, according to several current and former American officials. During the first few years of its occupation of Afghanistan, the United States was focused entirely on capturing or killing leaders of Al Qaeda, and it ignored drug trafficking, because American military commanders believed that policing drugs got in the way of their core counterterrorism mission. Opium and heroin production soared, and the narcotics trade came to account for nearly half of the Afghan economy. Concerns, but No Action By 2004, Mr. Juma Khan had gained control over routes from south-

ern Afghanistan to Pakistan’s Makran Coast, where heroin is loaded onto freighters for the trip to the Middle East, as well as overland routes through western Afghanistan to Iran and Turkey. To keep his routes open and the drugs flowing, he lavished bribes on all the warring factions, from the Taliban to the Pakistani intelligence service to the Karzai government, according to current and former American officials. The scale of his drug organization grew to stunning levels, according to the federal indictment against him. It was in both the wholesale and the retail drug businesses, providing raw materials for other drug organizations while also processing finished drugs on its own. Bush administration officials first began to talk about him publicly in 2004, when Robert B. Charles, then the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement, told Time magazine that Mr. Juma Khan was a drug lord “obviously very tightly tied to the Taliban.” Such high-level concern did not lead to any action against Mr. Juma Khan. But Mr. Noorzai, one of his rivals, was lured to New York and arrested in 2005, which allowed Mr. Juma Khan to expand his empire. In a 2006 confidential report to the drug agency reviewed by The New York Times, an Afghan informer stated that Mr. Juma Khan was working with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the political boss of southern Afghanistan, to take control of the drug trafficking operations left behind by Mr. Noorzai. Some current and former American counternarcotics officials say they believe that Mr. Karzai provided security and protection for Mr. Juma Khan’s operations. Mr. Karzai denied any involvement with the drug trade and said that he had never met Mr. Juma Khan. “I have never even seen his face,” he said through a spokesman. He denied hav-

ing any business or security arrangement with him. “Ask them for proof instead of lies,” he added. Mr. Juma Khan’s reported efforts to take over from Mr. Noorzai came just as he went to Washington to meet with the C.I.A. and the drug agency, former American officials say. By then, Mr. Juma Khan had been working as an informer for both agencies for several years, officials said. He had met repeatedly with C.I.A. officers in Afghanistan beginning in 2001 or 2002, and had also developed a relationship with the drug agency’s country attaché in Kabul, former American officials say. He had been paid large amounts of cash by the United States, according to people with knowledge of the case. Along with other tribal leaders in his region, he was given a share of as much as $2 million in payments to help oppose the Taliban. The payments are said to have been made by either the C.I.A. or the United States military. The 2006 Washington meetings were an opportunity for both sides to determine, in face-to-face talks, whether they could take their relationship to a new level of even longer-term cooperation. “I think this was an opportunity to drill down and see what he would be able to provide,” one former American official said. “I think it was kind of like saying, ‘O.K., what have you got?’ ” Business, Not Ideology While the C.I.A. wanted information about the Taliban, the drug agency had its own agenda for the Washington meetings — information about other Afghan traffickers Mr. Juma Khan worked with, as well as contacts on the supply lines through Turkey and Europe. One reason the Americans could justify bringing Mr. Juma Khan to Washington was that they claimed to have no solid evidence that he was smuggling drugs into the United States,

PROPPING UP A DRUG LORD, THEN ARRESTING HIM

and there were no criminal charges pending against him in this country. It is not clear how much intelligence Mr. Juma Khan provided on other drug traffickers or on the Taliban leadership. But the relationship between the C.I.A. and the D.E.A. and Mr. Juma Khan continued for some time after the Washington sessions, officials say. In fact, when the drug agency contacted him again in October 2008 to invite him to another meeting, he went willingly, believing that the Americans wanted to continue the discussions they had with him in Washington. He even paid his own way to Jakarta, Indonesia, to meet with the agency, current and former officials said. But this time, instead of enjoying fancy hotels and friendly talks, Mr. Juma Khan was arrested and flown to New York, and this time he was not allowed to go shopping. It is unclear why the government decided to go after Mr. Juma Khan. Some officials suggest that he never came

through with breakthrough intelligence. Others say that he became so big that he was hard to ignore, and that the United States shifted its priorities to make pursuing drug dealers a higher priority. The Justice Department has used a 2006 narco-terrorism law against Mr. Juma Khan, one that makes it easier for American prosecutors to go after foreign drug traffickers who are not smuggling directly into the United States if the government can show they have ties to terrorist organizations. The federal indictment shows that the drug agency eventually got a cooperating informer who could provide evidence that Mr. Juma Khan was making payoffs to the Taliban to keep his drug operation going, something intelligence operatives had known for years. The federal indictment against Mr. Juma Khan said the payments were “in exchange for protection for the organization’s drug trafficking operations.” The alleged payoffs were what linked

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

him to the Taliban and permitted the government to make its case. But even some current and former American counternarcotics officials are skeptical of the government’s claims that Mr. Juma Khan was a strong supporter of the Taliban. “He was not ideological,” one former official said. “He made payments to them. He made payments to government officials. It was part of the business.” Now, plea negotiations are quietly under way. A plea bargain might keep many of the details of his relationship to the United States out of the public record.

On May 23, 2009, U.S. military and Afghan troops seized 92 tons of opium poppy seeds from a Taliban stronghold. The destruction of the drug stash was reportedly “severely” disruptive to Taliban forces, as drug trade was a primary source of income.

Afghan farmers collect raw opium as they work in a poppy field in the Khogyani district of Jalalabad east of Kabul, Afghanistan, May 10, 2013.

