This week, the Taliban announced that more than 100 people were arrested in northeastern Afghanistan for allegedly growing opium poppy.

The arrests were made in a region that had previously defied an official ban on the crop put into place in 2022, for what the Taliban called Afghanistan.

"Their supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, seeks to reduce opium production to zero," Abdul Haq Akhund Hamkar, deputy minister for counternarcotics at Afghanistan's Interior Ministry told DW.

Opium is made from opium poppy, which in turn is the basic product for the hard drugs heroin and morphine.

Until 2022, Afghanistan was the country with the largest opium poppy cultivation area in the world.

The ban led to a recorded 95% drop in poppy harvests in 2023.

According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, farmers' income from opium sales fell from an estimated $1.36 billion (€1.29 billion) in 2022 to $110 million (€104 million) in 2023.

The ban has hit farmers such as Asadollah hard. The........

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