Four days of fighting between rival warlords competing to control their local cut of the narcotics trade in northeastern Afghanistan has left seven people dead and eight wounded, officials said on Sunday.
Fighting flared between the militias of the district chief and the police chief of an area called Argo, near the town of Fai-zabad, in the province of Badakhshan, said General Mohammad Daoud, the top military commander in northeastern Afghanistan. The two men had been at loggerheads for three months, and the clash was only stopped when a Defense Ministry delegation intervened, the general said.
The delegation, sent from his own military headquarters in neighboring Kunduz, reported that seven people had died and eight been wounded in the fighting, he said.
The fighting was over and the two local leaders would be taken to Kunduz for questioning, he said by satellite telephone.
The deputy interior minister, Hillaluddin Hillal, said the argument was over who should control what is effectively a road tax imposed by local leaders on the illegal opium trade.
Badakhshan province is one of the highest-producing areas of opium in Afghanistan and also provides a major route for smuggling drugs into neighboring Tajikistan and then on to Russia and Europe.
News of the clash came just as Afghanistan was preparing to hold a two-day international conference on combating narcotics and served as a reminder of how prevalent the drug business is in Afghanistan and how government officials and regional warlords are often involved.
The Afghan government has banned the cultivation of poppies and the production of narcotics but has little power to enforce the ban.
Afghanistan is the source of about 90 per cent of the heroin on the streets of Europe, and UN officials say that it produced its second-biggest opium harvest ever last year.
RSS