++GRAPHIC IMAGES OF DEAD BODY IN SHOT 3 AND BRUISES IN SHOT 13++

Kabul - 30 September 2021

1. Various of Afghans gathered under a bridge to consume drugs, mostly heroin and methamphetamines

2. SOUNDBITE (Dari) Jimmy (surname not given), drug user from Kabul:

"Since they (Taliban) arrived they don't allow us to be here or anywhere else. When they see us, they beat us until they take the breath out of us (until they kill us). It seems that they are beating animals, not humans. Animals are not hated as much as addicts."

3. Various of body of a dead man on ground under bridge, beaten during Taliban raid and found dead following morning according to drug users at scene ++GRAPHIC++

4. SOUNDBITE (Dari) Nezamuddin (surname not given), drug user from Kabul:

"It's been 12 years since I became addicted and started using heroin. I am far away from my family, friends and society. We spend nights under this bridge. He was OK last night, he was at dinner and took tea also. Suddenly the Taliban came and hit him. The next morning after the Taliban hit him, we found him dead."

5. Afghans gathered under a bridge taking drugs

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Kabul - 1 October 2021

6. Various of Taliban fighters beating and detaining drug users before transferring them to Avicenna Medical Hospital for Drug Treatment

7. SOUNDBITE (Pashto) Mawlavi Fazullah, Taliban officer:

"We catch and bring them to the hospital. It's not important if some of them will die. Others will be cured. After they are cured, they can be free."

8. Bus with drug users on board

9. Detained drug users wait in bus as they are transferred to treatment center

10. Various of Taliban fighters escorting drug users from the bus

11. Various of drug users detained during Taliban raid

12. Taliban fighter with AK-47

13. Close of drug user's back, covered with bruises ++GRAPHIC++

14. Various of drug users being shaved after arriving at treatment center

15. SOUNDBITE (Dari) Mohammad Hanif Popal, hospital medic:

"There are three procedures. The first is detoxication. Many patients feel pain at this phase. Patients stay at the detoxication section for 15 days. The patients suffer from pain, high tension, vomiting. They may also have other kinds of diseases. If we can't cure them, we will send them to the responsible hospitals. After that they will stay us for 45 days. After 15 days we introduce patients to psychotherapy. The psychotherapist will treat them and after 45 days until the treatment is finished."

16. Drug user resting on bench after being shaved

17. Various of drug users walking in line on their way to the detoxification ward

18. Drug users in room at detoxification ward

19. Drug user sleeping

20. Drug user looking out through the bars of stairwell in detoxification ward

Kabul - 4 October 2021

21. Drug users walking in hospital corridor

22. Various of drug addicts eating

23. Drug addicts looking out through barred window

24. Drug addict being beaten and led away

25. Wide of meeting room for relatives

26. Sitara, mother of drug addict, crying as she is reunited with her 21-year-old son after he had been missing for 12 days, UPSOUND (Dari):

Sitara: "Oh my God, there is my son. Oh my God, where were you, my son?"

Son: "Sit, sit, I'm fine."

Sitara: "Oh my God, my entire life is my son."

27. Close of little girl and Sitara

28. Son speaking to Sitara, UPSOUND (Dari): "I've lived in this area for 20 years and nobody complained about me. I'm not a criminal."

29. Sunlight on the floor

Now the uncontested rulers of Afghanistan, the Taliban have set their sights on stamping out the scourge of drug addiction, even if by force.  

At nightfall, the battle-hardened fighters-turned-policemen scour Kabul's drug-ravaged underworld.

Below the city's bridges, amid piles of garbage and streams of filthy water, hundreds of homeless men addicted to heroin and methamphetamines are rounded up, beaten and forcibly taken to treatment centers.

One evening, under a bridge in the Kotesangi neighborhood, some men were smoking up casually next to a collapsed body. The man was dead.  

"The Taliban came and hit him. Next morning after the Taliban hit him, we found him dead," said Nezamuddin, one of the drug addicts.

They covered him with cloth but dare not bury him while the Taliban patrol the streets.

The heavy-handed methods are welcomed by some health workers, who have had no choice but adapt to Taliban rule.

"It's not important if some of them die," said Mawlawi Fazullah, a Taliban officer, chief of the patrol in the Kotesangi neighborhood. "Others will be cured. After they are cured, they can be free."

During a raid last week, over 150 men were taken to a district police station, where their belongings were burned.

By midnight, they were taken to the Avicenna Medical Hospital for Drug Treatment, on the edge of Kabul.

Once a military base, Camp Phoenix, established by the U.S. army in 2003, it was made into a drug treatment center in 2016. Now it's Kabul's largest, capable of accommodating 1,000 people.  

The men were stripped and bathed, their heads shaved.  

The center's head psychiatrist Dr. Wahedullah Koshan said they were set to be weaned off their drugs with only limited medical care to alleviate withdrawal-related discomfort and pain.

Koshan conceded the hospital lacks the alternative opioids, buprenorphine and methadone, typically used to treat heroin addiction.

A waiting room was full of parents and relatives wondering if their missing loved ones were among those taken in the drug raids.  

Sitara wailed when she was reunited with her 21-year-old son, who'd been missing for 12 days.

"My entire life is my son," she wept, embracing him.  

But the Taliban's war on drugs is complicated as the country faces the prospect of economic collapse and imminent humanitarian catastrophe.  

Sanctions and lack of recognition have made Afghanistan, long dependent on foreign aid, ineligible for the financial support from international organizations that accounted for 75% of state spending.

An appalling human rights record, especially with respect to women, has rendered the Taliban unpopular among international development organizations.  

A liquidity crisis has set in. Public wages are months in arrears, drought has exacerbated food shortages and disease. Winter is weeks away.

Without foreign funds, government revenues rely on customs and taxation.

The illicit opium trade is intertwined with Afghanistan's economy and its turmoil. Poppy growers are part of an important rural constituency for the Taliban, and most rely on the harvest to make ends meet.

During the insurgency years, the Taliban profited from the trade by taxing traffickers, a practice applied on a wide variety of industries in the areas under its control.

Research by David Mansfield, an expert on the Afghan drug trade, suggests the group made $20 million in 2020, a small fraction compared to other sources of revenue from tax collection. Publicly, it has always denied links to the drug trade.  

But the Taliban also implemented the only largely successful ban on opium production, between 2000-2001, before the U.S. invasion. Successive governments failed to match that achievement.

Police roundups of addicts did occur during previous administrations. But the Taliban are more forceful and feared.