Afghan War Profiteers

Before the fall of Kabul, billions of dollars were sunk into a failing Western intervention. New records reveal the Afghan contractors who profited and the millions they stashed in Dubai property.

U.S. government auditors say at least $19 billion of American reconstruction funds were lost due to waste, fraud or abuse in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2019.

Much of that money quickly made its way to Dubai — a convenient three-hour flight from Kabul and with a glistening construction boom primed to absorb massive infusions of cash.

Our latest investigation pulls back the curtain on the profiteers of the Afghan war. Working with OCCRP and other media partners as part of the Dubai Unlocked project, we traced the vast property empires they built in the secretive emirate, often at the expense of ordinary Afghan citizens.

METHODS

The property data at the heart of the project comes from a series of leaks of more than 100 datasets from Dubai. Together they provide a detailed overview of the ownership or usage of hundreds of thousands of properties in the city. Most of the data is from 2020 and 2022.

Over seventy media outlets from 58 countries worked on the Dubai Unlocked project. Journalists combed through the data looking for familiar names, triangulating those names with key identifying information in the records, such as date of birth or passport number, to confirm a match.

Lighthouse Reports worked with Afghan journalists from Etilaat Roz and other outlets to dig into the names of importance to Afghanistan.

Verifying matches in the data proved challenging: it is not commonplace to record birth dates in Afghanistan. In other countries, these were key to confirming the identities of people in the data. Reporters deployed OSINT tools, spoke with sources and combed archived versions of old corporate records to help close this gap.

We then worked with reporters in multiple countries to delve into other assets and businesses of key Afghans in the Dubai Unlocked dataset, investigating company records in Afghanistan, passport purchases in Cyprus and properties ownership in Germany.

STORYLINES

Experts told us how the US Department of Defense’s lack of oversight over large reconstruction contracts fuelled corruption in Afghanistan, with contracts enriching the elite and warnings falling on deaf ears.

One anti-corruption expert, speaking to us from hiding in Afghanistan, said efforts to crack down on fraud and corrupt politicians were thwarted by Western advisers who argued it was important to maintain what “little political stability” existed in the country.

“That was the justification. To maintain that little political stability, we have to keep those corrupt officials,” she said.

“And what happened on August 15th, 2021” – the Taliban’s dramatic takeover of Kabul and the withdrawal of U.S. troops – “that was the direct result.”