Heroin a fear factor in Afghanistan

DARA NOOR, Afghanistan — On a steep mountain road ahead of a blind curve, a Red Cross worker dies at the hands of an unknown attacker. Just around the bend lies the possible reason: an opium poppy field.

Afghanistan’s $1.2 billion drug trade is blooming, bringing violence that is driving away aid groups while Islamic extremists and warlords apparently profit.

The agencies that monitor the pulse of conflict zones point to a rise in ambushes and execution-style slayings that coincide with the southeast’s autumn harvest of the opium-producing flowers, also the source of heroin.

“It’s absolutely true that security is worse in places where people are growing poppies,” said Diane Johnson, Afghanistan program director for Mercy Corps. She said the Portland, Ore., organization has suspended operations indefinitely in the country, but Margaret Larson, a spokeswoman in Portland, said that was not the case.

A member of the group was killed Aug. 7.

“Narco-terrorism” has become an increasingly entrenched factor in the violence that’s meant to keep southern and eastern Afghanistan — a key opium poppy region — off-limits to outside assistance, said Paul Barker, country director for the charity CARE.

“The revenue from the poppy trade in Afghanistan is more than all the humanitarian aid combined,” he said.

Other countries have committed roughly $500 million to rebuild this central Asian nation of dusty, gasp-inducing deserts and mountains. Poppy revenue brought in $1.2 billion last year, according to the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan.

About 90 international relief groups operate in Afghanistan, but most have curtailed drilling wells, vaccinating children and rebuilding school systems in the deadly southeast.

The September edition of CARE’s policy brief — which other relief groups follow closely — said armed attacks on aid workers have jumped from one a month to one every two days since September 2002.

Half the country’s 32 provinces — mostly in the south — are too risky to enter. “There are all sorts of movements to keep Afghanistan unstable,” said Mr. Barker, the CARE official.

Local authorities generally blame all violence on the Taliban regime, ousted by a U.S.-led force two years ago, but a confounding array of agendas are in play.

“It’s impossible to separate out what’s factional fighting, what’s Taliban activity and what’s drug trafficking,” said Miss Johnson. “We haven’t seen this type of targeting [of aid workers] in the 16 years we’ve been here.”

In March, at the height of the poppy season’s spring harvest, gunmen attacked a three-vehicle convoy at a blind curve on a rocky mountain road near Dara Noor, a village 60 miles north of Kandahar and a prime poppy region. The attackers killed Ricardo Munguia, 39, a water engineer from El Salvador working for the Red Cross. He was the first foreign-aid worker to die in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s ouster.

Story Continues →