KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN, Dec 23: Haji Khairullah Barakzai is the ultimate Afghan success story: illiterate village boy makes a fortune thanks to a lifetime of hard work, unerring street smarts and God’s favour.
But to the U.S. Treasury Department, he is one of the biggest bankers to the Taliban, the architect of an underground network that converts opium grown in the poppy fields of his native southern Afghanistan into cash.
On June 29, the United States and United Nations slapped “terror finance” sanctions on Khairullah and his 25-year-old currency-exchange business, freezing his assets and imposing a travel ban. The move marked a new phase in an escalating but little known campaign to starve the insurgency of drug money ahead of a handover to Afghan forces in 2014.
A Treasury statement accused Khairullah of “donating money and providing financial services to the Taliban”, which used his cash transfer service “in support of the Taliban’s narcotics and terrorist operations”.
Treasury’s evidence is classified, but Afghan sources and Western officials familiar with Khairullah painted a portrait of a man with long-standing ties to the Taliban and the drug trade alongside significant legitimate businesses.
Khairullah’s friends and associates describe an entirely different figure, a patriarchal pillar of the community who in the murky world of Afghan currency trading cannot always be expected to know the true identity of his customers.
“I am a businessman, and a businessman is like a ram. Anyone in authority can come and grab it by its neck and slaughter it,” Khairullah told Reuters, in his first interview since the sanctions were imposed.
“My life has become hell. I have lost my credibility and reputation. I have been declared guilty without any verdict from a judge,” he said. He was speaking by telephone from Quetta, the city in southwest Pakistan where he sought sanctuary after Washington named him as a key Taliban financier.
The showdown between Khairullah and his pursuers opens a rare window into another kind of war, where financial intelligence trumps firepower, and captured territory is measured in frozen accounts.
It is a war the West has not been winning. Milking money from the heroin trade, donors in the Gulf and extortion rackets on NATO contractors, the Taliban increased its income to 400 million dollars in the last Afghan calendar year, according to UN estimates. About a quarter came from narcotics.
(AGENCIES)
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