Villagers Abducted in Tajik-Afghan Drug Trade
When Tajik drug traffickers default on payment, their Afghan business partners wreak vengeance by kidnapping locals in cross-border raids.
Villagers Abducted in Tajik-Afghan Drug Trade
When Tajik drug traffickers default on payment, their Afghan business partners wreak vengeance by kidnapping locals in cross-border raids.
While out grazing his livestock near the ruins of the Bardara fortress, Sherzamon Manonov was abducted by two armed men. Eyewitnesses were sure the raiders who spirited Manonov away across the border were members of an Afghan drug gang.
Manonov’s parents were close to desperation when they heard the news, and his wife was out of her mind with worry.
The herder, who comes from the village of Odinaboi in the Shuroabad district of south-western Tajikistan, was only the latest in a series of Tajik nationals abducted by raiders from over the border.
These are not random attacks, but deliberate tactics employed when a business debt remains unpaid. The business involved is the high-return and high-risk trade in heroin produced from opium poppies in Afghanistan and shipped north through Central Asia on its way to destinations in Europe.
That does not mean Manonov or his relatives were enmeshed in trafficking, as there are frequent reports that the Afghan suppliers will target anyone in order to pressure a whole community into repaying a debt left by a defaulting client.
Manonov was fortunate – Tajik security forces secured his release after just one week. The head of Shuroabad’s district government, Ibrahim Azizov, told IWPR that all security agencies in the areas, border guards as well as police, sprang into action and negotiated with the kidnappers. He did not say whether a deal had been struck with them.
His mother still bursts into tears every time she remembers the day he was taken. “I am happy everything turned out well. But if he hadn’t been released, who would have raised his five children?” she said.
ROUGH JUSTICE ON LAWLESS FRONTIER
The border strip in Shiroabad district lies in a particularly remote mountainous part of the country, where Tajikistan’s frontier guards have limited ability to patrol the tortuous landscape. The porous nature of this section of the frontier have made it a magnet for drug smugglers shifting consignments of heroin over the river Panj, which is easily crossed here, to sell to Tajik gangs who will move it on and out of the country.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, economic decline and a five-year civil war, coupled with chaos as rival mujahedin warlords battled each other in Afghanistan, created all the preconditions for a thriving drug trade.
Afghan traffickers were soon on the lookout for locals poor enough to consider doing the legwork of getting drugs from the border to the interior of the country.
“At first, they were polite and didn’t insult anyone, but they were persistent in looking for middlemen to dispose of the drugs,” recalled one local resident who gave his first name as Alikhon. “Many people agreed to it since there were no other jobs to be had in those days.”
Alikhon explained how there was an air of unreality to the trade at that time, “Drugs were handed out freely to anyone who wanted to get involved in selling them, without any payment up front. The idea was that accounts were settled after the sale went through.”
Another local man, Nurkhon, added, “It was as if people went mad when they saw how easy it was to make money from drugs. You’d see elderly couples leading a donkey or horse loaded with saddlebags full of hashish.”
In the years since the United States-led Coalition ousted the Taleban government in Kabul in late 2001, opium production has boomed, despite various eradication campaigns led by the international community. With Iran still the main exit for processed heroin, with two-fifths, the Central Asian states and Tajikistan in particular are the second most important transit route, accounting for perhaps another fifth.
Russia maintained troops along the Afghan border until 2005, when the Tajiks took over, but neither force proved capable of intercepting the massive quantities of heroin coming into the country, although Tajikistan intercepts more than any other Central Asian country.
A retired Tajik border guard who requested anonymity said adjoining parts of the Afghan province of Badakhshan were not under the control of Kabul or of the international troops stationed in the country.
He said the drug trade in this part of Afghanistan was under the control of ex-members of the mujahedin faction Jamiat-e Islami, part of the “Northern Alliance” that battled the Taleban regime prior to 2001.
“The remnants of these troops make up the majority of the local drug traffickers,” he said.
With more money at stake than ever, the rules of this illicit game are tough, especially for those who take the goods and renege on payment.
“Afghans used to hand out narcotics to almost anyone. The people here were neither sophisticated nor familiar with the drugs business, so they didn’t imagine that debts would be collected in this way,” said Nurkhon.
