MOSCOW—If you ask where to find almost anyone in Moscow’s Afghan community, you’ll be told to come here, to the Hotel Sevastopol. Probably you will be told it has 16 floors, which seems important to the direction givers. Much of the hotel has been turned into a market, a sort of Afghan bazaar where men with tired eyes above their COVID-19 masks crowd into the elevators carrying plastic shopping bags full of fragrant Indian spices, semi-precious stones, and cheap leather goods.
Russian neighbors of the Hotel Sevastopol complain bitterly about drugs being sold in the depths of this maze of hallways and rooms converted into tiny shops. Not unlike Afghanistan itself, they say, the market is a complete mess. But the Afghans seem to have enough clout with Moscow’s city government to keep business going. Always, new men are showing up to have a kebab and share the latest news.
Lately, talk turned to a certain Rahmatullah Azizi. He was identified by The New York Times at the beginning of this month as a middleman U.S. and Afghan security services believe paid bounties to the Taliban and criminal gangs in Afghanistan to kill American and other coalition soldiers. A unit of the Russian military intelligence, known as the GRU, allegedly was behind the operation.
ADVERTISEMENT
Both the U.S. and Afghan security services have been investigating the bounty scheme for months, raiding homes and offices and arresting at least a dozen suspects. According to the report, Azizi accumulated considerable wealth, with expensive cars and private bodyguards. A raid on one of his homes in Afghanistan several months ago turned up half a million dollars in cash. But Azizi was believed to have fled to Russia.
Here in the Sevastopol Hotel, however, it appears nobody ever heard of Rahmatullah Azizi. He certainly hadn’t shown up here, people said.
A tall young Afghan man, who offered just one name, Sam, was selling lapis lazuli necklaces on the 16th floor. “An Azizi worked here before me,” he said. “But he wasn’t Rahmatullah.”
Ali, in a small jewelry shop, said his uncle had a pharmacy in Kabul and knew “everybody,” but not Rahmatullah Azizi. He never heard of any such Azizi.
The answers kept coming back the same: Essentially, “Rahmatullah who?”
The bazaaris might not have met that Azizi, they said, but they knew what the story of this particular business meant: “Another conflict between Russia and the United States on Afghan land would be a catastrophe for our people,” says Sherkhasan Hasan, formerly a practicing physician, who now runs a small business here selling toys.
BLACK TULIPS
The Afghan diaspora in Russia counts about 20,000 in Moscow, and as many as 100,000 around the country. Its leaders, mostly Russian-educated during the decade of Russian occupation and dominance there, play an important role in political negotiations between Moscow and leaders on both sides of the Afghan conflict in which the United States became so deeply embroiled over the last 20 years.
Today, Russian attitudes toward Afghanistan are complicated, and even the Kremlin does not articulate any clear strategy. The Soviet war in Afghanistan took the lives of more than 14,000 Soviet soldiers and triggered the fall of the USSR—that is how many in Russia remember this bloody chapter of their country’s modern history.
The word Afghanistan is associated with what became known as “Black Tulips,” the Antonov cargo airplanes carrying dead soldiers home. In recent years, there has been a lot of concern about the drug traffic. Afghan opium smuggled across Central Asia makes its way to every Russian region. Thousands of drug addicts die in Russia every year.
Stamping out the drug trade, which is partly run through the diaspora, seemed for a time an opening for cooperation between the United States and Russia in Afghanistan. The cooperation ended after the U.S. economic sanctions on Russia were enforced in 2014 following the annexation of Crimea.
In 2008, three of Vladimir Putin’s close allies decided it was time to re-engage on Afghanistan. They were the head of the FSB Federal Security Service, Nikolai Patrushev; the deputy prime minister, Igor Sechin; and director of the drug-control agency, and an old friend of Putin’s from the KGB years, Victor Ivanov.
Ivanov’s aide, Yuriy Krupnov, traveled to Afghanistan in 2008 and 2009 to invite Afghan politicians and Pashto leaders to a high-level forum in Moscow. “By then Afghanistan was sick of American occupation and remembered Russians fondly as sheravi, which means Soviet people,” Krupnov told The Daily Beast.
