Sibel Edmonds’
“A Nazi & a Drug Lord in Charge of Police in Osh?”
Today Turkish Weekly ran an investigative piece on the newly appointed chief of police in Osh-Kyrgyzstan. The new police chief Suyun Omurzakov, who used to be a deputy minister of interior, has been known as a highly influential drug lord, a leader of organized criminal groups, and he was the subject of a criminal investigation in the past.
In October 2009, the Kyrgyznews.com published an article pointing to a direct link between the then Osh city deputy chief of police S. Omurzakov and organized criminal groups engaged into drug trafficking, referring to this person as one of the most influential drug lords in the south of Kyrgyzstan.
Another report that investigates the June 2010 events developed by a coalition of Kyrgyz and Uzbek human right defenders “Oshskaya Initsiativa” (Osh Initiative) speaks of Omurzakov as a leader of an organized Kyrgyz criminal group, along with the mayor of Osh Melis Myrzakmatov, and crime bosses Almanbet Manapiyaev and Kadyr Dusanov (“Jengo”), etc., who were directly involved into plotting, leading, financing and participating in anti-Uzbek pogroms and distributing arms and ammunition among Kyrgyz militia.
Since 2001 Kyrgyzstan has been hosting the Transit Center at Manas (formerly Manas Air Base) as the transit point for US military personnel coming and going from Afghanistan, and pays 200 million for continued use of the facilities. For years the base has been riddled with scandals and fiascos. Last December Boiling Frogs Post EyeOpener Investigative Report took a closer look at “The Manas Question: Drugs, Revolution & Terrorism on the Road to Afghanistan”:
But as important as the base is to the Kyrgyz people, the true nature of Manas remains an open question. For years, it has been at the centre of a string of allegations revolving around drug-running, terrorism and stage-managed revolutions.One of the most surprising revelations to emerge from Manas centered around the story of Abdolmalek Rigi, the former leader of the Jundullah terrorist organization who was captured by Iran onboard a flight from the United Arab Emirates to Kyrgyzstan.
Jundullah is a Pakistani tribal militant group that concerns itself with plight of Sunni Muslims in the predominantly Shiite Iran. Despite widely-acknowledged links to al-Qaeda, the CIA has been funding the group for years as a proxy force to commit attacks inside Iran, where it is believed to have killed and injured over 500 civilians since 2003.As Rigi himself told his Iranian captors, his story included the air base at Manas, which he claims the US uses to conduct covert meetings with people like himself.
You can watch the full report here at Boiling Frogs Post.
Last year, Peter Dale Scott wrote a lengthy article outlining how US intervention in Kyrgyzstan, in the name of protecting its strategic air base, has led to the destabilization of Kyrgyz politics and to a drastic increase in the flow of drugs through the country:
“…that there is a deep force behind drug, intelligence, and jihadi activity, would be consistent with the legacy of the CIA’s earlier interventions in Afghanistan, Laos, and Burma, and with America’s overall responsibility for the huge increases in global drug trafficking since World War II. It is important to understand that the more than doubling of Afghan opium drug production since the U.S. invasion of 2001 merely replicates the massive drug increases in Burma, Thailand, and Laos between the late 1940s and the 1970s. These countries also only became major sources of supply in the international drug traffic as a result of CIA assistance (after the French, in the case of Laos) to what would otherwise have been only local traffickers.
As early as 2001 Kyrgyzstan’s location had made it a focal point for transnational trafficking groups. According to a U.S. Library of Congress Report of 2002,
Kyrgyzstan has become a primary center of all aspects of the narcotics industry: manufacture, sale, and drug trafficking. Kyrgyzstan’s location adjacent to major routes across the Tajik mountains from Afghanistan combines with ineffectual domestic smuggling controls to attract figures from what a Kyrgyz newspaper report characterized as “an international organization uniting an unprecedentedly wide circle of members in the United States, Romania, Brazil, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan….These are no half-literate Tajik-Afghan drug runners, but professionals who have passed through a probation period in the mafia clans of the world narcotics system….”
Mr. Scott goes on to shine a further spotlight on the importance of Kyrgyzstan as a critical US “Transit Hub”:
The Badakhshan drug corridor is a matter of urgent concern for Russia. The Afghan opiates entering Russia via Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, the chief smuggling route, come from Badakhshan and other northeastern provinces. The reductions of the last three years in Afghan drug production, while inadequate overall, have minimally impacted the northeast, allowing opiate imports into Russia to continue to grow. Meanwhile the much-touted clearing of opium poppy from the Afghan northern provinces has in some cases simply seen a switch “from opium poppies to another illegal crop: cannabis, the herb from which marijuana and hashish are derived.”
