Afghanistan's Taliban Islamist movement is increasingly financed by criminal enterprises including heroin laboratories, illegal ruby and emerald mines and kidnapping, making negotiated peace harder, according to a report for the U.N. Security Council.
The report said there was a new "scale and depth" to the Taliban's integration with criminal networks, which includes directly running marble mines, taxing the production and export of narcotics and kidnapping for ransom.
Diverse financing, including foreign donations, helped the Taliban survive 13 years of U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, analysts say.
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