Syria’s Breaking Bad: Are Amphetamines Funding the War? By ARYN BAKER / BEIRUT OCT. 28, 2013 Time Magazine

FIFTEEN days into his job as Lebanon’s top drug-enforcement official, Colonel Ghassan Chams Eddine got a tip-off that something big was going down at the Beirut shipping port this summer. How big? Nearly 5.5 million tablets of a locally produced amphetamine expertly hidden inside an industrial water heater destined for Dubai. His men had to use acetylene torches to remove the white tablets, each embossed with an off-kilter yin-yang symbol and packed into 1,000-piece units in heat-sealed plastic bags. “The boiler was made in Syria, and the way the tablets were hidden, it was clear that they hadn’t been just stuffed inside,” says Chams Eddine. “That unit was formed around the drugs, at the factory.” A week later, on Aug. 21, Chams Eddine got another tip-off. Six Syrianmade cargo trucks destined for Saudi Arabia from Lebanon were stopped just as they were about to cross the border. Each of the containers’ steel reinforcing ribs concealed a cleverly designed drawer packed with loose pills — 6 million of them in total. A few days later, a Syrian was caught at Beirut’s international airport with 11,000 tablets hidden in pastries. Then two more Syrians destined for Saudi Arabia were stopped at the airport with 8 kg of the stuff in their luggage. In one month, Lebanese authorities confiscated more than $200 million worth of a potent amphetamine

that is almost entirely unheard of in the West. But in the Persian Gulf, Captagon, as the amphetamine is known, is the most sought-after drug on the street, and the conflict in Syria, with its attendant lawlessness, is making it even easier to obtain. (PHOTOS: A Flurry of Fire in Syria) As the war drags on, it is all the more likely that Captagon will take on a significant role funding warring parties in the conflict. The captured cargo trucks were owned by a Sunni Syrian clan long linked to the drug trade that fled the besieged city of Homs last year

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

to set up shop in Lebanon, says Chams Eddine, who suspects that the proceeds may have been used in part to fund anti–Bashar Assad rebels. “They run two or three operations like that, and they can easily get $300 million. That would buy a lot of guns.” But it’s not just Syrian Sunnis who are involved. Hizballah, the Iranianfunded and Lebanon-based militia that is fighting in Syria on behalf of President Assad, also has a hand in the trade, according to former U.S. Treasury official Matthew Levitt, a fellow at the Washington Institute

Captagon pills are displayed along with a cup of cocaine at an office of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces

and author of Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God. “Hizballah has a long history of dabbling in the drug trade to help with funding, and Captagon, with its high profit margins, is to them just another business opportunity,” Levitt says. It’s not yet clear if Captagon finances the war effort directly, he adds, but profits from the trade, like Hizballah’s other criminal activities, help fund the organization, freeing up capacity for efforts elsewhere. A Hizballah security official tells TIME that the organization does not engage in drug trafficking,

as the practice is considered sinful in Islam. However, he admits, Hizballah has worked with drug mafias for what he called security operations. “It was never to benefit or fund Hizballah, it was more to collect information. After all, the end justifies the means.” Captagon is the trade name for fenetylline, a synthetic stimulant used in the early treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder before it was banned in most countries in 1986. The counterfeit versions available today contain amphetamine derivatives that are easier and cheaper to produce.

Though Captagon was manufactured and trafficked in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s, it didn’t really take off in the Middle East until 2006, when local authorities started reporting a worrying uptick in amphetamine seizures, most of them in the form of Captagon pills. A year later, Lebanese authorities reported that they had discovered a factory manufacturing counterfeit Captagon, according to a U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) survey. The machinery was reportedly donated to Hizballah members by their Iranian backers in order to provide increased revenue streams for the organization in the wake of the Israel-Hizballah war of 2006, according to an August 2013 report in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism that examines Hizballah’s role in the counterfeit-pharmaceutical industry. In the spring of 2012, Lebanese officials busted a vast Captagon manufacturing and smuggling ring run by prominent members of Hizballah. At least 10 machines, capable of producing tens of thousands of pills a day, were confiscated and destroyed, but it is assumed that many more are still in operation. Hizballah probably needs them, says Levitt. Sanctions against the terrorist group’s financial backer, Iran, have taken their toll. At least twice, he says, Iran has had to cut back regular funding by a third. “That hurts. Imagine if your bosses said, ‘We have to cut back your salary by 30%, and we don’t know for

SYRIA’S BREAKING BAD: ARE AMPHETAMINES FUNDING THE WAR?

how long.’” It’s one thing to be told that rocket deliveries will stop, he adds, but if you can’t pay your bills, it becomes an existential crisis. “So for Hizballah you had this conscious decision to increase criminal activity in order to diversify the resource base,” he says. The HIzballah security official denies that the organization uses drugs to fundraise, but admits that some supporters, particularly in the Bekaa Valley region of Lebanon, a Hizballah stronghold where the production is centered, work in the business. Going after them would be detrimental to the Hizballah cause, he says. “People accuse Hizballah of standing behind drug factories because we cannot go and fight with the clans of Bekaa. We reject their actions but at the same time there is no replacement for them.” (MORE: Syria’s Minority Alawites Cling to Assad, Hope for Peace) In terms of pure profit, it’s hard to beat amphetamines. Unlike cocaine and heroin, the base ingredients are easy, and even legal, to obtain. A pill that costs pennies to produce in Lebanon retails for up to $20 a pop in Saudi Arabia, where some 55 million Captagon tablets are seized a year — a number that even Saudi officials admit amounts to only 10% of the overall total that actually makes it into the kingdom, according to the UNODC World Drug Report and a not-yet-published E.U. assessment of drug trafficking in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia alone accounts for more than one-third of global amphetamines seizures a year, and three-quarters of patients treated for drug problems there are addicted to amphetamines, almost exclusively in the form of Captagon. Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE have reported similar spikes in multimillion-tablet seizures of the drug in the past two years. On Sept. 17, Saudi Arabia executed a Syrian man convicted of smuggling Captagon into the kingdom; anoth-

er was hanged for the same crime in March 2012. Most smugglers caught trafficking the drug in Lebanon are also Syrian, says Lebanese drug-enforcement official Chams Eddine. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Syrians have taken over the drug business. At least not yet. With the war producing some 2 million refugees, and another 5 million internally displaced, desperation is driving more Syrians to take up smuggling on behalf of Lebanese cartels. But as lawlessness grows in Syria, so too does that country’s manufacturing capabilities. As war raged in the city of Homs last December, some 180,000 pills were confiscated by the government in a suspected factory. “I have seen more Syrians who are getting involved

“But as lawlessness grows in Syria, so too does that country’s manufacturing capabilities.” in the past year in the business,” Abu Ali Zaiter, one of Lebanon’s biggest (and most wanted) drug dealers, tells TIME over the phone. His name is well known to the authorities, but in order to avoid antagonizing them by speaking openly to the media, he requested to go by his equally well-known nickname. Captagon labs are multiplying in Syria, he says, but for the moment they are still selling to big-time dealers like him, who know the ins and outs of international drug trafficking. “Maybe 10 years from now, if the war continues, they will compete with us in the international market, but till now it’s a new business and very limited.”

