Where Does Taliban That Took Over Afghanistan Get Money From?

New Delhi: Afghanistan has been taken. The Taliban are in control after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country and conceded that terrorists had won the 20-year war. It took a week for the government to collapse. The terrorists took over the presidential palace on Sunday night, triggering fear and panic in the capital Kabul.

No flights can operate from Kabul airport now as the airspace has been closed. The Afghanistan Civil Aviation Authority asked all transit aircraft to reroute, adding any transit through Kabul airspace would be uncontrolled, news agency Reuters reported. There was chaos at Kabul airport on Monday morning after thousands of people rushed in to take any available flight out of the country. US troops fired in the air to control the crowd. Hundreds of men were seen jostling and trying to climb onto a parked aircraft, said media reports.

Having captured Afghanistan’s capital Kabul on Sunday (August 15), the Taliban announced that the war was over in Afghanistan. Taliban has appealed for peaceful relations with the international community.

Talking to Al Jazeera TV, Taliban spokesman Mohammad Naeem said that the Taliban did not want to live in isolation and the group respected women’s and minorities’ rights within Sharia law.

“We ask all countries and entities to sit with us to settle any issues”, he said in an interview with Al Jazeera TV.

Meanwhile, another Taliban spokesman, Shaheen Suhail, in an exclusive conversation with CNN-News18 laid out the militant group’s roadmap for the “reconstruction” of Afghanistan, its international co-operation plans and how this regime is going to be different from the one the world witnessed before. Suhail also said that the organisation expects India to change its stance and support the Taliban.

“I hope they (India) will also change their policies because earlier they were siding with the regime government, which was imposed. It would be good for both sides, for the people of India and Afghanistan,” said the spokesman.

Amid all this, the question being asked all over the world is, where does the Taliban get money from? So, how much is the Taliban worth and what is the source of income of the group?

In 2016, Forbes listed the Taliban as the fifth richest of the 10 ‘Terrorist’ organisations. ISIS was on top of the table with a turnover then of US$ 2 billion and the Taliban occupied the fifth spot with an annual turnover of US$ 400 million. According to Forbes, the Taliban’s primary sources of revenue were drug trafficking, protection money and donations.

According to a NATO report accessed by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the annual budget of the Taliban in 2019-20 had been US$ 1.6 Billion. RFE/RF gave a breakdown of how the Taliban earned their money:

Mining: $464 million

Drugs: $416 million

Foreign Donations: $240 million

Export: $240 million

Taxes: $160 million

(Protection/Extortion money)Real Estate: $80 million

It was mentioned in the NATO report that the Taliban leadership was focused on becoming self-sufficient in order to become an independent political and military entity.

Over the years the organisation had been reducing its dependency on foreign donations and contributions. In 2017-18 it had reportedly received an estimated $500 million or about half of its total funding then from foreign sources; this had reduced to roughly 15 per cent of their total revenues, by 2020.