Lieutenant-Colonel Abdurahim Buzmakov, former head of Shuroabad’s criminal investigation department, knows a thing or two about the crime network that spread in the area. He says that although police have broken up 14 trafficking gangs in the district, a similar number are still operating there, well-armed and consisting of up to 60 members each.
The more successful Tajik traffickers often relocated permanently to urban areas such as the capital Dushanbe, or even abroad, to enjoy their newfound wealth. If they left any outstanding debts behind, their relatives or others in the village pay the consequences.
“Many fled their homes, but the Afghan traffickers found a way to squeeze them for money,” said Nurkhon.
“When our villagers grew so poor and did not have anything to pay the debts, the Afghans started taking hostages,” says another villager Faizullo Ismoilov.
According to Asliddin Dostiev, a journalist in Shuroabad district who specialises in covering the drugs trade, “the Afghan drug smugglers conduct a raid over the border, grab hostages and bring them back to Afghanistan”.
The attackers are well aware that family ties are strong in Tajikistan, so taking relatives is an effective way of pressuring defaulters. The captives seem to be used as serfs, performing manual work for their captors until they are ransomed.
The border guards service says five Tajik nationals were kidnapped last year and 12 in 2007. These figures are lower than in previous years; in 2004, for example, there were 44 Tajiks recorded as being held captive in Afghanistan. However, members of the security services accept that the official figures may underestimate the scale of the problem.
Lt-Col Buzmakov recalled how two of the five people abducted last year were young men from the village of Sebandi.
“The Afghans seized these two young men because they allegedly took drugs from them and tried to pay them in counterfeit dollars,” said Buzmakov.
The two men were released, only to be arrested back in Tajikistan on charges of drug trafficking and counterfeiting.
Because the negotiations and sometimes transactions involved in securing a release are confidential, former captives are reluctant to talk to the press about their experiences.
Zoir Niezov, 63, from the village of Mulev in the Shuroabad district, spent several months in captivity in Afghanistan in 2005, held by a gang who claimed his nephew owed them money for drugs. They threatened to seize other family members if he died in captivity.
Like others, Niezov will not discuss how much money changed hands to free him, although he says the Afghans were demanding 170,000 US dollars in payment for the drugs.
Residents of Shuroabad told IWPR that traffickers sometimes engaged in plain extortion these days, beating up villagers and robbing them of livestock and valuables.
Another worrying trend is that the wives and sisters of defaulting drug customers are carried off and forced to become concubines of the minor warlords who run the drug gangs in the Afghan province of Badakhshan. The kidnappers often send the women home when they feel they have become a burden, for example when they bear children.
It is not known how many cases of this kind there are, but residents say there are many women living alone in border areas with children born from Afghan fathers.
EKING OUT A LIVING
Apart from the few Tajik drug runners who make a lot of money, the illegal trade has not brought wealth to the local population.
Most people in these border areas are living close to or below the national minimum, set at 60 somoni or 16 dollars a month. With few sources of paid employment, villagers in Odinaboi survive on what they can grow – peas, beans, lentils and wheat. They also keep livestock, but have to sell most of the meat, keeping only enough for special occasions.
Odinaboi has no mains water supply so villagers have to use nearby springs. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the local hospital closed for lack of staff and funding. There is a midwife in the village, but anyone who falls ill has to travel to the town of Shuroabad.
Many villages in the mountains along the border are all but inaccessible by car because Soviet-era roads have fallen into a state of disrepair, and are nearly impassible due to thick snow and mud from autumn to spring.
LARGE GAPS IN BORDER PROTECTION
Life under these harsh conditions is made worse by the ever-present threat of cross-border incursions.
The 169-kilometre stretch of border in Shuroabad is the most vulnerable section of the 1,300 km frontier with Afghanistan, because it runs around numerous gorges and ravines. The Panj river which marks the border is very easy to ford at this point, unlike lower downstream, where it grows to become the Amu Darya, one of Central Asia’s two great waterways.
Former border guards say this area was poorly protected even in the Soviet period, when the USSR was generally a well-defended fortress.
Lt-Col Buzmakov says the frontier post nearest the border is actually seven km away from it, and the furthest is 25 km from Afghan territory. The intervening strips of land are impossible to patrol properly.