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Not all elements involved in the war are so sanguine about the opportunities presented by continued conflict. Omar Atrash, the former head of the Lebanese branch of Jabhat al-Nusra, one of the al-Qaeda-affiliated groups fighting the Assad regime in Syria, boasted to TIME that he had personally overseen the destruction of two Syrian Captagon factories near the border. The factories were in Qalamoun, an area “liberated” by the rebels more than a year ago, he said, and “since then there is a complete absence of the state, and many villages thought once the regime is gone they can do all kinds of illegal activities.” According to al-Nusra’s strict interpretation of Islamic law, drugs are forbidden. So Atrash led the charge to destroy the factories, as well as several marijuana fields. He admitted, however, that continuing the fight against narcotics had been counterproductive. Not only would the complete eradication of all drug facilities in the area suck manpower from the front lines, it also risked alienating the very residents they were trying to win over. “Nusra clashed several times with villagers because they tried to end this phenomenon,” he said in an in-person interview conducted just days before his death, earlier this month, by a rocket in Syria. It is not clear where the rocket came from. Drugs, of course, are not new to the region. During its own civil war, Lebanon was at the center of an international drug trade that processed coca from South America and opium from Afghanistan into cocaine and heroin destined for the European market. Almost every warring party was involved in one way or another, the better to fund their war efforts. Surely Syrians on all sides of that conflict have taken note.

In 2010, Turkish and Saudi authorities seized 30 tons of ingredients for Captagon pills, which would have been enough to make 200 million psychostimulant tablets with a street value of $1.6 billion.

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Taliban set to double opium profits this year? By CBS News MAY 5, 2015

HARI, Afghanistan -- It's the cash crop of the Taliban and the scourge of Afghanistan - the country's intractable opium cultivation. This year, many Afghan poppy farmers are expecting a windfall as they get ready to harvest opium from a new variety of poppy seeds said to boost yield of the resin that produces heroin. The plants grow bigger, faster, use less water than seeds they've used before, and give up to double the amount of opium, they say. No one seems to know where the seeds originate from. The farmers of Kandahar and Helmand provinces, where most of Afghanistan's poppies are grown, say they were hand-delivered for planting early this year by the same men who collect the opium after each harvest, and who also provide them with tools, fertilizer, farming advice - and the much needed cash advance.

Afghan farmers collect raw opium as they work in a poppy field in the Khogyani district of Jalalabad, east of Kabul, Afghanistan, May 10, 2013. Afghanistanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s opium production surged in 2013 to record levels, despite 12 years of international efforts to wean the country off the narcotics trade, according to a report released Wednesday by the U.N.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s drug control agency.

TALIBAN SET TO DOUBLE OPIUM PROFITS THIS YEAR?

An Afghan farmer harvests opium sap from a poppy field in Surkh Rod District, of Nangarhar province near Jalalabad, May 5, 2015. GETTY

Afghanistan’s poppy harvest, which accounts for most of the world’s heroin, is worth an estimated $3 billion a year, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Production hit a record high in 2014, up 17 percent compared to the year before, as opium and the drugs trade continued to undermine security, rule of law and development, while funding both organized crime and the Taliban -- often one and the same.

The trend is expected to continue in 2015, in part thanks to the new poppy seeds, according to officials tasked with overseeing the eradication of poppy crops. This upcoming harvest in late spring is expected to surpass last year’s country-wide record of 8,600 tons by as much as 7 percent, and 22 percent in Kandahar and Helmand provinces respectively, local officials said. Experts say the Taliban, who have been waging war on the Kabul government for more than a decade, derive around 40 percent of their funding from opium, which in turn fuels their insurgency. Fierce fighting in recent months in poppy-growing regions shows the Taliban’s determination to protect their trafficking routes and the season-

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

al workers who come to earn money at harvest time from government forces under orders to eradicate the crop. Gul Mohammad Shukran, chief of Kandahar’s anti-narcotics department, said the new seeds came with the drug traffickers, but he did not know exactly where from. They yield “better drug plants, which require less water and have a faster growth time.” “This is a big threat to everyone,” he said, adding that Afghanistan’s central authorities had failed to act on his warnings. Growing poppy for opium is illegal in Afghanistan and forbidden under Islam, the country’s predominant religion. But Afghan farmers feel they have no choice. For more than a decade the government and its international partners have pleaded with

them to grow something else -- wheat, fruit or even saffron. When that didn’t work, the police were sent to destroy crops. And when that failed, the Americans and the British tried handing out free wheat seeds, an enterprise that found little fertile ground. This spring, the opium fields have again erupted in a sea of bright pink poppy flowers. The new poppy seeds allow farmers to almost double the output from each plant, said Helmand’s provincial police chief Nabi Jan Malakhail. At harvest, collectors cut the bulb of the plant, allowing the raw opium to ooze out. This resin dries and is collected the following day. Malakhail said the new seeds grow bulbs that are bigger than usual and can be scored twice within a few days, thus doubling the quantity of raw opium. The plants mature in three to four months, rather than the five months of the previous seed variety, allowing farmers to crop three times a year instead of just twice. In Kandahar’s Zhari district, farmer Abdul Baqi said he knows poppy growing is illegal and that, given a choice, he would “rather eat grass.” But, he added, “I cannot feed my kids with nothing but the air.” Baqi said the Taliban and associated crime gangs make it easy for the farmers to produce opium, and difficult -- even deadly -- not to.

Without government support, it’s impossible to grow food crops as the cash-strapped farmers would have to pay for the seeds, tools, fertilizer and irrigation themselves. No one would come and collect their crop, even if their landlords allowed them to grow wheat or other food. If the government took charge and provided irrigation and power, Hismatullah Janan, another Zhari poppy grower, said he would gladly change to growing wheat or similar crops “so we could make an honest and decent living, and leave this so-called dirty work behind.” Afghan anti-narcotics officials say they need international assistance to proceed with poppy eradication. Yet since 2002, the United States has spent at least $7 billion “on a wide variety of programs to reduce poppy cultivation, prevent narcotics production, treat drug addiction and improve the criminal justice system to combat drug trafficking,” John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, told the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control in January. Afghanistan supplies 90 percent of the world’s opium and opiates originating from there find their way to every corner of the globe, Sopko said. The Taliban will also likely be emboldened, since for the first time this year, there are no international combat troops on the battlefields of

Afghanistan after the NATO drawdown at the end of 2014. Many anti-narcotics officials also left, fuelling concerns that Afghanistan’s economic addiction to opium, worth around 15 percent of its gross domestic product, would only grow, Sopko added. Almost 90 percent of Afghanistan’s poppy cultivation is in the south and the west -- and provinces such as Helmand and Kandahar, longtime Taliban strongholds, have become synonymous for poppy cultivation. As opium production rises, so does Afghanistan’s own drug addiction problem. Estimates put the number of heroin addicts in the country at between 1.5 million and 2 million in a population estimated at around 30 million. And the unchecked Afghan opium production is also blamed for rising drug addiction in neighboring countries, including the former Soviet republics to the north, Iran to the west, and China and Pakistan to the east. The UNODC can do little beyond encouraging the government to curb opium production, said the organization’s chief in Afghanistan, Andrey Avetisyan. Kabul, with the support from the international community, he said, needs to find a way to introduce “crops that can be a serious competition to opium.” But for now, finding something more lucrative than the mystery poppy seeds is a daunting task, so the vicious opium cycle continues.

