Lashes swished and whirled through the air in a burst of celebration around a sea of opium poppies, as farmers in a southern Afghan village rejoiced over a bumper harvest with a traditional rope game.
Hundreds of farm laborers from across Afghanistan’s Pashtun heartland, many of them Taliban, last month congregated in Naqil in Uruzgan Province for the most lucrative time of the year — the poppy harvest.
After laboring all day in the torpid heat, extracting milky opium resin from swollen green pods, they broke into revelry around the bountiful farms.
Photo: AFP
Hands tethered to long ropes, men lunged forward and back within a chalk circle, kicking up dust and knocking down opponents with heavy lash strokes.
Hissing and hooting, a crowd of turbaned spectators gathered to watch the bare-knuckle game known colloquially as dora.
A tricycle cart pulled up nearby, selling ice-cream drizzled with raspberry sauce, lending a carnival atmosphere to the harvest that is expected to bring record opium production this year.
“This is the only time of the year to make money,” said Afzal Mohammad, who traveled all the way from Kandahar, standing amid chest-high poppy stalks nearby. “People work here for about 15 days and then are jobless for the rest of the year.”
The revelry highlights how opium — refined into heroin — remains an economic linchpin amid rampant unemployment, and lays bare how the West lost a multibillion US dollar war on drugs in Afghanistan as it pursued a war on terror there.
Afghanistan, the world’s top opium producer, recorded more poppy cultivation in 2014 — at the end of which NATO troops officially ended their combat mission — than in any year since 2002.
Last year saw a sharp decline in production, but the crop failure was more due to drought than any eradication campaign, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
The drop, observers say, has only intensified efforts to spike production this year.
MAKE OPIUM, NOT WAR
Fighting usually ebbs during the harvest season, illustrating how the Taliban are deeply entwined in the US$3 billion opium trade, believed to be the mainstay of their insurgency against the government.
“As the harvest concludes ... we expect to see an uptick in Taliban efforts to attack [Afghan forces],” said Charles Cleveland, a senior spokesman for US forces in Afghanistan. “There is a concern that the very good poppy crop this year ... is going to result in the Taliban being able to turn that into money for their [insurgent] efforts.”
The ubiquity of opium farms in Uruzgan, a remote mountainous province straddling drug-smuggling routes, is staggering.
Poppy grows within eyeshot of the provincial governor’s office in the capital, Tarin Kot, government buildings and police bases, spurring allegations that officials are also profiting from the opium boom.
“We are in a state of war,” Uruzgan Governor Mohammad Nazir Kharoti said, voicing helplessness. “Forced eradication will increase economic hardship, fueling sympathy for the Taliban and people will start sheltering them in their homes.”
Naqil, hemmed in between verdant hills on the outskirts of Tarin Kot, is a netherworld of opium farmers, drug lords, addicts and, increasingly, the Taliban.
It is officially under government control, but authorities are openly wary about visiting the area.
With rolling fields of white-and-pink flowers splashed between dull green opium pods visible as far as the eye can see, Naqil is a magnet for laborers during harvest time.
‘LANCE WITH LOVE’
The bulbs are typically lanced during the afternoon and left for the night as a sticky resin oozes out and coagulates into a dark brown mass.
The laborers collect the sap in the mornings with a flat blade and wipe it into a plastic can hanging around their necks.
Many wax philosophical about the process, almost as though it were an act of veneration.
“Cradle the poppy bulb gently,” Sher Mohammed said, going from bulb to bulb in his farm, making shallow incisions with sharp blades on the tip of a curved wooden spatula. “Lance the bulb with love.”
For many, the labor-intensive season, which lasts less than a month, is the only productive period; the rest of the year is a hopeless blur.
“Afghanistan has too much war, very little employment,” said tribal elder Abdul Bari Tokhi, whose extended family owns more than 100 hectares of farmland in Naqil. “The world might say: ‘If there was no poppy, there would be no war in Afghanistan,’ but for us, if there was no poppy, there would be no work and no food on the table.”
A ship that appears to be taking on the identity of a scrapped gas carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, showing how strategies to get through the waterway are evolving as the Middle East war progresses. The vessel identifying as liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Jamal left the Strait on Friday morning, ship-tracking data show. However, the same tanker was also recorded as having beached at an Indian demolition yard in October last year, where it is being broken up, according to market participants and port agent’s reports. The ship claiming to be Jamal is likely a zombie vessel that
Cannabis-based medicines have shown little evidence of effectiveness for treating most mental health and substance-use disorders, according to a large review of past studies published in a major medical journal on Monday. Medical use of cannabinoids has been expanding, including in the US, Canada and Australia, where many patients report using cannabis products to manage conditions such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and sleep problems. Researchers reviewed data from 54 randomized clinical trials conducted between 1980 and May last year involving 2,477 participants for their analysis published in The Lancet. The studies assessed cannabinoids as a primary treatment for mental disorders or substance-use
NATIONWIDE BLACKOUT: US President Donald Trump cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba, strangling the Caribbean island’s already antiquated grid Cuba’s national electric grid collapsed on Monday, the nation’s grid operator said, leaving about 10 million people without power amid a US-imposed oil blockade that has crippled the already obsolete generation system. Grid operator UNE on social media said that it is investigating the causes of the blackout, the latest in a series of widespread outages that last for hours or days and that this weekend sparked a rare violent protest in the communist-run nation. Officials ruled out a major power plant failure, but had still not pinpointed the root cause of the grid collapse, suggesting a problem with transmission. Officials said that
‘HEALTH ISSUE’: More than 250 women are hospitalized every day due to complications from unsafe abortions, and about three die, a study showed Jane had been bleeding heavily for days before finally seeking help, not from a hospital, but from the man who sold her the pills meant to end her six-week pregnancy. Abortions are strictly outlawed in the mainly Catholic Philippines, forcing women to turn to a patchwork of providers operating in the online shadows. While rare in practice, Philippine law allows for prison terms of up to six years for abortion patients and providers, leaving thousands of Filipinas to search for solutions in online forums where unlicensed sellers promote abortifacients. “It was very painful, as if my abdomen was being twisted,” said Jane, whose
RSS