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As President Obama frees droves of terrorists—including five Yemenis this week—from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo news reports confirm that a Gitmo alum who once led a Taliban unit has established the first Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) base in Afghanistan. His name is Mullah Abdul Rauf and international and domestic media reports say he’s operating in Helmand province, actively recruiting fighters for ISIS. Citing local sources, a British newspaper writes that Rauf set up a base and is offering good wages to anyone willing to fight for the Islamic State. Rauf was a corps commander during...

Elite Army Green Berets are knocking the performance of the Afghan National Army, telling war tales of its soldiers hiding and quitting the fight.The Green Beret criticisms, contained in a U.S. Central Command “friendly fire” investigative file, provide a window into the flaws of a national army more than a decade in the making.The Special Forces soldiers gave poor marks to the institution that is supposed to keep Afghanistan’s democratically elected governments in power. The security force must rebuff an expected Taliban offensive, on its own, once all American troops leave after 2016.The soldiers gave statements to investigators after going...

A Chinese noodle shop owner has admitted to lacing his wares with opium poppy seeds in an apparent effort to keep customers coming back, it’s reported. The use of the unusual ingredient—used to make opium—at the restaurant in Yan’an, in Shaanxi province, came to light after one of its clients tested positive in a routine urine test by traffic police, despite insisting he’d never touched drugs, the Xi’an Evening News reports. Suspecting the noodle shop he’d eaten at a few hours before the test might be to blame, the customer, Liu Juyou, persuaded relatives to frequent the shop as well...

UNITED NATIONS — Illegal opium cultivation occupies more land worldwide than ever before, according to the United Nations, largely because of a surge over the last year in Afghanistan, the dominant opium producer. The annual World Drug Report, released Thursday, found that nearly 741,000 acres worldwide were occupied by opium-producing poppy fields, the largest area devoted to the farming of the crop since 1998, when estimates were first available. Afghanistan’s poppy fields alone expanded by 36 percent from 2012 to 2013, taking up 516,000 acres. Myanmar, too, stepped up opium production; nearly 143,000 acres were devoted to poppy cultivation there....

Heroin peddled by Mexican drug cartels have flooded the Northeast – and unlike its predecessors from the 1980s, the drug is stronger, cheaper and purer. New York City has become the hub for the criminal enterprise and lawmakers in the state are putting forward a package of legislation that seeks to fight the resurgence of heroin. The bills, expected to become public on Monday, would toughen penalties for dealers, impose more funding for overdose-reversal drugs and increase insurance coverage for treatment. The proposed laws follow a series of forums that Senate Democrats held around the state on the sudden spread...

In the sharpest warnings they have ever issued on the topic, Pentagon officials told Congress the growing opium trade is threatening the costly US war effort to build a stable Afghanistan.

“Opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan reached a sobering record high in 2013,” said the UNODC. “According to the 2013 Afghanistan Opium Survey, cultivation amounted to some 209,000 hectares, outstripping the earlier record in 2007 of 193,000 hectares, and representing a 36 per cent increase over 2012.”

The number of drug users in Afghanistan is estimated to be as high as 1.6 million, or about 5.3 percent of the population, among the highest rates in the world. Nationwide, 1 in 10 urban households has at least one drug user, according to a recent report from the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. In the city of Herat, it is 1 in 5. From 2005 to 2009, the use of opiates doubled, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, putting Afghanistan on par with Russia and Iran, and the number of heroin users jumped...

Afghanistan produces 90% of all opiate drugs in the world, but until recently was not a major consumer. Now, out of a population of 35 million, more than a million are addicted to drugs - proportionately the highest figure in the world. 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...

In Afghanistan, farmers grow poppy for opium, which is later processed into heroin and, ultimately, sold as heroin on the black market. How, when the Quran defines drugs as “the filth of Satan’s handiwork,” does the Islamic populace in Afghanistan justify growing this illicit crop? For one thing, the sale, but not consumption, of opium is acceptable to the locals because it is supposedly consumed by the West–by infidels–and thus furthers the war on them, outlines Gretchen Peters in her book Seeds of Terror: How Drugs, Thugs, and Crime Are Reshaping the Afghan War. Peters has worked for the Associated...

With deep condescension, my professors informed me that we live in a post-religious world. Religion, I was lectured, was the opiate of the people. I wondered, but never had the courage to suggest, that perhaps Marxism was the opiate of the elites.