TALIBAN SET TO DOUBLE OPIUM PROFITS THIS YEAR?

Tasked With Combating Opium, Afghan Officials Profit From It By AZAM AHMED FEB. 15, 2016 The New York Times

ARMSIR, Afghanistan — The United States spent more than $7 billion in the past 14 years to fight the runaway poppy production that has made Afghan opium the world’s biggest brand. Tens of billions more went to governance programs to stem corruption and train a credible police force. Countless more dollars and thousands of lives were lost on the main thrust of the war: to put the Afghan government in charge of district centers and to instill rule of law. But here in one of the few corners of Helmand Province that is peaceful and in firm government control, the green stalks and swollen bulbs of opium were growing thick and high within eyeshot of official buildings during the past poppy season — signs of a local narco-state administered directly by government officials. In the district of Garmsir, poppy cultivation not only is tolerated, but is a source of money that the local government depends on. Officials have imposed a tax on farmers practically identical to the one the Taliban use in places they control.

Afghan farmers harvested poppies last spring in the Nad Ali district of Helmand Province. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

TASKED WITH COMBATING OPIUM, AFGHAN OFFICIALS PROFIT FROM IT

By Joe Burgess/The New York Times

more working hours to every facet of the opium business. That fact was built into a mantra of Western officials in Afghanistan: When security improves, opium will be easier to take down. That the Afghan government is now also competing in the opium business, in the absence of other reliable economic successes, has ramifications beyond the nation’s borders. Governments across the region are struggling with the health and security problems brought by the increased opium flow. And as the trade becomes more institutionalized in Afghanistan, it has undercut years of anticorruption efforts, perpetuating its status as a source of regional instability, crime and intrigue.

Some of the revenue is kicked up the chain, all the way to officials in Kabul, the capital, ensuring that the local authorities maintain support from higher-ups and keeping the opium growing. And Garmsir is just one example of official involvement in the drug trade. Multiple visits to Afghan opium country over the past year, and extensive interviews with opium farmers, local elders, and Afghan and Western officials, laid bare the reality that even if the Western-backed government succeeds, the opium seems here to stay. More than ever, Afghan government officials have become directly involved in the opium trade, expanding their competition with the Taliban beyond politics and into a struggle for control of the drug traffic and revenue. At the local level, the fight itself

can often look like a turf war between drug gangs, even as American troops are being pulled back into the battle on the government’s behalf, particularly in Helmand, in southern Afghanistan. “There are phases of government complicity, starting with accommodation of the farmers and then on to cooperation with them,” said David Mansfield, a researcher who conducted more than 15 years of fieldwork on Afghan opium. “The last is predation, where the government essentially takes over the business entirely.” The huge boom in poppy production that began a dozen years ago was strongly identified with the new Taliban insurgency, as the means through which the militants bought their bullets, bombs and vehicles. In recent years, the insurgents have committed more and

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

An Entrenched Process The administration of President Ashraf Ghani has made fighting corruption a central promise. A spokesman for his government, asked about official involvement in opium trafficking, including in Garmsir, insisted that there was “zero tolerance” for such behavior. “The president has been decisive in acting on information that indicates involvement of government officials in illegal acts, including taxation of opium,” said the spokesman, Sayed Zafar Hashemi. But in Garmsir and other places in the Helmand opium belt, the system is firmly in place and remarkably consistent. It relies on a network of village leaders and people employed by farmers to manage the water supply, men known as mirabs. These men survey the land under cultivation and collect money on behalf of officials, both in district-level government and in Kabul. The connections run deeply into the national government, officials acknowledge privately. In some cases,

the money is passed up to senators or assembly members with regional connections. In others, employees in the Independent Directorate of Local Governance, the agency that oversees provincial and district governments, pocket the payoffs, officials said. Some of the most important regional police and security commanders, including allies of American military and intelligence officials, are closely identified with the opium trade. But the real money often stays local, with provincial and district officials. In the case of Garmsir, the district governor and police chief reaped the largest share of the rewards, according to local officials and farmers. The local police were also included in the profits. Farmers said they paid about $40 for each acre of poppies under cultivation. In 2015, that meant nearly $3 million in payments from the district of Garmsir alone, according to officials familiar with the process. Garmsir is just one of several districts in Helmand Province, the heart of poppy country and the center of the 2010 American troop “surge,” where the government has built local opium alliances with farmers. The district of Marja has a system similar to the one in Garmsir, in which locals pay a flat rate based on how much poppy they grow, according to interviews with more than a dozen farmers and officials. In the district of Nad Ali, the same conditions exist to a lesser extent. That the Taliban have closed in on some of those districts in recent weeks will mean little to the local growers. They paid their tax to the insurgents before the American troop

surge and to the government after it. They will adjust again. And the money to be made is only increasing. Already, experts say, satellite imagery from the past growing season across southern Helmand showed that opium cultivation was occurring openly within sight of military and police bases. “Over the years, I have seen the central government, the local government and the foreigners all talk very seriously about poppy,” said Hakim Angar, a former two-time police chief of Helmand Province. “In practice, they do nothing, and behind the scenes, the government makes secret deals to enrich themselves.”

