Word: kabul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Over the past several years there has been a significant increase in the number of drug users throughout the country. Afghanistan's Public Health minister, Amin Fatimie, says heroin addicts in the capital city, Kabul, have doubled to 14,000 since 2003. According to the first ever nationwide survey on drug use in Afghanistan by the UNODC, there are nearly 50,000 heroin users in the country as a whole, and an additional 150,000 who use opium. "For those in the West, that may not look like a lot," says Fatimie. "But for me it's a big number...
...Bagh Ali Mardan, a 27-year-old addict from Bamiyan, has tried to quit several times. Now he has given up. Waving a couple of curious children away from the ruins of a bombed house in Kabul where junkies congregate, he says it's better to stop the next generation from getting the habit. "This is a big problem for Afghanistan, much worse than terrorism or the Taliban. In war, if the enemy kills you, you die once. But addiction kills the future...
Even if Noorzai wasn't fully reliable, it's fair to ask why his offer wasn't taken up. Washington may have scored a public victory in the war on drugs with his arrest. But some officials in Kabul and Washington now quietly wonder whether giving him a shot at what he said he could deliver--the allegiance of his tribe--might have been the smarter option. The government has not said that his arrest will diminish the heroin trade in Afghanistan. Indeed, the war against drugs and the war against the Taliban have to be seen as a single...
...traditional stronghold in the south--where Noorzai's tribe lives--the radical Islamic group is actively encouraging poppy cultivation on a grand scale, a dramatic shift from its days in power when its puritanical tenets forbade drugs and drug trafficking. Why the change? As a Western diplomat in Kabul puts it, "It takes money to fund an insurgency." Of the $3 billion earned last year by Afghan narcotraffickers, roughly $800 million trickles down to the Afghan farmers who grow the crop. According to a senior Western official in Kabul, a small portion of that sum is "more than enough...
...Afghan National Army soldiers guard intersections - Ashura rituals have often attracted Shi'ism's most violent sectarian foes, as the violence that has in recent days wracked Najaf in Iraq, and Karachi and Peshawar in Pakistan, where 14 were killed on Sunday in a suicide bombing. But here in Kabul, the only blood spilled is that collecting at the feet of the participants. "We are all Muslim. It is not important whether we pray with open hands (as do the Shi'ites) or closed hands," says Khalil Umrani, who helps organize the Ashura events. "Living...