When the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan last year one of its first pledges was to clean up the country’s drug problem – never mind that they spent years profiting off the very same opium people are now addicted to.
Six months on from the take-over and the Taliban is keeping its promise, after a fashion: By rounding up thousands of homeless drug addicts and locking them in hospitals reminiscent of concentration camps for three months while they detox, cold turkey.
A look inside one such ‘hospital’, in Kabul, reveals inmates wasting away in horrifying conditions: Crammed in three-to-a -bed with little or no food, forced to eat grass to stave off hunger pains – amid rumours they have resorted to eating cats and even cannibalism in order to survive.
