There is growing evidence that ISIS is in the process of seizing control of the enormous heroin trafficking that emanates from Afghanistan. Russian officials have been sounding the alarm about that for well over a year, and yesterday Iranian Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, according to a report that appeared in the Young Journalists Club website, said that ISIS is funded to a great extent from the smuggling of illegal drugs: “We are seeing that the benefit gained from the agriculture of narcotics in Afghanistan feeds many terrorist groups. Aid going to the ISIS also comes from the benefits gained from the smuggling of narcotics. The group are themselves smugglers of narcotics.”

On Sept. 20 of this year, Carol Adl of YourNewsWire.com reported that Russia’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin told a UN Security Council session that there is increasing heroin trafficking activities by the ISIS terrorists. “There is information that a group of militants from ISIS … already control a part of the routes of illegal drug supply from the Badakhshan Province” in northeastern Afghanistan. At that session, Adl said, Churkin had urged the UN body to closely monitor the situation of drugs in Afghanistan, given that it is one of the main routes of drug trafficking into Europe. Badakhshan Province, she noted, “is especially strategic since it extends into Afghanistan’s neighbors Pakistan, Tajikistan and the Xinjiang Province in China, which could also become a militant corridor for the ISIS group.”

On Oct. 8, the Russian news agency nakanune.ru reported that Gen. Valeri Gerasimov, chief of the Russian military’s General Staff, announced an estimate that Afghan heroin production will have increased 20% this year over 2014. Gerasimov also said that the General Staff estimates that two to three thousand Islamic State guerrillas are currently in Afghanistan.

Almost a year earlier, in late November 2014, Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service (FDCS) Director Victor Ivanov told the annual meeting in St. Petersburg of the Counternarcotics Group of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), that the enormous narcotics business in Afghanistan was a global threat to security and peace, citing the fast-developing role of the Islamic State terrorists and African coastal pirates as drug-runners. He said that ISIS was then handling the logistics for half of the heroin reaching Europe via Iraq and Africa, deriving steady financing from its drug-running. Ivanov said: “Without the elimination of large-scale Afghan drug production, there will be no settlement of the conflicts in these regions.”

Ivanov has also repeatedly noted the dependence of the world financial system on laundered drug money, and has presented programmatic proposals for the rapid industrial development of Afghanistan and the region as the antidote to the drug trade.

ISIS is functioning like any other narco-terrorist tool in the British Empire’s Dope, Inc. armamentarium, and is increasingly involved in the multi-billion-dollar Afghan heroin trade. This reality is being insistently pointed to by Russian officials and media outlets, for the world to better understand what the war against ISIS really involves.

The Dec. 7 RT quotes from a recent study by the IHS Conflict Monitor, which reports that ISIS’s control over illegal oil shipments is not the major source of their financing. Some 43% of ISIS’s income comes from oil, the prestigious British defense and security analysis firm reports, but 50% comes from “taxation of all business activities on the territories under their control [including] trafficking of antiques and drugs.” The article reports that the Russian air strikes against the ISIS oil contraband from Iraq and Syria to Turkey, has really hurt ISIS, and that “for that purpose, ISIS also intends to take under full control heroin production and trafficking in Afghanistan. The terrorists are already making $1 billion a year from Afghan heroin.”

That figure of $1 billion comes from Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service, which was cited in an earlier Nov. 30 RT piece on ISIS and drugs, which also quoted Russian anti-drug czar Viktor Ivanov from earlier this year:

The UN currently estimates the value of Afghan heroin trade at $100 billion per year—something of an underestimate, according to EIR’s estimates.

The Nov. 30 RT article also quotes Tom Keatinge of RUSI (Royal United Services Institute), in London, who concurs that

RT concludes by quoting Vladimir Markin, the spokesman for Russia’s Investigative Committee (a powerful investigative agency within the executive branch of the Russian government): “Daesh [isis] and Al-Nusra Front are nothing but political cronies for massive trafficking of oil, currency, weapons, items of cultural value, transplant organ harvesting and slave trade.”