Lucrative Arrangements By the most basic metric, the international effort to curb poppy production in Afghanistan has failed. More opium was cultivated in 2014, the last year of the NATO combat mission, than in any other year since the United Nations began keeping records in 2002. If there was a bright spot in 2015, it was that a poppy fungus or weevil reduced the harvest by as much as half in some places. But the lower production is likely to mean even more desperate attempts to increase cultivation next year, if the past is any guide. Highlighting the efficiency of the government poppy tax, officials in Marja decided this year to halve it from the year

Opium poppies in Garmsir, a district of Helmand Province. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

TASKED WITH COMBATING OPIUM, AFGHAN OFFICIALS PROFIT FROM IT

before — precisely the proportion of the harvest that the fungus blighted. “In the case of the opium trade, they try harder,” said one counternarcotics law enforcement official in southern Afghanistan. “There’s just too much money to ignore it.” Government complicity in the opium trade is not new. Power brokers, often working for the government, have long operated behind the scenes, producing, refining and smuggling opium or heroin across one of the many porous borders of Afghanistan. That kind of corruption has been seen nationwide. Taxation on a districtwide level in the main opium-growing centers, however, has been less common. Most who spoke about it did so on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. Those who spoke openly tended to have enough resources to deter official blowback. “Of course it happens here,” said a local police commander in Marja, Baz Gul, who oversees a few dozen men and was one of the residents who first took up arms against the Taliban. “But the police chief, the local police commander, they don’t take the money directly. They do it through influential figures.” As it happens, Marja — one of the most violent districts during the 2010 troop surge, and the site of pitched battles recently between the Taliban and Afghan forces backed by American Special Operations troops — is a case study in opium economics. One elder in Marja, who collects money from villagers who cultivate poppy in his block of 44 acres, said poppy was simply too alluring to ignore. Even with the tax, even with the blight, opium outstripped the next most lucrative crop by a ratio of more than three to one. In 2015, the elder said, the group’s earnings came close to $62,000, less than half as much as the year before. With a tax of $60 per acre, the final profit for all 44 acres was roughly $59,000.

By comparison, the average income for an Afghan, according to the World Bank, is $681 a year. “Most other crops would have earned about $20,000 for 44 acres,” said the elder, seated in the home of another tribal elder in Marja. A dozen men arrayed in the room nodded quietly at his accounting. Blight and Turbulence The district of Nad Ali, a short drive from the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, appears less organized than Garmsir or Marja. In April, on a drive through open farmland in government-controlled areas, much of the poppy crop had been plowed through because of an early harvest or because the plants were so disease-ridden that the farmers saw no point in keeping them standing. Farmers in Nad Ali said tax collection depended on a number of factors, including one’s relationship with the local police commander, proximity to the district center and how badly crops were hurt by disease. In some cases, the teams sent by the government to eradicate crops collected the funds. In others, it was the local or national police. Payments ranged from about $90 to $100 for every acre, according to six farmers. “All of our poppies were disease-affected,” said one farmer in the Loy Bagh area of Nad Ali. “What people paid depended on how much they cultivated and how much was destroyed by the disease.” The system in Garmsir, however, appears to leave little to chance. The district, farther from the provincial capital than Marja or Nad Ali, enjoys more autonomy than most under government control. Interviews conducted in midMarch, before the blight appeared, showed a system of accommodation that was settling in comfortably. While farmers were not happy about paying

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the government, most saw it as inevitable and noted that the profit margin for opium was still considerably better than for wheat or cotton. “We understand that the officials will charge us money,” said Juma Khan, a 35-year-old farmer in Garmsir, shrugging. The system ran into turbulence in the spring, when two members of Parliament caught wind of the arrangement. After their demand for a cut of the profits was rebuffed, they went public, according to Afghan officials familiar with the case. Officials in Kabul quickly fired the district governor, police chief and intelligence director, who were accused of dividing the profits. In a small ceremony, the Helmand deputy governor returned wads of cash to cheering farmers outside the provincial governor’s offices and promised to crack down on such exploitation. Officials said that all of the money had been returned to farmers and that the responsible parties had been removed from power. But neither promise was entirely true. The governor of Garmsir — who, in an interview, denied that he had created or collected any tax — was quietly moved to Washir, a neighboring district. Months later, he was moved back to Garmsir, where he has returned to his old job. Government officials in Kabul said he had been cleared of wrongdoing after a thorough investigation. A later visit to Garmsir unearthed a second inconsistency: Farmers said they had received only half of their money back. Still, that was something of a rebate. After all, they had lost nearly half of their crop to blight.

Afghan boys leave school to help prepare the soil for poppy seeds in Cham Kalai village in Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province, Nov. 12, 2013. Children and women have to help plant the poppy crop because the planting season in Afghanistan is less then two months, and poor farmers have only basic equipment.

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Penetrating Every Stage of Afghan Opium Chain, Taliban Become a Cartel By AZAM AHMED FEB. 16, 2016 The New York Times

ARANJ, Afghanistan â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Shortly after sunrise, an Afghan special operations helicopter descended on two vehicles racing through the empty deserts of southern Afghanistan, traversing what has become a superhighway for smugglers and insurgents. Intelligence showed that the men were transporting a huge cache of drugs and weapons from Helmand Province to Nimruz Province, a hub for all things illegal and a way station on the global opium trail. Hovering above, the troops fired tracer rounds into the sandy earth beside the vehicles, which skidded to a stop. It was an impressive take for the Afghan forces that day, July 12, 2014. They seized nearly a metric ton of opium in various phases of processing, three AK-47 assault rifles, an automatic handgun, a PKM machine gun, a rocket-propelled grenade, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, four two-way radios and two satellite phones. But the biggest coup was neither the drugs nor the weapons. It was Afghans accused of smuggling opium were held last year in Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz Province, where Mullah Abdul Rashid Baluch was the Taliban shadow governor. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

PENETRATING EVERY STAGE OF AFGHAN OPIUM CHAIN, TALIBAN BECOME A CARTEL

a passenger who gave his name as Muhammad Eshaq, a 40-year-old carpet seller from Nimruz. After a later inquiry by international officials, the police discovered that Mr. Eshaq was actually Mullah Abdul Rashid Baluch, the Taliban shadow governor of Nimruz Province: a man with blood on his hands and with direct links to the top Taliban leaders in Pakistan. In many respects, Mullah Rashid embodies the evolution of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. As a hardened insurgent, most notorious for planning a mass suicide attack in Nimruz during the holy month of Ramadan, he had become among the most powerful drug smugglers in all of southern Afghanistan. That he was picked up during a drug raid, not a counter-terrorism operation, was a fitting end. He was, in the eyes of many, more of a criminal than an insurgent ideologue. Prosecutors brought him to the country’s elite drug court, and within four months, he was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison. Mullah Rashid is just one of dozens of senior Taliban leaders who are so enmeshed in the drug trade that it has become difficult to distinguish the group from a dedicated drug cartel. While the Taliban have long profited from the taxation and protection of the drug trade in Afghanistan, insurgents are taking more direct roles and claiming spots higher up in the opium chain, according to interviews with dozens of