“Since Soviet times, over 32,000 hectares of territory in Shuroabad district have never had frontier posts,” he said. “Something needs to be done about it. Afghan drug smugglers take advantage of this situation.”
Tajikistan only began guarding its southern border in 2006, taking over from Russian troops who had stayed on after 1991. Although at the time some doubted that the Tajik force would cope as well as the Russians, three years on observers say the level of border control has not deteriorated, although it has not shown much of an improvement either.
Officials say one thing that has got better is that the number of Tajik nationals kidnapped and taken to Afghanistan has declined steadily since 1996.
“We need to lay 154 km of new roads… to connect villages and the frontier posts. We need to have well-equipped posts, and to shift them closer to the border,” said Buzmakov. “None of this is currently in place, which is to the advantage of the drug smugglers.”
Officers with the Tajik border guards in the Shuroabad sector readily admit that the force is under-funded and under-resourced.
On patrol, the service’s armed units lack adequate communications to stay in touch with base or call for back-up when they need it. Often, a local command centre will discover there is a problem only from the sound of shots as a patrol unit engages a band of armed smugglers.
A serving major with the border guards, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said most of his men’s kit dated from the Soviet era, and they lacked night vision equipment.
Another problem, he said, was that units were short of local men who knew the lay of the land.
“Afghan drug smugglers know this area better than border guards who were drafted in from various regions of the country. We are prohibited [by law] from conscripting only locals,” he said.
Tajikistan has received assistance from the international community, mainly the United States and the European Union, to strengthen border protection and narcotics interdiction, but this does not seem to have reached units stationed in remoter locations.
The Tajik authorities have recognised that Shuroabad is a special case, and set up a commission to make recommendations for improved border protection arrangements there. One of the recommendations was that two battalions of the regular army should be deployed to offer a rapid response when necessary.
Last year, the government also ordered local authorities to help with the running costs of the border forces stationed in their area, both in cash and by providing land where they could grow fruit and vegetables.
The head of Shuroabad district, Ibrahim Azizov, told IWPR that his administration was doing everything it could, although since nearly 80 per cent of its budget was subsidised by central government, it was hardly in a position to make a substantial contribution.
He insisted that life was slowly getting better in the district, adding that “Securing the border… is paramount importance if people are to live and work in peace.
Turko Dikaev and Mukammal Odinaeva are journalists based in Tajikistan.
Manonov’s parents were close to desperation when they heard the news, and his wife was out of her mind with worry.
The herder, who comes from the village of Odinaboi in the Shuroabad district of south-western Tajikistan, was only the latest in a series of Tajik nationals abducted by raiders from over the border.
These are not random attacks, but deliberate tactics employed when a business debt remains unpaid. The business involved is the high-return and high-risk trade in heroin produced from opium poppies in Afghanistan and shipped north through Central Asia on its way to destinations in Europe.
That does not mean Manonov or his relatives were enmeshed in trafficking, as there are frequent reports that the Afghan suppliers will target anyone in order to pressure a whole community into repaying a debt left by a defaulting client.
Manonov was fortunate – Tajik security forces secured his release after just one week. The head of Shuroabad’s district government, Ibrahim Azizov, told IWPR that all security agencies in the areas, border guards as well as police, sprang into action and negotiated with the kidnappers. He did not say whether a deal had been struck with them.
His mother still bursts into tears every time she remembers the day he was taken. “I am happy everything turned out well. But if he hadn’t been released, who would have raised his five children?” she said.
ROUGH JUSTICE ON LAWLESS FRONTIER
The border strip in Shiroabad district lies in a particularly remote mountainous part of the country, where Tajikistan’s frontier guards have limited ability to patrol the tortuous landscape. The porous nature of this section of the frontier have made it a magnet for drug smugglers shifting consignments of heroin over the river Panj, which is easily crossed here, to sell to Tajik gangs who will move it on and out of the country.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, economic decline and a five-year civil war, coupled with chaos as rival mujahedin warlords battled each other in Afghanistan, created all the preconditions for a thriving drug trade.
Afghan traffickers were soon on the lookout for locals poor enough to consider doing the legwork of getting drugs from the border to the interior of the country.
