Helmand Farmers Fight to Defend Opium Crop

Until recently, the Marja area of Helmand province, close to the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, enjoyed relative peace. The main occupation here is farming, albeit with a specific twist – opium poppies take up almost all the arable land.



The calm ended last month when the Afghan government decided to send “eradication teams” into Marja to destroy the crop.



Local residents say the tougher new line yielded little other than angering and radicalising the farmers.



“Marja used to be a very calm district, but when the [eradication] campaign personnel came here, it turned all the farmers into Taleban fighters,” said Janan, who lives in the Wansi Block area of Marja.



“They all got guns and now they’re fighting alongside the Taleban.”



According to Janan, the fighters successfully held off the eradication teams, sent in by the interior ministry in Kabul and consisting mostly of Afghan National Police officers. The result was that almost none of the crop was destroyed.



"To be honest, I am very happy that the campaign has failed in the Marja district,” said Janan. “We’d lose everything if the Taleban didnt help us. We wouldn’t have anything to eat if our poppy fields were destroyed. I thank God for the Taleban.”



Helmand is the undisputed poppy centre of the world, supplying almost half the raw material for heroin sold on international markets.



In previous years, efforts to eradicate the crop have faltered, largely due to corruption. This year, the government announced a major counter-narcotics initiative, and farmers complained that police were no longer as susceptible to bribery as they used to be.



The Taleban have mounted their own campaign to capitalise on the anger and desperation of Helmand’s farmers. According to local residents, the insurgents have been distributing guns and turning farmers into fighters.



“Residents and farmers were very concerned when the [anti-poppy] campaign people arrived in the Sistani area of Marja,” said Rahimullah Sistani, who lives there.



“The farmers thought they were going to lose their crops, but the Taleban promised them protection. Almost all of the farmers in the Sistani area took guns and stood alongside the Taleban. They started attacking the campaign personnel every night. In five days they were able to defeat this huge campaign, something that we’d thought was out of the question. On the sixth day, the campaign people left Marja.”



Mullah Mohammad Qasem, a local Taleban commander, confirmed that his men were working with the local farmers. He was also quite open about the Taleban using drug money to fund their operations.



“We prevent the destruction of poppy fields because we have bought [weapons] on the black market out of the heroin money,” he told IWPR. “We do whatever will weaken the Afghan and International forces."



The fight has left Marja residents relieved that their crop was saved, but concerned for the future.



“The situation in Marja is very bad,” said Abdul Haq, a man from the Sipan area. “We cannot take our sick to get treatment, for fear of the Taleban fighters and the government.”



Abdul Haq poured scorn on the eradication team, and expressed pride in the resilience of local people.



“The police in the poppy eradication campaign are really incompetent. I never thought they would leave the district this way,” he said. “It is true that the ordinary people are also very powerful. All of Marja’s residents stood up against the poppy eradication campaign. Thank God they [police] left the district, otherwise there would have been a serious battle here.”



A policeman in the Sipan area, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the eradication efforts had failed.



“A huge campaign involving many people came to Marja, but it was unable to confront the Taleban,” he said. “The Taleban in Marja are very strong. They attack us every night. That is the only reason why the campaign failed.”



Mohammad Gul, one of the officers with the poppy eradication force, disagreed.



“It is not true that the Taleban in Marja are strong. The reason we did not eradicate any poppy fields is because we did not receive orders from the interior ministry to launch the campaign. Anywhere we go, we launch our campaign [only] after receiving an order from the centre.”



He admitted that some fighting had taken place, "It is true that we came under attack from Taleban at some points, but that doesn’t mean they were strong enough to confront the campaign forces. I have no idea why we didn’t launch the poppy eradication campaign in Marja district."



Ali Mohammad, who lives in Marja, said the police were lucky to get away with their lives.



“The police had a lot of personnel and many vehicles. I cannot understand why they did not destroy any poppy fields,” he told IWPR. “But the farmers were all saying that they would resist until they were caught or killed. The interior ministry team was lucky to leave quickly.”



The final results of this season’s poppy eradication campaign have yet to be tabulated, but preliminary figures reported by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime suggest that several thousand hectares of land have been destroyed in Helmand, out of at least 100,000 hectares cultivated with the crop. That is at least an improvement on last year, when an area less than 1,000 hectares is believed to have undergone eradication.



The area under cultivation is believed to have remained more or less stable, because there is little more arable land available to grow poppy.



Counter-narcotics officials with Helmand’s provincial government have been conducting their own campaign, and they are proud of the results. They complain, however, that the Afghan interior ministry and the police units it deployed failed to coordinate with them.



“We have destroyed 7,500 hectares of poppy,” said Fazel Ahmad Shirzad, a senior official with the Helmand counter-narcotics department. “I have no idea what the interior ministry’s team has done. They have not been in touch with us.”



Shirzad insisted that his teams were not intimidated by local resistance.



“We don’t care how the farmers react,” he said. “We destroy the poppy at any cost.”



The official expressed some frustration with the extent of the interior ministry’s operation in Marja. They “should not have left. They did not stay in Marja long enough”, he said.



Few topics are as likely to produce such anger as poppy – on either side of the divide. In Helmand’s monoculture economy, almost everyone is involved in some way with the poppy industry, either fostering it or trying to stamp it out.



Mohammad Hussein Andiwal, Helmand’s chief of police, gave a rousing speech when the season’s eradication campaign kicked off, saying, “This time we will use all of our resources and destroy all of the poppy.”



His police then launched a campaign, which, according to farmers, was fierce and efficient.



Mohammad Ismail, a resident of Babaji village, lost his fields to Andiwal’s men.



“The municipal team is very cruel,” he said bitterly. “They destroyed my lands. We were able to give them money last year, but this year they didn’t take bribes.”



The resolute campaign pursued by the provincial administration may have set the scene for the Taleban’s success in Marja. The uncompromising nature of the eradication effort, contrasting with the more malleable approach seen in past years, clearly angered the farmers and spurred them to take up arms – and find allies where they could.



“The campaign destroyed lands belonging to pro-government farmers,” said Ali Shah Mazlumyar, a tribal elder from the area. “Then the Taleban showed those farmers that they could protect them. So even the pro-government farmers took up arms and stood with the Taleban when the interior ministry came.”

Many growers are grateful for the respite brought by the withdrawal of the government team.



“Thank God the campaign in Marja did not destroy any fields,” said Mohammad Ibrahim, a shopkeeper in Marja, who said he has ten jeribs of land under poppy, equivalent to 20,000 square metres.



“I have heard that the campaign in Nad Ali was conducted by a local police team who destroyed the poppy completely. Thank God there’s been no such campaign in Marja.”



Mohammad Ilyas Dayee is an IWPR-trained journalist in Helmand.