The U.S. war in Afghanistan ended in 2021, with a chaotic withdrawal of American forces and takeover of the country by the Taliban. While the war did not succeed in building a better future for the Afghan people, it did create tremendous wealth for a small, connected group of people at home and abroad who accrued vast wealth through shady contracting deals that they won while supporting the NATO war effort.

In spring of 2023, at a ribbon cutting near the city of Stuttgart, a group of leading German politicians and local dignitaries announced Quantum Gardens, a landmark high-tech campus that aimed to further advancements in quantum computing and artificial intelligence, while also hosting the future German headquarters of global tech giant IBM. Former chancellor Angela Merkel had campaigned for IBM to relocate to the site, and the inaugural event brought out a number of dignitaries, including the governor of the state of Baden-Württemberg. Also in attendance was a man named Ajmal Rahmani, an Afghan-origin businessman reported to have made hundreds of millions of Euros worth of real estate investments in Germany, and who was a major investor in Quantum Gardens.

Few people at the event would have known about his past. During the war in Afghanistan, Rahmani and his father worked as major contractors supplying fuel and other services to NATO forces. Starting from the early days of the war, the Rahmani family built close ties with Western forces, using their connections to earn tremendous sums of money and build a base for political careers inside Afghanistan. Yet their family’s work in Afghanistan would quickly come to haunt Quantum Gardens.

In December 2023, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued a scathing public report about Rahmani and his father, Mir Rahman Rahmani. The report alleged that they had engaged in widespread corruption during the war, including, among many other crimes, inflating fuel contracts, procurement fraud, and corrupting the Afghan political system through bribery. In one example, the report alleges that in 2014 the Rahmanis and several other families allegedly drove up fuel prices on U.S.-funded contracts by more than $200 million and eliminated bids from competitors. In addition to these public charges, the OFAC statement last December also announced sanctions on the Rahmanis’ sprawling business empire, alleged to have built through their profiteering during the war. The sanctions list targeted a string of corporate entities owned by the Rahmanis in Germany, Cyprus, the UAE, Afghanistan, Austria, the Netherlands, and Belgium.

In February 2024, Emran Feroz, an Austrian-Afghan journalist who wrote about the OFAC listing and spoke about the U.S. allegations of corruption against Rahmani in the German press, received legal notices from a lawyer working with the Rahmanis threatening him to retract his reporting about the OFAC listing and issuing a cease-and-desist order. Feroz refused to back down. In April, the Rahmanis followed through on their threat, suing Feroz for an amount potentially totalling over €100,000, threatening to send him into bankruptcy.

A senior BBC editor at the center of an ongoing scandal into the network’s systematic pro-Israel bias is, in fact, a former member of a CIA propaganda outfit, MintPress News can reveal. Raffi Berg, an Englishman who heads the BBC’s Middle East desk, formerly worked for the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a unit that, by his own admission, was a CIA front group.

In 2020, for instance, Berg published “Red Sea Spies: The True Story of Mossad’s Fake Diving Resort,” a book that tells the story of the Israeli operation to clandestinely smuggle Ethiopian Jews into Israel. That the 320-page account lionizes Israel and its spies is perhaps unsurprising, considering how much input Mossad had in its creation. Berg said that he wrote the book “in collaboration” with Mossad commander Dani Limor, whom he relied on extensively, as he, in his own words, knew “next to nothing” about the story and its background before writing it. Limor opened numerous doors and was able to secure “over 100 hours of interviews” with Israeli military and intelligence officials, including with the head of Mossad.

Limor and Berg became extremely close friends. In 2020, he posted a picture of himself with his arm around the ex-Mossad commander. The first page of “Red Sea Spies” is simply a glowing recommendation from Efraim Halevy, former director of Mossad, a group Berg describes as “the world’s greatest intelligence service.”

According to his LinkedIn profile, Berg was an employee of the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) three years before joining the BBC. The FBIS is understood the world over to be a CIA front group known for gathering intelligence for the agency. As the first two lines of its Wikipedia entry read:

The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) was an open source intelligence component of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology. It monitored, translated, and disseminated within the U.S. government openly available news and information from media sources outside the United States.

The indictment filed with the Jerusalem Magistrates Court alleges that during a search for drugs and weapons in Shikh Ali's home, police found a substance suspected of being cannabis. When the suspect refused to cooperate, he was tied up in front of his wife and children and treated violently.

After his release, Shikh Ali filed a complaint with the police investigations unit, alleging that during his arrest he had been seriously injured by the police and much of the time handcuffed and blindfolded, even though he was not suspected of security offenses.

When the incident first surfaced in the public last year, police claimed that officers used "reasonable force" at the time of the arrest and that the injury was likely caused when Shikh Ali's face pressed against one of the officers' shoes. They claimed that what appeared to be a Star of David was the pattern created by the laces and buckles on the shoe.

Three of the officers were also indicted for destroying evidence. That included intentionally deleting the GoPro videos that documented the incident, as well as photos they took on their cell phones, to prevent them from being used as evidence.