“At first, they were polite and didn’t insult anyone, but they were persistent in looking for middlemen to dispose of the drugs,” recalled one local resident who gave his first name as Alikhon. “Many people agreed to it since there were no other jobs to be had in those days.”
Alikhon explained how there was an air of unreality to the trade at that time, “Drugs were handed out freely to anyone who wanted to get involved in selling them, without any payment up front. The idea was that accounts were settled after the sale went through.”
Another local man, Nurkhon, added, “It was as if people went mad when they saw how easy it was to make money from drugs. You’d see elderly couples leading a donkey or horse loaded with saddlebags full of hashish.”
In the years since the United States-led Coalition ousted the Taleban government in Kabul in late 2001, opium production has boomed, despite various eradication campaigns led by the international community. With Iran still the main exit for processed heroin, with two-fifths, the Central Asian states and Tajikistan in particular are the second most important transit route, accounting for perhaps another fifth.
Russia maintained troops along the Afghan border until 2005, when the Tajiks took over, but neither force proved capable of intercepting the massive quantities of heroin coming into the country, although Tajikistan intercepts more than any other Central Asian country.
A retired Tajik border guard who requested anonymity said adjoining parts of the Afghan province of Badakhshan were not under the control of Kabul or of the international troops stationed in the country.
He said the drug trade in this part of Afghanistan was under the control of ex-members of the mujahedin faction Jamiat-e Islami, part of the “Northern Alliance” that battled the Taleban regime prior to 2001.
“The remnants of these troops make up the majority of the local drug traffickers,” he said.
With more money at stake than ever, the rules of this illicit game are tough, especially for those who take the goods and renege on payment.
“Afghans used to hand out narcotics to almost anyone. The people here were neither sophisticated nor familiar with the drugs business, so they didn’t imagine that debts would be collected in this way,” said Nurkhon.
Lieutenant-Colonel Abdurahim Buzmakov, former head of Shuroabad’s criminal investigation department, knows a thing or two about the crime network that spread in the area. He says that although police have broken up 14 trafficking gangs in the district, a similar number are still operating there, well-armed and consisting of up to 60 members each.
The more successful Tajik traffickers often relocated permanently to urban areas such as the capital Dushanbe, or even abroad, to enjoy their newfound wealth. If they left any outstanding debts behind, their relatives or others in the village pay the consequences.
“Many fled their homes, but the Afghan traffickers found a way to squeeze them for money,” said Nurkhon.
“When our villagers grew so poor and did not have anything to pay the debts, the Afghans started taking hostages,” says another villager Faizullo Ismoilov.
According to Asliddin Dostiev, a journalist in Shuroabad district who specialises in covering the drugs trade, “the Afghan drug smugglers conduct a raid over the border, grab hostages and bring them back to Afghanistan”.
The attackers are well aware that family ties are strong in Tajikistan, so taking relatives is an effective way of pressuring defaulters. The captives seem to be used as serfs, performing manual work for their captors until they are ransomed.
The border guards service says five Tajik nationals were kidnapped last year and 12 in 2007. These figures are lower than in previous years; in 2004, for example, there were 44 Tajiks recorded as being held captive in Afghanistan. However, members of the security services accept that the official figures may underestimate the scale of the problem.
Lt-Col Buzmakov recalled how two of the five people abducted last year were young men from the village of Sebandi.
“The Afghans seized these two young men because they allegedly took drugs from them and tried to pay them in counterfeit dollars,” said Buzmakov.
The two men were released, only to be arrested back in Tajikistan on charges of drug trafficking and counterfeiting.
Because the negotiations and sometimes transactions involved in securing a release are confidential, former captives are reluctant to talk to the press about their experiences.
Zoir Niezov, 63, from the village of Mulev in the Shuroabad district, spent several months in captivity in Afghanistan in 2005, held by a gang who claimed his nephew owed them money for drugs. They threatened to seize other family members if he died in captivity.
Like others, Niezov will not discuss how much money changed hands to free him, although he says the Afghans were demanding 170,000 US dollars in payment for the drugs.
Residents of Shuroabad told IWPR that traffickers sometimes engaged in plain extortion these days, beating up villagers and robbing them of livestock and valuables.