Afghan and Western officials, as well as smugglers and members of the communities where they reside. This includes high-level commanders, like Mullah Rashid, personally escorting large shipments. And it goes straight to the top: The new Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, is at the pinnacle of a pyramid of tribal Ishaqzai drug traffickers and has amassed an immense personal fortune, according to United Nations monitors. That drug money changed the entire shape of the Taliban: With it, Mullah Mansour bought off influential dissenters when he claimed the supreme leadership over the summer, according to senior Taliban commanders. In some areas of Afghanistan, the Taliban have provided seeds for farmers to grow opium on the insurgents’ behalf, or paid middlemen to purchase opium for them to store while they wait for prices to increase. In its most recent monitoring report, the United Nations warned that the Taliban’s deeper drift into the drug business was bad news for the prospect of peace. “This trend has real consequences for peace and security in Afghanistan, as it encourages those within the Taliban movement who have the greatest economic incentives to oppose any meaningful process of reconciliation with the new government,” the authors wrote. Some of the change in the nature of the Taliban movement can be attributed

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

to the devastating military campaign to take out its leaders, leaving younger, more radical commanders on the battlefield. With competing conflicts diminishing some of the money from traditional donors in the Persian Gulf, the Taliban have been forced into greater self-reliance, cobbling money together from a variety of sources. Those sources include gem and lumber smuggling, but drug trafficking has become, by far, the Taliban’s most important and steady revenue source. Mullah Rashid is one of the highest-ranking Taliban members to be directly implicated in drug smuggling in recent years. He owned homes in the notorious smuggling haven of Baramcha and controlled narcotics traffic through the open deserts in southern Helmand Province that connect Nimruz, Pakistan and Iran. “He started as an idealist but became a professional smuggler,” said one top intelligence official in Nimruz Province, who has tracked Mullah Rashid for five years. “When he became the shadow governor, the trade became so lucrative, he could not give it up.” According to government officials, Mullah Rashid was appointed to the governorship of Nimruz more than four years ago, after his predecessor was killed. He was a strategic pick for the Taliban, which hoped to benefit from his ethnicity as well as his experience. He is of Baluch descent, which made it easier for him to operate and

recruit in the borderlands, where his tribesmen are prominent. As an insurgent commander, his highest-profile acts were a series of suicide attacks in Zaranj in August 2012, which claimed the lives of nearly 30 people during Ramadan, officials familiar with his tenure said. He was also a key figure in coordinating contacts between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, setting up high-level meetings in Pakistan between the two groups. But soon, his main focus became the drug business. Mullah Rashid consolidated his power in the smuggling zones of southern Afghanistan, a vast expanse of desert used for decades by smugglers hoping to evade detection. Knowledge of the routes and landscape, which has no formal maps or roadways, is the difference between life and death. The police, for the most part, are unable to patrol or secure this area outside of a few highly selective special operations missions. In some areas of Afghanistan, the Taliban have provided seeds for farmers to grow opium on the insurgents’ behalf, or paid middlemen to purchase opium for them to store while they wait for prices to increase. In its most recent monitoring report, the United Nations warned that the Taliban’s deeper drift into the drug business was bad news for the prospect of peace. “This trend has real consequences for peace and security in Afghanistan, as it encourages those

within the Taliban movement who have the greatest economic incentives to oppose any meaningful process of reconciliation with the new government,” the authors wrote. Some of the change in the nature of the Taliban movement can be attributed to the devastating military campaign to take out its leaders, leaving younger, more radical commanders on the battlefield. With competing conflicts diminishing some of the money from traditional donors in the Persian Gulf, the Taliban have been forced into greater self-reliance, cobbling money together from a variety of sources. Those sources include gem and lumber smuggling, but drug trafficking has become, by far, the Taliban’s most important and steady revenue source. Mullah Rashid is one of the highest-ranking Taliban members to be directly implicated in drug smuggling in recent years. He owned homes in the notorious smuggling haven of Baramcha and controlled narcotics traffic through the open deserts in southern Helmand Province that connect Nimruz, Pakistan and Iran. “He started as an idealist but became a professional smuggler,” said one top intelligence official in Nimruz Province, who has tracked Mullah Rashid for five years. “When he became the shadow governor, the trade became so lucrative, he could not give it up.” According to government officials, Mullah Rashid was appointed to the

governorship of Nimruz more than four years ago, after his predecessor was killed. He was a strategic pick for the Taliban, which hoped to benefit from his ethnicity as well as his experience. He is of Baluch descent, which made it easier for him to operate and recruit in the borderlands, where his tribesmen are prominent. As an insurgent commander, his highest-profile acts were a series of suicide attacks in Zaranj in August 2012, which claimed the lives of nearly 30 people during Ramadan, officials familiar with his tenure said. He was also a key figure in coordinating contacts between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, setting up high-level meetings in Pakistan between the two groups. But soon, his main focus became the drug business. Mullah Rashid consolidated his power in the smuggling zones of southern Afghanistan, a vast expanse of desert used for decades by smugglers hoping to evade detection. Knowledge of the routes and landscape, which has no formal maps or roadways, is the difference between life and death. The police, for the most part, are unable to patrol or secure this area outside of a few highly selective special operations missions.

PENETRATING EVERY STAGE OF AFGHAN OPIUM CHAIN, TALIBAN BECOME A CARTEL

Stories from ISIS Recruits: Drugs, Money and Preying on Youth By CHAKER KHAZAAL MAR. 1, 2016 The Huffington Post

IME Magazine reported last year that the Islamic State, also known as “ISIS” and “ISIL,” acquires as many as 1,000 new fighters each month. Recently leaked documents have revealed that ISIS is making a concerted effort to brainwash and groom young recruits to become their next generation of soldiers. The terrorist group’s so-called “Cubs of the Caliphate“ trainees may number in the thousands, and have been prominently featured in their propaganda videos over the past year. The youths, who range from small children to teenagers, hold rocket launchers, AK-47s and other heavy weaponry while posing for photos with ISIS banners. As members of the caliphate, these youths’ duties are not much different from that of their adult counterparts—they are “educated” daily in the faction’s religious mission, trained to use weapons and close-quarters combat techniques, and occasionally carry out suicide bombings and even executions. A portion of ISIS’s junior faction are victims of mass abduction campaigns during which ISIS takes hundreds of children over the course of a few weeks. The organization’s agents use fear and deception to lure, pressure, and sometimes trick young targets into joining their ranks. But not all of their child prospects assimilate well to the ISIS way of life—young recruits who cannot be molded into ruthless fight-

