By Alan MACLEOD
Join us on Contact us: @worldanalyticspress_bot There is an epidemic of child sex crimes in and around Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Since 2021, and the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, dozens of elite soldiers stationed at the military base have been convicted of raping children, distributing child pornography, and other similar offenses. Many of these soldiers served in Afghanistan, where it is now acknowledged that the U.S. military aided their local allies in “bacha bazi” (boy play): the practice of kidnapping and keeping boys as sex slaves, large numbers of whom were enslaved on U.S. military compounds. MintPress News explores this dark and deeply disturbing topic. Unspeakable Crimes In August 2023, Joshua Glardon – a first sergeant in the 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne) at Fort Bragg – was sentenced to 76 years in prison, followed by lifetime supervised released, for the distribution of child pornography across the internet. An unnamed woman – his accomplice – was sentenced to 30 years in prison after she “confessed to allowing him to rape” her child. Just two weeks later, Major Vincent Ramos was arrested at North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham International Airport on one count of statutory rape of a child younger than 15, seven counts of statutory sex offense with a child younger than 15, and two counts of indecent liberties with a child. A logistics officer based at Fort Bragg, he was later charged with two counts of indecent liberties with a child. And one month after that, in October 2023, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Stuart P. Kelly of the 82nd Airborne Division was sentenced to 16 years in prison and a dishonorable discharge after pleading guilty to raping and abusing a child under the age of 12. Kelly had made the child touch him and perform oral sex on camera. Meanwhile, Staff Sergeant Carlos Castro Callejas was handed a 55-year jail term, a dishonorable discharge, and a demotion to the rank of private, after facing 13 charges of rape of a child under 12 years old. All four of these men were not only based at Fort Bragg, but have served lengthy tours in Afghanistan. But they are merely the tip of a shockingly large iceberg of dozens of individuals from Fort Bragg who have been arrested on crimes related to abusing and trafficking minors. According to investigative journalist Seth Harp, who uncovered a massive narcotics smuggling and distribution network run by elite military operators at the base in his book, “The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces,” there has been a tenfold increase in such cases since 2021 and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. But even chilling is the choice of victims for these sexual predators; “I have not heard in years about one case of these special forces guys raping a woman. In the same time, I’ve heard about 15 cases of them raping children,” he told Abby Martin and Mike Prysner on the Empire Files podcast. All this raises a plethora of serious questions about what is going on at the base, and what sort of dark and chilling secrets are being kept there. “Laughing Off” Child Sexual Assault A sprawling, city-sized base on the outskirts of Fayetteville, North Carolina, Fort Bragg is home to some 50,000 military personnel, making it one of the largest military installations anywhere in the world. It is home to many of the U.S.’ most elite organizations, including JSOC, Delta Force, the 3rd Special Forces Group, and the 82nd Airborne Division. It also lies minutes away from I-95, the primary north-south interstate route on the American Eastern Seaboard. I-95 stretches from Miami in the south to the Canada/Maine border in the north, making it a crucial transport highway. Fayetteville is near its halfway mark. “It is a natural point, almost like a city that grew up upon the Silk Road in ancient times,” Anthony Aguilar told MintPress News, “It is a matter of fact that throughout this part of North Carolina, along the 95 corridor, there are vast amounts of sex trafficking and human trafficking in these areas. It is because of the accessible route from border to border that these things are trafficked or smuggled.” Anthony Aguilar is a former United States Army Lieutenant Colonel, Special Forces Green Beret, and a former Battalion Commander at Fort Bragg. In 2025, he became a whistleblower, revealing serious misconduct about U.S.- and Israeli-backed operations in Gaza. He alleged that other commanders at Fort Bragg are well aware of the epidemic of child sex crimes, but “laugh about it or brush it off,” stating: “Military leadership at the highest ranks are aware of what is happening, and they choose to cover it up. Not ignore it; they don’t ignore it. They acknowledge it. They choose to cover it up, because nobody wants to look like their unit is a bad and undisciplined unit. Nobody wants to look like troublemakers.” Aguilar shared with MintPress an example of this from was when he was a commander of the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg. A warrant officer was accused multiple times of sexually assaulting and abusing his stepdaughter – a minor – and producing pornography of these events. His chain of command decided not to do anything about it, but simply transfer him to Aguilar’s unit. “He came to ours, and he did it again. My position on it was: court-martial, grand jury hearing, criminal case, criminal prosecution before a military judge,” he said. However, he was unable to carry this out as, “a three-star general circumvented my authority to charge him, and took that court-martial case up to his level, and then recanted those charges, and simply offered him a deal: ‘get out the Army and we won’t charge you criminally.’” The warrant officer took the deal, was discharged, and faced no criminal charges. Clearly disturbed by