Another worrying trend is that the wives and sisters of defaulting drug customers are carried off and forced to become concubines of the minor warlords who run the drug gangs in the Afghan province of Badakhshan. The kidnappers often send the women home when they feel they have become a burden, for example when they bear children.
It is not known how many cases of this kind there are, but residents say there are many women living alone in border areas with children born from Afghan fathers.
EKING OUT A LIVING
Apart from the few Tajik drug runners who make a lot of money, the illegal trade has not brought wealth to the local population.
Most people in these border areas are living close to or below the national minimum, set at 60 somoni or 16 dollars a month. With few sources of paid employment, villagers in Odinaboi survive on what they can grow – peas, beans, lentils and wheat. They also keep livestock, but have to sell most of the meat, keeping only enough for special occasions.
Odinaboi has no mains water supply so villagers have to use nearby springs. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the local hospital closed for lack of staff and funding. There is a midwife in the village, but anyone who falls ill has to travel to the town of Shuroabad.
Many villages in the mountains along the border are all but inaccessible by car because Soviet-era roads have fallen into a state of disrepair, and are nearly impassible due to thick snow and mud from autumn to spring.
LARGE GAPS IN BORDER PROTECTION
Life under these harsh conditions is made worse by the ever-present threat of cross-border incursions.
The 169-kilometre stretch of border in Shuroabad is the most vulnerable section of the 1,300 km frontier with Afghanistan, because it runs around numerous gorges and ravines. The Panj river which marks the border is very easy to ford at this point, unlike lower downstream, where it grows to become the Amu Darya, one of Central Asia’s two great waterways.
Former border guards say this area was poorly protected even in the Soviet period, when the USSR was generally a well-defended fortress.
Lt-Col Buzmakov says the frontier post nearest the border is actually seven km away from it, and the furthest is 25 km from Afghan territory. The intervening strips of land are impossible to patrol properly.
“Since Soviet times, over 32,000 hectares of territory in Shuroabad district have never had frontier posts,” he said. “Something needs to be done about it. Afghan drug smugglers take advantage of this situation.”
Tajikistan only began guarding its southern border in 2006, taking over from Russian troops who had stayed on after 1991. Although at the time some doubted that the Tajik force would cope as well as the Russians, three years on observers say the level of border control has not deteriorated, although it has not shown much of an improvement either.
Officials say one thing that has got better is that the number of Tajik nationals kidnapped and taken to Afghanistan has declined steadily since 1996.
“We need to lay 154 km of new roads… to connect villages and the frontier posts. We need to have well-equipped posts, and to shift them closer to the border,” said Buzmakov. “None of this is currently in place, which is to the advantage of the drug smugglers.”
Officers with the Tajik border guards in the Shuroabad sector readily admit that the force is under-funded and under-resourced.
On patrol, the service’s armed units lack adequate communications to stay in touch with base or call for back-up when they need it. Often, a local command centre will discover there is a problem only from the sound of shots as a patrol unit engages a band of armed smugglers.
A serving major with the border guards, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said most of his men’s kit dated from the Soviet era, and they lacked night vision equipment.
Another problem, he said, was that units were short of local men who knew the lay of the land.
“Afghan drug smugglers know this area better than border guards who were drafted in from various regions of the country. We are prohibited [by law] from conscripting only locals,” he said.
Tajikistan has received assistance from the international community, mainly the United States and the European Union, to strengthen border protection and narcotics interdiction, but this does not seem to have reached units stationed in remoter locations.
The Tajik authorities have recognised that Shuroabad is a special case, and set up a commission to make recommendations for improved border protection arrangements there. One of the recommendations was that two battalions of the regular army should be deployed to offer a rapid response when necessary.
Last year, the government also ordered local authorities to help with the running costs of the border forces stationed in their area, both in cash and by providing land where they could grow fruit and vegetables.
The head of Shuroabad district, Ibrahim Azizov, told IWPR that his administration was doing everything it could, although since nearly 80 per cent of its budget was subsidised by central government, it was hardly in a position to make a substantial contribution.
He insisted that life was slowly getting better in the district, adding that “Securing the border… is paramount importance if people are to live and work in peace.
Turko Dikaev and Mukammal Odinaeva are journalists based in Tajikistan.