ers are sold off as sex slaves or killed, sometimes by cruel methods such as crucifixion or live burial. I made a trip to the Middle East last year to do investigative reporting on ISIS’s recruiting methods, and discussed their techniques with Lebanese social worker Maya Yamout. She, together with her sister Nancy, conducted interviews with thirty-five suspected terrorists being jailed in Lebanon. Yamout is also involved in “Rescue Me,” a Lebanon-based NGO founded by her sister that works with vulnerable youth to prevent them from being recruited into ISIS and other terrorist organizations. She told me that based on the cases she interviewed in Roumieh prison in Lebanon, she believes that the Islamic State’s ruthless recruiters convert desperate targets by preying on their weaknesses. “Terrorists I interviewed confirmed that there is an ISIS recruiting agent in every corner in the world today. They prey on the vulnerable ones,” Yamout said. “Those who are poor, they persuade them with money. Those with psychological troubles, they provide them with drugs.” “They gave us drugs: hallucinogenic pills that would make you go to battle not caring if you live or die.” 19-year-old former ISIS member Kareem Mufleh told CNN’s Ivan Watson in November. “If they give you a suicide belt and tell you to blow yourself up, you’ll do it.” In an interview with B.M., a 19-year-old ISIS member jailed for be-

“If they give you a suicide belt and tell you to blow yourself up, you’ll do it.”

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

heading a Lebanese soldier, B.M. told Yamout that ISIS forced [him] to use opium regularly until he developed a severe addiction. He said he was high and hadn’t slept for days when he carried out the beheading. Following ISIS’s release of a chilling video depicting a young boy beheading a Syrian army officer last year, terrorism expert Will Geddes said it was obvious the child was on drugs as he carried out the gruesome act. “It’s probably cocaine or an amphetamine,” said Geddes, the threat management firm International Corporate Protection. “His pupils are completely dilated and he has a thousand-yard stare. He looks like he’s been wound up to do what he’s about to do.” After the infamous ISIS attack that killed 130 people in Paris last year, survivors described their assailants’ demeanor as ‘peaceful’ and ‘zombie-like’ while pouring bullets from their assault rifles into anything that moved. French media has since reported that evidence has surfaced indicating the gunmen may have been high on a drug called Captagon, a synthetic amphetamine-based pill ISIS uses to make their soldiers ignore pain and hunger while fighting for days on end. Yamout told me during our interview that not all of ISIS’s recruits are converted by coercion. She explained that children or young men who have lost their parents are often targeted by ISIS recruiters, who persuade them to join the ISIS ‘family.’ “For those who have lost their father figure [due to abandonment, death or otherwise], they send someone to them to replace that missing element in their life,” Yamout said. “In fact, many of those I interviewed had the absent-father syndrome. They missed their father figure, so ISIS and other terrorist organizations send someone like a Sheikh to pretend

Near the end of my interview with Yamout, I asked her how the world On April 14, 2014, six people were can thwart ISIS’ plans to transform arrested in Saudi Arabia for allegedly smuggling 22.6 million amphetamine their child army into cold-blooded pills hidden inside coils of barbed killing machines. wire and rolls of plastic. The pills were “The more we learn about ISIS, valued at $267 million. the more we know how to prevent terrorism,” she told me. “The solution to halt their recruitment begins first with they’re there for them. Next thing you awareness, and then prevention.” know, they are in Syria or Iraq fighting.” Yamout and her sister are currently ISIS has focused an alarming amount seeking full scholarship for a clinical soof effort on developing their future force cial work doctoral program to continue of terror, and sources report they are re- studying about terrorists and extremism. cruiting more children than adults. By Her will to expand her work is partially forcing these ‘cubs’ to perform horrific driven by interactions she had with one acts of violence, ISIS aims to create a former prisoner in particular, who she brutalized generation of fighters that says was a student of Usama Bin Laden. will kill with reckless abandon. “He was released a year ago because of ‘lack of evidence’.” Yamout

was disappointed that Lebanese authorities had released him despite her warnings about his extremist views. “I last heard from him 9 months ago when we chatted via Skype. He told me that he was on the Turkish-Syrian border and wanted to go for Jihad to become a Shaheed (Martyr). Two years ago when I interviewed him in prison, he told me that ISIS will spread in Europe, and attacks will happen in many places like France,” Yamout said. “He also said that ISIS has plans to create chaos all over the world, especially strong countries like USA, Canada, the UK, and Russia.”

STORIES FROM ISIS RECRUITS: DRUGS, MONEY AND PREYING ON YOUTH

Scaling Up a Drug Trade, Straight Through ISIS Turf By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI and LORENZO TONDO SEPT. 13, 2016 New York Times

ALERMO, Italy — The investigators for Italy’s antidrug unit were used to measuring the flow of hashish from Moroccan fields to European shores one speedboat or Jet Ski at a time. So when the phone rang with a tip that an enormous freighter loaded with hashish was plying international waters south of Sicily — bound for Libya, hundreds of miles to the east of the usual quick drug route to Spain — Francesco Amico, a senior investigator, immediately knew something odd was going on. Not just odd, but huge: When two Italian Navy warships eventually stopped the freighter, the Adam, off the Libyan coast on April 12, 2013, agents found a terrified Syrian crew and 15 metric tons of hashish — a stash many

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

A jute suitcase containing 100 blocks of hashish in the office of the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian financial police force, in Palermo, Italy. The blocks were among 13 tons of hashish seized from the cargo ship Munzur in December. Credit Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times

multiples larger than Italian officials had ever seen. “There was so much of the drug that we didn’t know where to put it,” said Mr. Amico, who waited in the Sicilian port of Trapani for the escorted ship to arrive. “We had to go out and rent a warehouse.” The Italian officials had stumbled on a lucrative new trafficking route

continental Europe last year, according to the European Union’s Monitoring The cargo ship Meryem docked in Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction. Palermo in June. The freighter, with 20 Then the tips dried up, and the busts tons of hashish, was seized last year. Credit Gianni Cipriano for The New stopped. The Italian investigation, which York Times had expanded to include other European countries and the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, has not that stretched far to the east along the seized any ships on the route in 2016, coast of Northern Africa — and although officials say they believe the ways led to Libya, in an area fought traffic continues. over by competing armed groups that Instead, as they have sought to unincluded the Islamic State. derstand what happens to the enormous The Adam was the first of 20 ships shipments, they are struggling with a that would be intercepted over the route mystery that has prompted intriguing over the following 32 months, officials questions but offered few answers. say. Their collective cargo amounted to One thing they know is that the more than 280 tons of hashish valued at drugs were not ending up in Libya. The 2.8 billion euros, or about $3.2 billion — Moroccan drug producers consistently roughly half of what was seized in all of use individualized branding logos, like

a scorpion or a dollar sign. That helped investigators pick up the drug shipments’ trail again after they left Libya, traveling along an overland route through Egypt and then on to Europe through the Balkans. But the investigators are still not sure what happened as the drugs passed through. From interrogations and surveillance, they know the route crossed territory that until a few weeks ago was claimed by the Islamic State — which has taxed shipments of drugs and other goods in Syria and Iraq. That, in particular, led the Italian drug investigators to start asking questions they never expected to confront: Could the Islamic State or some other group be profiting from the drug route by taxing it? Was the militant-driven