the event, Aguilar noted: “That is why this continues to happen. That is why this is part of the culture. That is why these things continue to grow. It is because commanders at the highest level continue to hide it. They lie about it. And they do not hold those who do it accountable, in fear that it makes them look bad as a commander.” “Women Are For Children, Boys Are For Pleasure” Many American soldiers and operators encountered a similarly widespread practice of child sexual assault in Afghanistan – and found a correspondingly permissive attitude from U.S. officials and military top brass. The practice is called bacha bazi, a process by which men exploit and enslave adolescent boys, coercing them into cross-dressing, wearing makeup, dancing suggestively, and acting as sex slaves. The bachas (boys) are generally aged between nine and fifteen years old, and inordinately come from impoverished or vulnerable backgrounds. Many grew up in orphanages, are street children, or have been sold into slavery by relatives facing starvation. Others are simply abducted. Bacha Bazes (boy players) are typically older, wealthier men who consider the ownership of one or young boys to be a status symbol, often giving them money and expensive clothing. In Afghanistan’s strictly gender segregated society, a common saying is that “women are for having children, boys are for pleasure.” The United Nations has condemned bacha bazi. “It is time to openly confront this practice and to put an end to it,” Radhika Coomaraswamy, then Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, told the U.N. General Assembly in 2009. “Laws should be passed, campaigns must be waged and perpetrators should be held accountable and punished,” she added. Although it had been known for centuries, occurrences in Afghanistan exploded in the 1980s with the ascendancy of the U.S.-backed Mujahideen government. It was briefly quashed under the Taliban (1996-2001), but returned again in the 21st century under the U.S.-protected Afghan government, made up of many of the same elements who were in power two decades previously. How Washington Participated In Mass Child Sexual Slavery The United States government actively tried to ignore the practice – an open secret in military and diplomatic circles. However, as it was withdrawing from the country, the State Department belatedly released a report admitting that, for nearly 20 years of occupation, there existed, “a government pattern of sexual slavery on government compounds.” U.S.-trained and funded authorities, it noted, “continued to arrest, detain, penalize, and abuse many trafficking victims, including punishing sex trafficking victims for ‘moral crimes’ and sexually assaulting victims who attempted to report trafficking crimes to law enforcement officials.” NGOs who helped the children, the report noted, advised them not to go to the police, as they were often the ones responsible for enslaving them in the first place. Bacha bazi was primarily practiced by high-status individuals put in power by U.S. occupation forces – police, military, teachers, and government officials. Many of these people lived with their boys on U.S. compounds. This meant that, in practice, the U.S. taxpayer was subsidizing the widespread rape of children, one of the many reasons that American personnel were so unpopular with the local population, and why the U.S.-installed government fell within days of the 2021 military pullout. As Harp stated: “The whole time that the U.S. was in Afghanistan, they were working with, protecting, funding, and arming guys who were systematically raping little boys, keeping them in chains on U.S. military bases – chained children on U.S. bases who were raped on a nightly basis! What can we even make of this? I struggle to wrap my mind around not only the evil of it, but how little anybody ever said about it.” One example of the levels of depravity of the U.S.’ allies comes from Jordan Terrell, a former Fort Bragg paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne. At Forward Operating Base Shank in Logar Province in 2014, Terrell recalls seeing a group of young bachas running around the base. One, he noticed, “had something hanging out of his butt.” At first confused by the site, he later realized that what he saw was the child’s prolapsed anus from being repeatedly sodomized. “Dudes were exposed to that stuff so much,” he said, “The Afghan National Army, Afghan police… The contractors who cooked our food. Those guys raped children.” Officially, Washington saw nothing. On 5,753 occasions between 2010 and 2016, the U.S. military was asked to review Afghan units to see if there were any gross human rights abuses noted. American law requires military aid to be cut off from any offending unit. On zero occasions did they report any abuses. Yet bacha bazi was so widespread that virtually all U.S. personnel had heard about it. Aguilar stated that soldiers were relieved to make it to Friday every week, joking that: “It’s man-boy love Friday, so we are not going to get attacked very much today, because they are all having sex with their young boy concubines.” The practice was as open as it was widespread. In 2016, an Afghan police commander invited a Washington Post journalist to his office for tea, where he gleefully showed off what he called his “beautiful boy slave.” The Afghan police were just one of a myriad of organizations the U.S. government sponsored during its 20-year, $2 trillion occupation of the country. “I heard of it a number of times from both U.S. military and State Department officers throughout Afghanistan and in D.C., usually off-hand, with an exasperated what are you going to do type affect to their comments,” Matthew Hoh, a former U.S. Marine Corps Captain and State Department official told MintPress News, adding: “It was clear that such crimes were not to be intruded upon. I doubt there was official paperwork to that