This is popular front a podcast focus on the very niche and kind of geeky

details of Modern Warfare with me Jake Hanrahan. Today we're speaking to Franz Marti.

He's a freelance journalist who's been in Afghanistan for the last four years and most recently

he's gone in search of big-time Afghan arms dealers. He's found it very tricky, found out that a lot of these

so-called mysterious and secret arms bazaars that people talk about just don't exist.

So he's going to be giving us an insight into how it really works in Afghanistan, how the Taliban

have managed to take so much ammunition from the army that they don't even need to buy it anymore,

how the weapons go back and forth across the

border and a lot more.

If you like what we're doing here at Popular Front, please do consider supporting us at

Patreon. Afghanistan recently right? Tell us what were you doing there?

Yes, I've been in Afghanistan since about four and a half years as a freelance journalist,

travelled a lot around the country and in the later years I also tried to get information

about black market arms dealing which is kind of tricky because the arms dealers are very paranoid

even if you compare it for example it's way easier to talk with a Taliban commander or even an Islamic State commander if you try to talk to an arms dealer it's very hard to get people to talk and most of the time it's only like the small fish that will at least say a little bit and to find the merchandise is even worse because usually even the people that agree to talk they hardly if ever show any weapons

but I nonetheless manage to find some bits of information.

So how did you manage to speak to the people that you're saying,

you know, it's so hard to speak to the big arms dealers in Afghanistan. I tried to via other contacts people that know arms dealers to set up a meeting.

Then usually people tell you they can help you and they can arrange something.

Most of the time it then just leads nowhere and you have to try with 10, 15 different people until at one point a friend of mine

we are friends of his managed to in one instance last December a small scale broker who brokers like weapon sales in

hojani in Angahar in the east of Afghanistan, plus also from there not far away a place at the Afghan-Pakistani border where they are smuggling routes and they smuggle everything including weapons and there I could

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