(7 Oct 2021) Now the uncontested rulers of Afghanistan, the Taliban have set their sights on stamping out the scourge of drug addiction, even if by force.
At nightfall, the battle-hardened fighters-turned-policemen scour Kabul's drug-ravaged underworld.
Below the city's bridges, amid piles of garbage and streams of filthy water, hundreds of homeless men addicted to heroin and methamphetamines are rounded up, beaten and forcibly taken to treatment centers.
One evening, under a bridge in the Kotesangi neighborhood, some men were smoking up casually next to a collapsed body. The man was dead.
"The Taliban came and hit him. Next morning after the Taliban hit him, we found him dead," said Nezamuddin, one of the drug addicts.
They covered him with cloth but dare not bury him while the Taliban patrol the streets.
The heavy-handed methods are welcomed by some health workers, who have had no choice but adapt to Taliban rule.
"It's not important if some of them die," said Mawlawi Fazullah, a Taliban officer, chief of the patrol in the Kotesangi neighborhood. "Others will be cured. After they are cured, they can be free."
During a raid last week, over 150 men were taken to a district police station, where their belongings were burned.
By midnight, they were taken to the Avicenna Medical Hospital for Drug Treatment, on the edge of Kabul.
Once a military base, Camp Phoenix, established by the U.S. army in 2003, it was made into a drug treatment center in 2016. Now it's Kabul's largest, capable of accommodating 1,000 people.
The men were stripped and bathed, their heads shaved.
The center's head psychiatrist Dr. Wahedullah Koshan said they were set to be weaned off their drugs with only limited medical care to alleviate withdrawal-related discomfort and pain.
Koshan conceded the hospital lacks the alternative opioids, buprenorphine and methadone, typically used to treat heroin addiction.
A waiting room was full of parents and relatives wondering if their missing loved ones were among those taken in the drug raids.
Sitara wailed when she was reunited with her 21-year-old son, who'd been missing for 12 days.
"My entire life is my son," she wept, embracing him.
But the Taliban's war on drugs is complicated as the country faces the prospect of economic collapse and imminent humanitarian catastrophe.
Sanctions and lack of recognition have made Afghanistan, long dependent on foreign aid, ineligible for the financial support from international organizations that accounted for 75% of state spending.
An appalling human rights record, especially with respect to women, has rendered the Taliban unpopular among international development organizations.
A liquidity crisis has set in. Public wages are months in arrears, drought has exacerbated food shortages and disease. Winter is weeks away.
Without foreign funds, government revenues rely on customs and taxation.
The illicit opium trade is intertwined with Afghanistan's economy and its turmoil. Poppy growers are part of an important rural constituency for the Taliban, and most rely on the harvest to make ends meet.
During the insurgency years, the Taliban profited from the trade by taxing traffickers, a practice applied on a wide variety of industries in the areas under its control.
Research by David Mansfield, an expert on the Afghan drug trade, suggests the group made $20 million in 2020, a small fraction compared to other sources of revenue from tax collection. Publicly, it has always denied links to the drug trade.
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