THE OPENING
Patrushev, Sechin, and Ivanov on the Russian side and Afghan Vice President Karim Khalili opened the forum at another Moscow hotel—the upscale President Hotel—in May 2009 to sign some business agreements, appeal to the Russian government for bank credits, restore 142 Soviet-built industrial sites, and announce support for some educational programs. Bridges were being built.
At the forum, an old friend of Moscow, the nephew of Afghanistan’s last king, Abdul Ali Seraj, declared, “We don’t want the American model.”
In the fractured political landscape of Afghanistan, Moscow realized, Pashto leaders were once again reasserting their influence, and not just as the Taliban.
“This is all wrong to say, ‘Taliban claims this or that,’” Krupnov said. “There are dozens of various Taliban groups among about 60 tribes, who each have their own ancient culture and history.”
Russia planned to work on what it saw as this deeper, older level of Afghan power structures.
Two months after the forum, in July 2009, President Barack Obama visited Moscow to help launch the so-called reset of the U.S.-Russia relations. In the years to come, Victor Ivanov on the Russian side and Gil Kerlikowske, director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, would lead a joint anti-drug group and organize about 15 joint anti-narcotics operations in Afghanistan.
The U.S. national security adviser at the time, Gen. James L. Jones, addressed Nikolay Patrushev, as his “friend and counterpart” in fighting organized crime and terrorism in the country.
As a correspondent for Newsweek, I interviewed Ivanov multiple times in 2010 and in 2011. He spoke about the huge volume of drugs coming into Russia and financing terrorism in the North Caucasus. “A kilo of heroin,” he noted, “is worth $150,000 on the street in Russia and a Kalashnikov costs $1,000 on the Afghan market.”
Ivanov traveled to Kabul in 2010. On the plane with some members of the press, Russia’s drug tsar drank Champagne and toasted his return to Afghanistan, two decades after he last was there during the war with Soviet army.
Krupnov says he believes that Ivanov’s activity—trips to China, to Afghanistan, and Russian drug-fighting centers in Central America—annoyed Washington. The Obama administration’s special envoy for the region, the late Richard C. Holbrooke, said poppy eradication had alienated poor farmers and was driving people into the hands of the Taliban.
“Washington’s special representative to Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, told Viktor Ivanov to keep his hands off Afghanistan during their meeting at the State Department,” Krupnov says, citing that as a turning point in the relationships. Holbrooke died in 2010, and cooperation continued, but without the commitment that existed before. The last joint operation was in 2012, and meetings ended in 2014.
ASSASSINS? REALLY?
Today Krupnov denies outreach to the Afghans a decade ago was the beginning of an anti-American campaign in the Middle East and South Asia, or that the Kremlin, brushed off so many times, was offended and seeking revenge in some fashion, much less paying Taliban to kill U.S. and coalition soldiers—which is something that many are perfectly willing to do on their own.
“It would be ridiculous to imagine that any Russians in Afghanistan—there are about 300 Russian nationals there and thousands of U.S. military and private forces—would hire assassins to kill American soldiers.”
(The element of the GRU cited by the Times as instrumental in the alleged bounty operation, Unit 29155, also has been blamed for destabilization operations in Europe and the attempted murder in Britain of former GRU officer Sergei Skripal.)
In any case, outreach to the Taliban has continued. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov received a Talib leader, Sher Mohammed Abas, last year along with a group of other Taliban authorities to discuss the joint fight against the Islamic State terror group.
The idea that Russia and the United States make a great team against ISIS is one that U.S. President Donald Trump has promoted for years. At the Helsinki summit with Putin in 2018, for instance, Trump noted his appreciation for Russian help against “the scourge of radical Islamic terrorism.”
“Both Russia and the United States have suffered horrific terrorist attacks,” Trump said. “We have agreed to maintain open communication between our security agencies to protect our citizens from this global menace.” That was the same summit where Trump said he doubted U.S. intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 elections that made him president.
Meanwhile, the Russian foreign ministry has eagerly pointed out that the Trump White House, too, is questioning intelligence on Russian bounties for the deaths of American soldiers.
But the sense Russia is inching back into Afghanistan, again in conflict with the United States, is not lost on those who know this relationship well.
“I don’t like the idea of some bearded Taliban leaders, who previously tried to drag us back a thousand years, all of a sudden becoming legitimate,” Hasan said of Russia’s negotiations with the group. “It would be a big mistake to help people who everybody considered terrorists.”
