KABUL: Afghan Taliban militants have strengthened their grip on lucrative illegal mining operations in the north of the country, as security forces focus most of their efforts on battling the insurgency in the volatile south, officials said.
Abuses by local commanders with private militias and beyond the purview of central government have also driven people into the hands of Islamist fighters, the officials added, making it easier for them to profit from small-scale mines in the region.
“The Taliban provide protection for the villagers to mine and the people are happy to do it despite the fact that there’s a presidential decree banning any uncontrolled mining,” said Gul Mohammad Bedar, deputy governor of Badakhshan province. He estimated that the militant group, fighting to overthrow the Western-backed government in Kabul, raised about one-third of its funding needs in Badakhshan from deposits of minerals, including semi-precious lapis lazuli, found in its mountains.
Opium, grown mainly in the south of Afghanistan, is by far the biggest source of revenue for the Taliban nationwide, with the total value of opiates reaching as much as around $2-3 billion annually, according to the UN.
Mining, by comparison, is worth several tens of millions of dollars a year, although that rises in the north. Insurgents have taken authorities by surprise in the last year or so by seizing large swaths of territory in a part of the country where their presence has traditionally been weaker.
“We always thought that since much of the north, especially Badakhshan, Takhar and even parts of Kunduz, were anti-Taliban, we would be fine and the militants would never be able to gain ground, but we were wrong,” said one Afghan security official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Last month’s attack on Kunduz, the city that the Taliban briefly seized last year, underlined the movement’s growing strength in the north and the problems the government has had in enforcing its authority even in a traditional stronghold. The grip the Taliban still holds on surrounding areas was underlined last week by a raid by Afghan and US forces on a nearby village in which two Americans died.
More than 30 civilians, half of them children, were killed in an air strike called in to protect the troops, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan has promised an investigation.
