Drug Enforcement Administration(WASHINGTON) — A joint U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, American Special Forces and Afghan counter-narcotics operation last October resulted in an eye-popping seizure of 20 tons of drugs, which officials said was the “largest known seizure of heroin in Afghanistan, if not the world.”
The operation was kept under wraps until Thursday, when a DEA official confirmed the contents of a field intelligence report obtained by ABC News but did not explain why a successful “super lab” take-down — which agency veterans agreed is an unprecedented narcotics haul — was not officially announced.
“This drug seizure alone prevented not only a massive amount of heroin hitting the streets throughout the world but also denied the Taliban money that would have been used to fund insurgent activities in and around the region,” DEA spokesman Steven Bell told ABC News Wednesday.
Bell said a “conservative” estimated street value was about $60 million for the 12.5 tons of morphine base, 6.4 tons of heroin base, 134 kilograms of opium, 129 kilograms of crystal heroin and 12 kilograms of hashish seized in the Oct. 17 raid which took place in the Western Afghanistan province of Farah on the Iranian border.
“If that was Pablo Escobar’s stash, that would be considered a lot of frickin’ heroin,” said one combat veteran of the DEA’s 11-year counter-narcotics mission to blunt the country’s heroin trade, referring to the Medellin, Colombia narcotics kingpin killed two decades ago. “That’s going to make a dent in the European market.”
The operation’s success is all the more extraordinary given the footprint of the U.S. military is now below 10,000 service members and the DEA’s numbers have diminished to a handful in-country, sources said. This downsizing has also eliminated the DEA’s Foreign-Deployed Advisory Support Teams (FAST), which targeted drug traffickers.
A Green Beret A-team aided the agents in executing a “warrant search” in the western Afghanistan province. After a brief gunfight with insurgents near the compound outside a remote village, the teams also found tons of chemicals in what one report called a “super lab” used to process the poppy into heroin base.
The “super lab” was apparently a first of its kind seen by DEA agents in Afghanistan, who described the facility as “complex, sophisticated and well-fortified” in the field report.
Besides the drugs and chemicals, they also seized nine motorcycles and five AK-47 rifles, a source said.
Throughout the 15-year U.S.-led war against insurgents from the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin and more recently ISIS, Afghanistan has remained the world’s number one supplier of heroin, which is made from opium refined from poppy flowers grown in fields that have commonly become battlegrounds. A United Nations report released last October said Afghanistan’s opium harvest had increased 43 percent over last year’s crop.
Most of the Afghan heroin ends up in Europe and some in the U.S., where officials are calling addiction and fatal overdoses an epidemic. The profits of heroin trafficking have funded large portions of the Taliban’s seemingly bottomless reservoir of fighters and weapons since being toppled from power after the 9/11 attacks, experts say.
The DEA responded to this in 2005 by forming 12-man FAST teams trained by U.S. Special Forces. The FAST teams, made up of seasoned DEA agents, initially operated with British Special Air Service commandos to destroy small opium processing labs in remote areas of southern Afghanistan but eventually gained support from their American counterparts in Special Forces and SEAL “Trident” teams. The American agents and operators were often supported by Afghanistan’s Sensitive Investigative Unit and National Interdiction Unit officers, such as last October in Farah.
The October operation targeted the obscure Hadimama drug trafficking network led by Abdul Rahman, “a suspected Taliban commander,” and Haji Janan, “a suspected Taliban facilitator and narco-trafficker.” The two “were believed to be producing heroin in these labs to fund their insurgent activities,” the DEA said.
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