As a result, according to U.N. officials, Afghanistan is now also the world’s biggest producer of hashish (another drug inundating Russia).67 This has added to the flow of drugs up the Badakhshan-Tajik-Kyrgyz corridor. In short, the political skewing of America’s Afghan anti-drug policies is a significant reason for the major drug problems faced by Russia today.
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IN July 2010 I wrote a lengthy investigative piece at Boiling Frogs Post on Kyrgyzstan, Bakiyev, Mina Corp and the connected US operatives:
When we talk about the strategic importance of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and other ‘stans’ we are not talking only about strategic in the sense of traditional resources-oil, we also talk about ‘narcotics resources’:
At the moment the stock of pure heroin in Afghanistan is estimated at slightly below 3,000 tons, and the revenues of Afghan drug suppliers reach around $3 bn annually. The international drug mafia earns at least $100 bn annually on heroin from Afghanistan, the money nourishing organized crime not only in Afghanistan but also across Central Asia – in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
And no, the real lords of these resources are not the farmers in Afghanistan or the mules transporting them. The real lords of heroin enterprises happen to be those who’ve been ‘groomed and planted’ to rule the source and transit nations, and the ones who rule those rulers who reside in the United States and other Western countries:
The revenues generated by the drug business are distributed among the criminal groups controlling various segments of the supply chain linking poppy farms to narcotics consumers. While Afghan poppy growers are enduring extreme poverty, the owners of the fields mostly reside in the US, Great Britain, and other Western democracies.
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I encourage you to take the time and read the entire investigative report on Kyrgyzstan here. Once you do that you’ll understand why it makes perfect sense to have a drug boss lead Kyrgyzstan’s police force. It takes far more than a few mules to transport tens of billions of dollars worth of poppies-heroin. And it takes more than a third-world shack to house-base the loads as a transit hub. What you need is a major airbase and a massive hub. A la USA.
dancingczars
jcscuba
must have been one of Obama buddies he helped get elected
Ralph,
A Chicago political crony or a Kenyan relative no doubt.
Patriot John
It’s important to reveiw history to understand what is going on in Afghanistan. When the press refers to Afghanistan’s history it is usually to the Soviet invasion of the 1980s or WW II, which ended with the British Empire’s departure from South Asia in 1947. There is a silence about the three decades in between. During that time, Afghanistan was divided between the Soviet Union in the north and the United States in the south.
So what happened in those 30 some years and does it reflect on the Afghanistan of today?
In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States made southern Afghanistan a showcase of nation building with a dazzling project to “reclaim” and modernize a swath of territory comprising roughly half the country. The Helmand Valley venture is worth remembering today as a precedent for renewed efforts to rebuild Afghanistan.
The Helmand Valley is located in the southwestern portion of Afghanistan and occupies about one-fourth of the total area of the country. Average yearly rainfall in the valley area is about four inches. The valley is in the temperate zone with an elevation varying between 1,500 and 3000 feet. Humidity is low, and strong dry winds frequently blow in the westerly portion of the valley during July and August. The Helmand river is the longest in Afghanistan supplying forty percent of the country’s total water resources. The obstacle towards the agricultural development of the Helmand Valley has traditionally not been a shortage of water, but a lack of adequate control of the water in the valley.
The Afghans themselves started the first development work in the area in 1910 when part of the vast work of old irrigation canals were reconstructed. They also constructed the first new functional canals by 1914. Foreign technical assistance first arrived in the 1930s when new canals were built with German and Japanese assistance. The Germans gave some technical assistance and the Japanese (1937-1941) helped dig nine miles of canals at Boghra, which was pushed ahead by another 16 miles (1941-1946) by Afghans themselves. During World War II, because of the British-Soviets ultimatum on the Afghan government to expel all Germans, Italian and Japanese personnel, the Helmand project was brought to a halt.
In 1945 negotiations began between the Afghan government and an American company, the Morrison-Knudsen on the construction of two diversion dams, one on the Helmand River and the other on its chief tributary, the Arghandab River, enlargement of an irrigation canals and the construction of roads in the Valley. An agreement was reached in 1946 resulting in the formation of Morrison-Knudsen Afghanistan Inc.. The MKA Helmand Valley Project (also called the HVP Project) has been an important turn of event in the history of modern Afghanistan. It was the largest and most ambitious project ever undertaken in the history of modern Afghanistan.