SCALING UP A DRUG TRADE, STRAIGHT THROUGH ISIS TURF

By Joe Burgess/The New York Times

chaos in Libya providing an opportunity by drug traffickers to pick a route the authorities wouldn’t suspect, or were the Libyan-based groups more directly involved? The investigation continues. “Once it reaches Libya, we lose track of it,” said Lt. Col. Giuseppe Campobasso, who heads the antidrug unit in Sicily of the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian financial police force that led the search for the ships. For years, the Italian investigators had tracked small shipments of Moroccan hashish, around 100 kilograms at a time, coming to Spain in boats that crossed the Strait of Gibraltar — a narrow passage that ferries cross in under 35 minutes. In 2007, Spain began installing cameras up and down its southern coastline, but at least at first, the hashish traffic continued in the usual way.

With Europe’s eyes trained on smallboat traffic coming from the south, at first no one noticed the cargo ships that were taking a big dogleg to the east. Giacomo Catania, an inspector with the Guardia di Finanza who was in charge of storing the incoming drugs, explained another oddity: The enormous cargo ships they seized — some as long as a soccer field and designed to carry fleets of automobiles or cargo containers — were empty except for the drugs. “These are ships that have a capacity to carry thousands of tons, and the cargo in most cases was around 20 tons. Only a minuscule portion of it was used,” Mr. Catania said. That the smugglers were willing to operate so inefficiently — Mr. Catania compared it to using an 18-wheeler to transport a single pack of cigarettes — is testament to the value of the cargo. Considering that hashish sells for €10,000, about $11,200, per kilogram once it reaches Europe’s streets, the Adam’s cargo alone was worth at least

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

€150 million. And shipments seized later were even bigger — including a load of hashish aboard the freighter Aberdeen, boarded in the summer of 2014, that was estimated to be worth €420 million — or about $472 million. After seizing the Adam, investigators in Italy interrogated its crew members, who insisted that they did not know that hashish was in the 591 plastic bags investigators had found on the ship’s deck. The ship’s captain testified that he believed he was transporting humanitarian aid, brought to the ship by the crew of a speedboat that approached them off the coast of Morocco and insisted that they take the bags, according to a transcript of his statement to investigators. To learn more, the investigators — who have decades of experience dealing with the Sicilian Mafia — decided to bug the cells where the six crew members were imprisoned. Over months of surveillance, Mr. Amico began to discern the outlines of the trafficking route,

and the mystery of the militant stronghold in coastal Libya it passed through. Since the ouster of the Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011, stretches of Libya along the coastline in the eastern region of Cyrenaica had become a battleground for competing militant groups. By 2014, that included the Islamic State’s branch in Libya, which at various times had footholds in the cities of Benghazi, Derna and especially Surt, which has partly fallen to pro-government forces. Italian officials believe that those cities were all destinations for some of the drug ships, although the navigation units of other seized vessels indicate that they were headed to the Libyan port of Tobruk, which is controlled by a rebel group fighting the Islamic State. Investigators say they believe that at least in some cases, the terrorist group would have been able to exact a tax in re-

turn for the drugs’ passage. That matches the Islamic State’s business practice in its stronghold in Syria and Iraq, where according to one study by IHS Country Risk, 7 percent of the group’s revenue last year was from the production, taxation and trafficking of drugs. But officials concede that they cannot be certain what role, if any, the Islamic State might play in the hashish shipments. “No one has eyes on the ground to say that they know for a fact,” said Masood Karimipour, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s regional representative for the Middle East and North Africa. “What we can offer, or make a reasonable inferences from, is that where the terrorists are holding terrain they are controlling everything that goes through it, including the trafficking of whatever — whether it’s weapons or drugs.”

The hold of the Munzur, where drugs were stored in cardboard packets. Seized vessels — designed to carry fleets of automobiles or cargo containers — are often empty except for drugs. Credit Guardia di Finanza di Palermo

Poring over the surveillance tapes of the jailed crew of the freighter Adam, Mr. Amico and the rest of his investigative team started to wonder whether the drugs were part of a bigger scheme, perhaps involving weapons. They learned that the Adam had begun its Mediterranean voyage in Cyprus, where it picked up four containers of “furniture,” destined for Benghazi. After dropping off the cargo, the vessel continued to Morocco, picking up 15 tons of hashish and returning to Libya.

SCALING UP A DRUG TRADE, STRAIGHT THROUGH ISIS TURF

Hashish seized from the Munzur. Credit Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times

From other comments by the crew, Mr. Amico and his team came to believe that the “furniture” was a shipment of weapons, he said, an idea supported by two of the prosecutors involved in the case. “Libya is not a land where people consume hashish,” said Deputy Prosecutor Maurizio Agnello. “So that cargo of drugs is definitely a method of payment, a kind of coin.” In recent months, however, the Italian investigation has stalled. Most of the tips were coming from French officials, who in recent months were scrambling to deal with a wave of terrorist attacks at home, and when the tips ended, so did the busts. No ships have been intercepted along the route

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

in 2016, though investigators say they believe the path is still being used. They expressed unease about the lack of certainty regarding the players controlling the new route. “If this was controlled by the Mafia, we would know how to deal with it, because we know the Mafia well,” said Mr. Agnello, whose office is in a stately building in Palermo, a stronghold of the Sicilian Mafia, which for years controlled the hashish arriving from Morocco via Spain. When it comes to the possible involvement of terrorist groups, he said, “It frightens us because they don’t have limits. They do stuff that would be unthinkable for a Mafioso.”

On June 11, 2008, Afghan counternarcotics agents discovered 260 tons of hashish, worth $260 million, buried in six-foot-deep trenches.

CRIME | DRUGS IN THE MIDDLE EAST