The following cast of characters appear in Seeds of Terror.
Haji Juma Khan
Haji Juma Khan
STATUS: INCARCERATED. An ethnic Balouch, Haji Juma Khan’s drug empire has been estimated to move as much as one billion dollars worth of opium a year, helped by his close ties to al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Pakistani and Iranian spy agencies. Arrested in October 2008 when he arrived in Indonesia from Dubai, he was extradited to New York where he awaits trial.
Haji Bashar Noorzai
Haji Bashar Noorzai
STATUS: INCARCERATED. A former right-hand man to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, this tribal leader flew to New York to cooperate with U.S. authorities, whereupon they promptly arrested him. In April 2009, a New York federal judge sentenced Noorzai to life in prison for smuggling millions of dollars worth of Taliban heroin into the U.S. His lawyer says he will appeal.
Dawood Ibrahim
Dawood Ibrahim
STATUS: WANTED – Head of the Mumbai crime gang the D-Company, Ibrahim runs a sprawling global organized crime syndicate that many investigators believe is laundering billions of dollars worth of Afghan heroin money. “If you want to understand what Osama bin Laden is up to,” says a former senior CIA official. “You have to understand what Dawood Ibrahim is up to.”
Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden
STATUS: WANTED – The world’s most wanted man has distinguished himself from other extremist leaders by building a multi-tentacle business empire that spans the globe. American and British spies who watched his network during the Taliban years believe he used Afghanistan’s Ariana Airlines to move millions of dollars worth of dope and materiel.
Mullah Dadullah
Mullah Dadullah
STATUS: DEAD Mullah Dadullah was a Taliban commander so ferocious he even got reprimanded by Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. He tried to muscle in on poppy profits in the southern Afghan region he commanded, and in 2007, died in a shootout with NATO and Afghan forces.
Mullah Omar
No photo
STATUS: WANTED – Believed to be hiding out in western Pakistan, the secretive one-eyed Taliban leader and his immediate deputies reportedly receive cash payments, often to the tune of millions of dollars, from top regional drug traffickers. According to his strict brand of Islam, he refuses to be photographed.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
STATUS: WANTED – This fundamentalist former Afghan prime minister commands Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin, known as the HIG by American officials. The HIG is considered a sophisticated narco-terror group that uses drug profits to finance attacks in Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hecmatyar was close to Pakistan’s spy agency, the ISI, in the 1980s and is believed to be hiding out in Pakistan’s northwest frontier.
Jalaluddin Haqqani
Jalaluddin Haqqani
STATUS: WANTED – Jalaluddin Haqqani controls the southeastern flank of the Taliban from his base in Miramshah, in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency. A legendary mujahideen fighter from the anti-Soviet resistance, he is widely believed to have smuggled guns and drugs since the 1980s.
Baitullah Meshud
No photo
STATUS: WANTED – The secretive leader of the Taliban Movement of Pakistan, Baitullah Meshud commands a shaky alliance of militant groups from his perch in South Waziristan. Although he has no known connections to the heroin trade, his men have been accused of extorting local businesses, running kidnapping rings and robbing money changers to stay flush. Like Mullah Omar, Meshud refuses to be photographed. A BBC reporter caught him on camera here.
Tahir Yuldeshev
Tahir Yuldashev
STATUS: WANTED – The leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan who is believed to be hiding out in Pakistan’s rugged tribal areas and whose men at one point acted as bodyguards for Osama bin Laden. The IMU has close ties to narcotics smuggling and Interpol believes the group controls as much as 70 percent of the multi-billion-dollar heroin trade through Central Asia and into Europe.
Gretchen Peters
Gretchen Peters
STATUS: MISSING SOUTH ASIA – This Boston native reported from Pakistan and Afghanistan for more than a decade for the AP and ABC News, spending five years researching and writing Seeds of Terror with a band of brave local journalists. Although her exact whereabouts remain unknown, she is believed to be hiding out in the Rocky Mountain Front Range. It’s rumored she can be reach via gretchen at gretchenpeters dot org.
Great interview on Coast2Coast. Is you book going to be available on Amazon’s Kindle 2??
Gretchen,
There is another titled book called Seeds of Terror by Maris
Ressa?
Try and get Amazon to differentiate between the two books, and if you are going to speak or appear in the Aspen area please email me of you appearance.
In answer to both your questions in case others have them, I do not yet have a Kindle contract but don’t hesitate to email my publishers (St Martins/Tom Dunne) and ask them to put out an electronic version.
That’s correct, there is another Seeds of Terror by the CNN reporter Maria Ressa who has covered Southeast Asia. The original working title of my book was different, but publishers, not authors, get to pick book titles. I am not complaining. Most writers never get published at all. Thanks for writing.
We the black American knew about this in the 60s & 70s. If you do some resource on this time of the history.Vietnam war. That is when the black film was talking about . The drugs was coming in to the inner cities . The we could bring those drugs in. We did not have the money. Movies like Cleo patria Jones,Garden’s war ect. Was all about the drugs coming in to the country from Afghanistan. They even show you at the beginning of the movies. This is not new. They did not care then be course it was the inner cities.The government was bring the drugs in. I was a young child in I knew this
Thanks for coming to the Tattered Cover in Denver, Gretchen. Heard you on Coast to Coast AM. You’re a heroine!
Excellent and informative show on c2c. Haa haa ! Obama bin Laden (pic)
Ms. Peters,
My name is Diana Baide,a third year at Tufts University and a recent discoverer of your work. I have no idea how to find the proper email address on this website so I will just make this message public. In the past month, I have been doing some independent research on the narcotics and arms trade, their relationship, and their resulting impact on exacerbating and expediting the conditions of war (i.e. FARC and al Qaeda). I ran across your article “Taliban Drug Trade: Echoes of Colombia” and was really inspired because these are all speculations that I have been formulating for the past 3 years as a student who is deeply interested in studying all aspects of war and conflict. THEN, last night I saw you on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and was baffled by the fact that I had not come across your book! Essentially you have put all these ideas swimming in my head into this book (which I still have yet to purchase…) and have really put some hard work into this. So I thank you for giving light to this very important issue, as well as (unknowingly) provided a great source for my research. Congratulations!
Diana
Hi Gretchen. Found your interview on Jon Stewart to be highly engaging, original and extremely thought-provoking. I will be purchasing your book. Well done for addressing a hideously over-looked dimension of the current global conflict. If you’re ever doing a talk/interview in the UK, please let me know in advance.
Mohammed Omar banned opium in 2001. Production of opium went down 91%. Next year with U.S. forces occupying Afghanistan production resumes to normal levels. So nice of the CIA to help you write this book. No mention of the monetary incentives that drive drug production. Now, who was it that controls the monetary system again?