|
|
Tweet
4/15/2013
By David Axe / Wired
ZARI, Afghanistan — Because of the poppies, the raw material for most of the world’s heroin, the list of things 1st Lt. Christopher Gackstatter and his 2nd Platoon can’t do in Sartok is far longer than the list of things they can.
Marching into the mud-walled village in this sun-baked district of southern Afghanistan on an April 24 intelligence-gathering mission, the boyish 25-year-old lieutenant and his roughly dozen riflemen and machine gunners are mindful of the many poppy-related prohibitions, developed over 12 painful years of war, that have been passed down to [...]
Tweet
4/23/2013
By Menekse Tokyay / Southeast European Times
The international drug trade continues to ply the “Balkan route,” bringing narcotics through Turkey and the Balkans to Europe in a multi-billion euro illicit industry run by sophisticated organised crime groups, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, Europol, found in its annual report.
“Routes through Western Balkan countries remain important for the movement of many illicit commodities into the EU. Heroin and cocaine pass through the Western Balkans after transiting through Turkey and Africa,” the EU Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment 2013 (SOCTA), report stated.
The international drug [...]
Tweet
4/15/2013
By David Loyn / BBC News
Three times as much opium was produced in Helmand last year as when British troops went there in 2006, and a new UN forecast says that this year’s crop will be even higher. Opium is the raw material for heroin, and most of the illegal drugs for sale on the UK’s streets come from Afghanistan.
Like many other farmers in Helmand province, Hamidullah planted cotton last year, encouraged by British and American agricultural advisers.
But there was no market for it, and he planted opium poppies again this year.
“The price [...]
Tweet
As the heroin trade suffers in Afghanistan, poppy farmers are marrying off their daughters, sometimes to unsavory and far-away men, to pay their debts.
4/11/2013
By Tahir Qadiry / BBC News
Right in the heart of Kabul, on the stony banks of the Kabul River, drug addicts gather to buy and use heroin. It’s a place of misery and degradation.
In broad daylight about a dozen men and teenage boys sit huddled in pairs smoking and injecting. Among them are some educated people – a doctor, an engineer and an interpreter.
Tariq Sulaiman, from Najat, a local addiction [...]
Tweet
4/01/2013
A federal drug-sniffing dog named Shadow earned his keep and then some on Monday at O’Hare Airport, when he helped discover more than 30 pounds of opium worth nearly $500,000, officials said.
A member of the Customs and Border Protection team at O’Hare’s international mail facility, “Shadow is an 8-year-old Belgian Malinois whose nose definitely knows how to ferret out hidden drugs in imported cargo and mail,” William Ferrara, CBP’s acting director of field operations, said in a statement.
At 2:30 p.m. Monday, Shadow alerted agents to a parcel from Laos heading to Wisconsin, the invoice for [...]
Tweet
As the heroin trade suffers in Afghanistan, poppy farmers are marrying off their daughters, sometimes to unsavory and far-away men, to pay their debts.
2/16/2013
She was a 12-year-old girl, with fiery green eyes and defiance on her face. Her father had promised her hand to a stranger from Helmand province who didn’t speak her language, was more than 30 years her senior, and already had eight children. Her father had borrowed the man’s money for his poppy venture. And now it was up to her to repay that debt.
Darya, as she was called in a new [...]
Tweet
Central Asia: Cold-War Attitudes Hindering Drug War
2/07/2013
Narcotics use is wreaking havoc in Russia, responsible for 30,000 annual deaths and 200 new HIV infections every day. But Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin is letting knee-jerk hostility toward the United States cloud its response to the drug-trafficking crisis. Not only is Russia reluctant to go along with a Washington-designed anti-trafficking blueprint, Moscow is believed to be leaning on Central Asian states not to cooperate either.
Back in July 2011, Washington unveiled its so-called Central Asia Counter-narcotics Initiative (CACI) to battle drug traffickers throughout the region and reduce the volume of [...]
Tweet
1/11/2013
SANT ANDREU DE LA BARCA, Spain – Drug traffickers arrested in Spain with 64 kilos (141 pounds) of high-purity heroin from Afghanistan planned to distribute the drug throughout Europe, police officials said Monday.
The ring was dismantled Sunday in the province of Barcelona in an operation that led to the arrest of eight people, six of them Pakistani, and the seizure of cash and documents.
The news was announced at a press conference by officials of the Civil Guard, National Police and the delegate of the national government in the Catalonia region of Llanos de Luna.
When [...]
Tweet
1/04/2013
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG / The New York Times
KABUL, Afghanistan — It was only after the young Afghan soldier’s hatred of Americans had grown murderous that he reached out to the Taliban.
The soldier, named simply Mahmood, 22, said that in May he told the insurgents of his plan to shoot Americans the next time they visited the outpost where he was based in northeastern Afghanistan. He asked the Taliban to take him in if he escaped.
The Taliban veterans he contacted were skeptical. Despite their public insistence that they employ vast ranks of infiltrators within the [...]
Tweet
1/03/2013
The Iranian anti-narcotics police have nabbed two tons of high-quality heroin on the New Year’s Eve at the country’s border with Afghanistan, Press TV reports.
The operation was carried out after two months of surveillance and led to the largest seizure of Europe-bound heroin in decades, worth millions of dollars in the European market.
“The police found out that on the New Year’s Eve an international network was planning to transit two tons of heroin into Europe through Iran. Because of our religious duties and international commitments, we stopped the convoy on the Afghan border,” Iran’s [...]
|
|