April 14, 1999, Wednesday COMMITTEE HEARING SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS: SUBCOMMITTEE ON NEAR EASTERN AND SOUTH U.S. SENATOR SAM BROWNBACK (R-KS) HOLDS HEARING ON THE CRISIS IN AFGANISTAN  WASHINGTON, D.C. SPEAKERS: U.S. SENATOR SAM BROWNBACK (R-KS), CHAIRMAN U.S. SENATOR JOHN ASHCROFT (R-MO) U.S. SENATOR GORDON H. SMITH (R-OR) U.S. SENATOR ROD GRAMS (R-MN) U.S. SENATOR CRAIG THOMAS (R-WY) U.S. SENATOR PAUL DAVID WELLSTONE (D-MN), RANKING MEMBER U.S. SENATOR ROBERT G. TORRICELLI (D-NJ) U.S. SENATOR PAUL S. SARBANES (D-MD) U.S. SENATOR CHRISTOPHER J. DODD (D-CT) U.S. REPRESENTATIVE DANA ROHRABACHER (R-CA) THE HONORABLE KARL F. INDERFURTH ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR SOUTH ...

WASHINGTON — When the U.S. State Department announced this week that it finally is going to designate the Haqqani network as a foreign terrorist organization, it was a nonevent for most of our countrymen. That's because few Americans know how deadly the organization is. For that we can thank those at Foggy Bottom who are wedded to the naive hope of a near-term "diplomatic breakthrough" in Afghanistan. Couple that misguided belief with the Obama administration's self-deception that the radical Islamic jihad against the West ended with the demise of Osama bin Laden and it's understandable why the Haqqani network...

When opium was cheaper than whiskey – and Great Britain waged a "wicked" drug war When Opium Was Cheaper Than Whiskey - and Great Britain waged a "wicked" drug war The bottles have a beautiful aqua color to them. If you hold them up to the light, rainbows fire across the delicate patina. But their beauty belies the deadly reality behind the delicate hues. The bottles once held opium based "elixirs," such as Dr. McMunn's Elixir of Opium, most claiming to be a cure for a host of ailments, including the relief of "convulsions and spasmodic action," as well as...

Production of opium and the illicit crop's value soared in Afghanistan last year, the United Nations said in a report released Thursday. According to the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime, farmer income derived from Afghanistan's opium crop in 2011 was $1.4 billion (1.09 billion euros), representing nine percent of GDP. "Opium is therefore a significant part of the Afghan economy and provides considerable funding to the insurgency and fuels corruption," Yury Fedotov, executive director of the UN office, said in a statement. Afghanistan grows about 90 percent of the world's opium. The UN said poppy-crop cultivation covered more than...

After 10 years of war, Afghanistan remains the world’s leading opium supplier, responsible for 90 percent of the global supply. Opium cultivation rose by 7 percent in 2011 compared with last year. Opium production also climbed 61 percent this year. A crop blight destroyed much of Afghanistan’s opium harvest last year causing a decrease in opium production and creating a simultaneous spike in prices. Higher prices led to much speculation that more Afghan farmers would turn to the crop this year, which has indeed proved to be the case. UN officials estimate that 10 percent of opium harvest proceeds reach...

Fort Bragg Suspect Wanted in Second Murder, Was Growing Opium PoppiesBy Jay Barmann in News on August 31, 2011 2:30 PM Aaron Bassler, suspected of shooting Fort Bragg city councilman Jere Melo last Saturday, remains at large, and now his father has come forward to tell reporters that his son is schizophrenic, and that he was likely responsible for a second murder that occurred 30 miles away on August 11. James Bassler says his son had refused psychiatric treatment, and had moved into the woods after going broke four months ago. Furthermore, investigators have found two small poppy fields in...

Let Me Push Certain Individuals Buttons Fox News will air a Oliver North special on Special Ops, probably because of the Osama bin Laden operation in Pakistan. Part of the program will cover the U.S. DEA in Afghanistan and a mission to go after the Opium drug profits used by the Taliban. The Poppy Fields of Afghanistan supply the raw materials used to make Opium. How ironic. Oliver North is one of the principals involved in Drug Running during the Iran / Contra operations in Central America. The profits from those drugs illegally funded the weapons smuggling for that war...

Helmand is the largest cultivator of poppies in Afghanistan with just under 173,000 acres of the 346,000 acres) of arable land in the province dedicated to the crop.The next largest producer is neighbouring Kandahar province with about 50,000 acres under cultivation.To promote alternative livelihoods to growing poppies the food programme last year distributed wheat seed, fertiliser and grape vines to some 65,000 farmers across Helmand.Eradication actually increased this year, up from 3,645 acres last year to 3,959 acres this year.Police supported by military and civilian mentors from the UK, seized 5,000kg of opium, 155kg of heroin and 12,000kg of precursor...

More than $3 billion in cash has been openly flown out of Kabul International Airport in the past three years, a sum so large that U.S. investigators believe top Afghan officials and their associates are sending billions of diverted U.S. aid and logistics dollars and drug money to financial safe havens abroad. The cash -- packed into suitcases, piled onto pallets and loaded into airplanes -- is declared and legal to move. But U.S. and Afghan officials say they are targeting the flows in major anticorruption and drug trafficking investigations because of their size relative to Afghanistan's small economy and...