Pakistan’s forests fall victim to the Taliban

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Pakistan’s forests fall victim to the Taliban

The forests of northwestern Pakistan have become the latest victim of the Taliban’s increasingly desperate quest for resources to sustain and fund its military programmeThe landscape of Swat, an administrative district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province and once a luscious valley, is now dotted with thousands of tree stumps as militants decimate acres of forest for timber revenues. “Nearly all the forested areas have been mercilessly stripped of trees but the Swat in particular has borne the brunt of the Taliban’s atrocities over the last two years,” Jamshaid Ali Khan, secretary of the Sarhad Awami Forestry Ittehad (SAFI), told IPS.