How an Afghan Drug Kingpin Became Beijing’s Man in Kabul
Bashir Noorzai was once serving a life sentence in the United States. Now he’s the key conduit for growing ties between China and the Taliban.
February 10, 2024 (Foreign Policy)—A drug kingpin whose heroin empire helped fund the Taliban’s long war in Afghanistan—and who was released early from a U.S. prison in a trade for an American hostage—has now gone into business with China.
Bashir Noorzai, a close friend of the extremists’ supreme leader, has set up murky joint-venture deals with Chinese firms in Afghanistan that have won at least two minerals and petrochemical contracts, which mining and security sources said are little more than rentier operations raking in cash but doing nothing to develop the impoverished country.
The Taliban’s multibillion-dollar heroin production and export enterprises have dominated the global market for decades. Before his imprisonment, Noorzai was the don of the heroin trade, sometimes referred to as the “Pablo Escobar of Afghanistan” after the Colombian cocaine king who ran the Medellín cartel until his death in 1993.
Read more: https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/10/noorzai-afghanistan-taliban-china-mining-drug-kingpin/