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Monday, May 7, 2018

Afghan girl coders design games to fight opium and inequality

May 8, 2018 04H:28 GMT/UTC/ZULU TIME

by Sunita Kureishi and Biodun Iginla, BBC and Reuters Technology reporters, HERAT, Afghanistan

HERAT, Afghanistan - Think Super Mario Bros, but with an Afghan twist. This is how Afghanistan’s first generation of female coders explain their abilities as game-makers after uploading more than 20 games on digital app stores this year.

Afghan coders practice at the Code to Inspire computer training center in Herat, Afghanistan April 24, 2018. REUTERS/Mohammad Shoib

More than 20 young women in the western city of Herat have established themselves as computer experts, building apps and websites as well as tracking down bugs in computer code.

Like the team of Afghan schoolgirls who rose to fame last year when they competed in a robotics competition in the United States, the coders show what reserves of talent there are to be tapped when Afghan girls are given a chance.

“Coders can work from home and it is in this process women are building a new career path for themselves and for the next generation,” said Hasib Rasa, project manager of Code to Inspire, which teaches female students coding in Herat.

One of the games designed by the all-female team has caught the eye of developers and gamers as it illustrates the scourge of opium cultivation and the challenges the Afghan security forces face as they try to stamp it out.

The 2D game “Fight Against Opium” is an animated interpretation of the missions that Afghan soldiers undertake to destroy opium fields, fight drug lords and help farmers switch to growing saffron.

Afghanistan is the world’s largest source of opium but it also grows saffron - the world’s most expensive spice - which has long been pushed as an alternative to wean farmers off a crop used to make heroin.

Despite a ban, opium production hit a record in 2017, up 87 percent over 2016, according to a U.N. study.

Khatira Mohammadi, a student who helped develop the anti-opium game, said she wanted to show the complexities of the drug problem in the simplest way.

“We have illustrated our country’s main problem through a game,” said Mohammadi.

Afghan coders practice at the Code to Inspire computer training center in Herat, Afghanistan April 24, 2018. REUTERS/Mohammad Shoib

At the institute, more than 90 girls and young women, wearing headscarves and long black coats, are trained in coding and software development, a profession seen by some in conservative Afghanistan as unsuitable for women.

In Afghan society, it is unusual for women to work outside the home. Those who do, are mostly teachers, nurses, doctors, midwives and house helpers.

After the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, women regained freedom to work in offices with male colleagues - but many consider working as a software developer a step too far.

Hasib Rasa said girls are encouraged to design original player characters, goals, and obstacles that reflect Afghanistan’s ethos.

The course is exclusively aimed at females, aged 15-25, who are unable to pursue a four-year degree due to lack of funds or hail from families where they are prevented from enrolling in co-education schools.

“In Afghanistan the ability to work remotely is a key tool in the push for equality,” said Rasa.

Monday, February 12, 2018

Taliban infiltrator kills 16 Afghan government militiamen

February 12, 2018 10H:30 GMT/UTC/ZULU TIME

by Sunita Kureishi and Biodun Iginla, BBC News and Reuters, LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan - A Taliban infiltrator killed 16 members of a pro-government militia force in the insurgency ridden southern province of Helmand when he turned his gun on men who he had worked with for months, officials said on Monday.

The Afghan security agency had set up the militia to infiltrate the Taliban, a security official told us at Reuters, though a spokesman for Helmand’s governor was unable to identify the group.

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“We know that a Taliban fighter killed 16 militiamen fighting alongside government forces, but who these forces belong to, we don’t know yet,” said the spokesman, Omar Zwak.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the killings in the province’s Gereshk district on Saturday, saying two of its fighters were involved.

A security official, who declined to be identified, said the suspected gunman had worked with the militia for months and took arms and ammunition after killing the men.

Helmand is one of Afghanistan’s most violent provinces, and also a major source of opium, the narcotic used to make heroin.

The Taliban, fighting to re-establish strict Islamic rule in Afghanistan and drive out international forces backing the government in Kabul, control large stretches of the province.

