Taliban Gains Money, Al-Qaida Finances Recovering

KATHY GANNON

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — He moved his finger slowly across his throat, to show that the Taliban kills truckers who don't pay for safe passage through large swaths of territory near Afghanistan.

"The situation is very dangerous for us. We give them money or our fuel, or they kill us," said Ghadr Gul, a middle-aged trucker, who reluctantly spoke to The Associated Press outside his oil tanker. Along the road, storage depots are piled high with the burned-out hulks of vehicles destroyed by the Taliban.

As the Taliban gains power in Afghanistan and Pakistan, its money is coming mostly from extortion, crime and drugs, the AP found in an investigation into the financial network of militants in the region. However, funding for the broader-based al-Qaida appears to be more diverse, including money from new recruits, increasingly large donations from sympathizers and Islamic charities, and a cut of profits from honey dealers in Yemen and Pakistan who belong to the same Wahabi sect of Islam.

"With respect to the Taliban, the narco dollars are a major if not majority of their funding sources, and I think add in there as well extortion and kidnapping," said Juan Carlos, a former national Security Council adviser on terrorism who now works at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "With al-Qaida I think it is a mixed bag. They draw benefits from the Taliban but they are not relying wholesale on narcotics. They still rely on sympathetic donors and to a certain extent charities."