LOST CHILDREN OF THE BAZAAR

As for the romantic idea, promulgated in the market of Najeed Zaraf, back in Kabul, that the Turkmen got half of the price of a carpet, the going rate is $60 for a rug that takes three months to make. Before the war, things were better because western traders were coming to the region to buy rugs directly. The Turkmen were backward, but were moving forwards, benefiting from the fact that their skills were in fashion in the west, benefiting from the modernising ideas of a succession of rulers during much of the last century.

It was always an open secret in Afghan culture, tolerated, but with disapproval, that the Turkmen, who make up 3 per cent of the population, were culturally users of opium as pain-killing medicine. In the past, this habit was contained, however, because the Turkmen grew poppies only for their own private use. Even the women ingested opium, in order to quell the pain in their backs from weaving, and sometimes to quiet their children so that they could get on with their work.

Of course, even before the war, life for the Turkmen was challenging. Opium use has always been a symptom of the hard, poor, unevolving lives of this isolated minority. Yet the Turkmen are not among the Afghans who have turned to mass cultivation of poppies during the years of war. Even if they wanted to, the salty Turkman land is entirely unsuitable for the purpose. Paradoxically, in fact, Balkh is one of the regions in which opium growing has been more or less eliminated. But that wider shift in Afghan cultivation patterns, which has famously made the country into by far the largest producer of opium on the planet, has had a devastating effect on the Turkmen, nonetheless.

The community has now been exposed to heroin, and other processed drugs, even Valium, by dealers making their way up through Balkh, which was always relatively peaceful, and is now entirely so, to the border with Uzbekistan.

Often the dealers used the old trick, familiar in the West, of providing the first few hits for free. Not only is heroin far stronger and far more addictive than unprocessed opium, it is also sometimes injected, bringing addict diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C into a community that has no understanding of them. An astounding 90 per cent of the Turkmen are now addicted, and the cruellest thing of all is that their "medicine" is no longer free. Now they have to pay for it. Sometimes, now, the weavers are paid in drugs instead of money.

In response to this urgent tragedy, the two doctors have set up a drug rehabilitation clinic, part-funded by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and run by Islamic Relief. It has an outpatients clinic, a 10-bed residential facility and an outreach programme. A local landlord, the wealthiest man in his district, was persuaded by Islamic Relief to provide a building for the clinic for nothing.

The doctors and their colleagues go out to the villages, tell people that they can escape from the tyranny of addiction, and explain how they can help the villagers to achieve a drug-free life. The big cities have such clinics, too, for addiction has also hit the urban population, especially in Kabul. But this is the only rural area in which the problem is so concentrated and intense, and the Islamic Relief clinic is the sole one to be addressing the need.