INDO-PACIFIC
Who Has the Taliban Been Selling Mining Rights To?
Last autumn, the Taliban boasted of seven new mining contracts worth a collective $6.5 billion. Yesterday, the Afghan Witness, an open-source project by the Centre for Information Resilience, reported the total of disbursed contracts since 2021 at 205. Some of the companies were foreign, and many of them were new investors. To which countries has Kabul been auctioning off its minerals too, and what does that mean for Afghanistan geopolitically?