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.