Objectives of the HVP Project included: provision of farms for nomads and land-less villagers; raising the standard of living of peoples in the valley; producing agricultural and manufactured products for export; developing electric power; creating government income which will eventually pay off the investment; providing protection against floods; and providing utilization of the waters of the Helmand River. After a preliminary survey MKA made several estimates: an initial $10.7 million would be needed for all surveys and roads necessary to begin the construction of two dams and an extensive canal system; the total cost would be $63.7 million. The canal system would include intakes, waterways, laterals and sub-laterals. However, “neither the Afghan government nor the American engineering company understood the monumental problems of enfolding an entire region in the embrace of a single project”. By 1949 costs had skyrocketed first because under the agreement all equipment had to be shipped from the U.S., half way around the world from the site of the project. In 1949 Afghanistan asked the Export-Import Bank (EIB) in Washington D.C. for a $55 million loan. After an initial refusal, the EIB finally approved a $21 million loan. This marked the beginning of the US aid to Afghanistan through which the American government established its stake in the country.
By 1969, the new grains had spread to a modest 300,000 acres, half of which had been producing prior to the project. The 1971 drought destroyed much of the crops. The Arghandab reservoir dried up completely, a possibility not foreseen by planners. The vision of prosperous, irrigation-fed farms proved beyond HAVA’s grasp. Wheat yields were among the lowest in the world, four bushels an acre (Iowa farms produced 180) farm incomes in the valley were below average for Afghanistan and declining. Nobody had ever tested the arid alkaline soils of the area to see if they could indeed produce crops. State Department officials found it difficult to measure the magnitude of the economic crisis. “The food crisis, seems to have been the real clincher for which neither the King nor his government were prepared.” In July 1973, military units loyal to Mohammed Daoud deposed the king, who was vacationing in Europe, and terminated both the monarchy and the constitution. U.S. involvement in HAVA was scheduled to end in July 1974, and US AID officials strenuously opposed suggestions that it be renewed. Nonetheless, when Henry Kissinger visited Kabul in February, Daoud described the Helmand Valley as an “unfinished symphony” and urged the United States not to abandon it. In the end the project was a failure, of the 539,834 acres of land that was aimed to be irrigated as a result of the project only 170,000 (about 31%) acres actually received adequate water and most of these were already being farmed. Of the several ambitious objectives, only the control of floods seemed to have been achieved. There, therefore, is little doubt that the HV project represented a miscalculation on the part of all those involved. This despite the warning from numerous sources that the project was doomed to the fate it eventually encountered.
Without a strong central government the area returned to tribule rule. The Helmand Valley provided the new regime’s chief source of revenue, the opium poppy. The opium poppy grows well in dry climates and in alkaline and saline soils. Late seventies brought record crops of poppies. After the Soviet invasion of 1980 Poppy controls were put in place and production dropped greatly, but due to soil composition, no replacement crops ever took hold. So the USA stepped in arming and training the tribes to drive the soviets back. With the tribes worked together in the 1990′s the Taliban developed, and they were anti-drugs so poppies once more were illegalized and crops destroyed.
Before that order, Afghanistan had been the world’s largest producer of opium poppies. As a result of the ban, areas of Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban produced a few hundred tons of opium, compared with 3,200 tons produced last year and 4,500 tons the year before. During its five years in power, the Taliban government invested in the dams and finished one project begun but not completed by the Americans. The Kajakai Dam’s hydroelectric plant to the city of Kandahar was finished in early 2001, just a few months before American bombers destroyed the plant. A year after a Taliban ban virtually wiped out opium production in Afghanistan, desperate Afghan farmers are once again planting poppies, poppies and their final product heroin returned on a grand scale. Afghanistan once is the world largest producer of opium and heroin.
So does anyone else see the pattern here? Everytime the US helps Afghanistan poppy production rises, even now while Afghanistan is basically occupied and controlled by US forces, America’s need for Heroin is being satisfied by the poor peasants of Afghanistan. In 2007 Afghanistan produced 200% of the world’s need for heroin, now the farmers are starting to plant marijuana, which means the same people selling heroin will soon be selling hashish and pot as well. Why are we in Afghanistan anyway?
Hi Ronald this was excellent, would you consider using this and becoming a guest blogger? I will do the linkages for sourcing. Good job, please let me know, your comments are to good to be buried here. Thanks J.C.
sign em up jc he did a good job on that