FDS Insight Magazine Aug - Oct 2022

37 Drug addicts rounded up in a Taliban raid wait in the back of a truck.(AP Photo: E. Noroozi) Earlier this summer, Taliban fighters stormed two areas frequented by drug users – one on the hillside and another under a bridge. They collected about 1,500 people, officials said. They were taken to the Avicenna Medical Hospital for Drug Treatment, a former US military base that in 2016 was converted into a drug treatment centre. It is the largest of several treatment camps around Kabul. There, the residents are shaved and kept in a barracks for 45 days. They receive no treatment or medication as they go through withdrawal. The camp barely has enough money to feed those who live there. Drug users wait to have their heads shaved at an addiction treatment camp set up by the Afghan government.(AP Photo: E. Noroozi) A drug user sits on a bed in the detoxification ward of a treatment camp in Kabul.(AP Photo: E. Noroozi) Such camps do little to treat addiction. A week after the raids, both locations are once again full of hundreds of people using drugs. On the hillside, I see a man wandering in the darkness with a feeble flashlight. He is searching for his brother, who fell into drug use years ago and left home. ‘I hope one day I can find him,’ he says. An Afghan man searches for his drug-addicted brother among other addicts under a bridge in Kabul.(AP Photo: E. Noroozi) Under the bridge, where the stench is overwhelming, one man in his 30s, who identifies himself as Nazir, seems to be a figure of respect, breaking up fights and mediating disputes.