Monday, August 7, 2017

Taliban move into Afghan drug production

08 August 2017 - 07H30 GMT/UTC/ZULU TIME

by Sunita Kureishi and Biodun Iginla, France24, Kabul

KABUL -

The Taliban -- which banned poppy cultivation when it ruled Afghanistan -- now appears to wield significant control over the war-torn country's heroin production line, providing insurgents with billions of dollars, officials have told us at France24.

In 2016 Afghanistan, which produces 80 percent of the world's opium, made around 4,800 tonnes of the drug bringing in revenues of three billion dollars, according to the United Nations.

The Taliban has long taxed poppy-growing farmers to fund their years-long insurgency, but Western officials are concerned it is now running its own factories, refining the lucrative crop into morphine and heroin for exporting abroad.

"I pretty firmly feel they are processing all the harvest," William Brownfield, US Assistant Secretary for Drugs and Law Enforcement told reporters in the Afghan capital Kabul recently.

"Everything they harvest is duly processed inside the country. They receive more revenues if they process it before it has left the country.

"Obviously we are dealing with very loose figures, but drug trafficking amounts to billions of dollars every year from which the Taliban is taking a substantial percentage," he added.

Poppies, which are cheap and easy to grow, make up half of Afghanistan's entire agricultural output.

Farmers are paid about $163 for a kilo of the black sap -- the raw opium that oozes out of poppy seed pods when they are slit with a knife.

Once it is refined into heroin, the Taliban sells it in regional markets for between $2,300 and $3,500 a kilo. By the time it reaches Europe it wholesales for $45,000, according to a Western expert who is advising Afghan anti-narcotics forces and asked not to be named.

He said an increase in seizures of chemicals required to turn opium into morphine, the first step before it becomes heroin, such as acid anhydride, points to an escalation in Taliban drug activity.

Sixty-six tonnes of the chemicals were seized in all of 2016, while 50 tonnes were impounded in just the first six months of this year, the expert said.

In early July, he said, 15 tonnes were confiscated in the west of Afghanistan near the border with Iran, the start of a popular drug route to Europe through Turkey.

- 'Helmand is all about drugs' -

Seizures of morphine have also increased. Fifty-seven tonnes were discovered in the first half of 2017 compared to 43 tonnes for the whole of 2016, added the expert, who said that only about 10 percent of what is produced is actually discovered.

"It's easy to build a rudimentary laboratory -- walls of cob, a thatched roof -- and when the operation is finished it is evacuated," the source told us at France24.

Afghanistan's interior ministry said that between January and June, 46 clandestine drug factories were closed down by anti-narcotics officers compared with 16 in the first half of last year.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration predicts that the crackdown has deprived traffickers of about $300 million in income since the turn of the year.

A senior Western official who asked not to be named was adamant that the Taliban have their own laboratories, describing the southern province of Helmand, where an estimated 80 percent of Afghan poppies are grown, as a "big drug factory".

"Helmand is all about drugs, poppy and Taliban. The majority of their funding comes from the poppy, morphine labs, heroin labs. Of course they have their own labs," he told us at France24.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) opium production provided about half of the Taliban's revenues in 2016.

David Dadge, a spokesman for UNODC, says there is "anecdotal evidence" that Taliban commanders are involved in the manufacture of opiates, but says that stops short of proving that the Taliban as an organisation has a systematic programme of running factories.

For the Afghan interior ministry, however, there is little doubt.

"The Taliban need more money to run their war machine and buy guns, that is why they have taken control of drug factories," said Sayed Mehdi Kazemi, a spokesman for its counter-narcotics department.

The United States has spent $8.6 billion since 2002 in the war against drugs in Afghanistan, but Afghan-sourced heroin is still reaching North America.

"More than 90 percent of all heroin consumed in the US is of Mexican origin. But in Canada more than 90 percent of the heroin consumed is of Afghan origin," said Brownfield.