Taliban militants derive nearly 60 percent of their income from the drug trade amid a revolution in the Afghan opium supply chain, The New York Times reports.
U.S. and Afghan officials lamented that the Taliban are now constructing drug labs all over the country in order to refine opium into heroin or morphine. The ability to smuggle out refined product explodes the bottom line for the terrorist group fueling its ongoing insurgency against the U.S. backed Afghan government.
The troubling trend follows a country awash in opium and poppy fields under increasingly precarious Afghan government control. The Taliban now control or contest approximately 40 percent of the territory in Afghanistan, which is nearly one-third of the total population. The United Nations Office On Drugs And Crime also estimated in October 2016 that opium production had already surged by an additional 46 percent from 2015.
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