effect, but it was clearly understood that we were to accept the rape of children as part of the bargain in our relationship with the Afghans we had put and kept in power.” In 2009, after growing increasingly disillusioned with the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, Hoh resigned from his position at the State Department in Zabul Province. Other Americans who tried to blow the whistle on the disturbing practice (and American complicity in it) ended up dead. One was Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley Jr., who was kept up at night by the shrieks of children being raped by Afghan police in rooms beside him at Forward Operating Base Delhi in Helmand Province. Via a phone call, Buckley told his father that, from his bunk, “we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it.” His officers told him to “look the other way” because “it’s their culture.” It would be the last time his father heard Buckley’s voice, as he was murdered on the base days later by the very locals he was trying to train and protect. Others who have taken matters into their own hands have had their careers destroyed by the military. Green Berets Captain Dan Quinn and Sergeant First Class Charles Martland found out that a local police commander in Kunduz Province had kidnapped a boy and was keeping him chained to the bed as a sex slave. After learning that she had turned to the Americans for help, the commander also beat up the boy’s mother. Quinn and Martland confronted him, but he laughed it off, telling them “it was only a boy,” after all. Incensed, the pair threw him to the floor, punched and kicked him. Quinn was relieved of his command and sent back to the United States, where he left the military. Martland was originally going to be expelled from the Army, but, after a public backlash, he was quietly reinstated. Drug Abuse, Child Abuse The prevalence of Bacha bazi closely mirrors that of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. The practice was far less common in the 1970s and 1980s, under the U.S.S.R.-backed, secular, Communist government. In an effort to overthrow the regime and bleed the Soviets dry, Washington spent $2 billion funding, training, and arming local Mujahideen militias (including Osama bin Laden). The Mujahideen seized control of Afghanistan in 1992, not long after the demise of the Soviet Union. Presented as brave and gallant freedom fighters, the Mujahideen were lauded in the West. But, as in Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and much of the rest of the world, the U.S. so often allies itself with deeply unsavory movements in order to achieve its ends. Not only were the Mujahideen religious reactionaries, but they displayed a conspicuous penchant for kidnapping and molesting children, and the practice exploded once they attained power. Although bacha bazi was widely adopted by the Mujahideen, it was never accepted by much of the public, who saw it as barbaric and monstrous. Therefore, despite their depiction as the Afghan equivalent of the Founding Fathers in the Western press, many in Afghanistan saw their new rulers as little than a gang of U.S.-imposed pedophile warlords. The Mujahideen would be supplanted in only four years by the Taliban, who rose to power in no small part due to the nationwide revulsion and outrage over bacha bazi. Indeed, Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban until his death in 2013, shot to fame due to his prominent opposition to the practice. In 1994, he led a group of armed men on a series of raids to rescue kidnapped and enslaved boys and girls. The stunt made him a national hero, and greatly increased the Taliban’s strength and prestige. From a force of just 30 fighters, his militia grew to 12,000 by the year’s end, as thousands joined his cause, paving the way for their march on Kabul in 1996. Upon seizing power, the Taliban outlawed bacha bazi, making it punishable by death. Thus, while the Taliban are hardly known for their human rights policies, they were at least able to gain some public support through their actions to stamp out child rape. This period, however, proved to be short-lived, as just five years later, in 2001, the United States would invade Afghanistan in order to topple the Taliban, putting in place many of the deposed Mujahideen figures from the previous regime. The return of the U.S.-backed government saw the reemergence of bacha bazi, with many top government, police and military officials flaunting their child concubines. This included even family members of President Hamid Karzai. Likewise, drug production in Afghanistan directly correlates with U.S. involvement in the country. In the 1970s, heroin production was minimal, and largely for domestic consumption. But as the Western-backed regime change war dragged on, Washington looked for other ways to support the insurgency. They found their answer in opium, and soon, refineries processing locally-grown poppy seeds sprang up on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Trucks loaded with U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons entered Afghanistan from their ally, Pakistan, and returned filled to the brim with opium. As Professor Alfred McCoy, author of “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,” told MintPress, “What the resistance fighters did was they turned to opium. Afghanistan had about 100 tons of opium produced every year in the 1970s. By 1989-1990, at the end of that 10-year CIA operation, that minimal amount of opium — 100 tons per annum — had turned into a major amount, 2,000 tons a year, and was already about 75% of the world’s illicit opium trade.” The operation caused a worldwide boom in opium consumption, with heroin addiction than doubling in the United States alone. The drug became a cultural touchstone, as illustrated in popular movies such as Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream. By 1999, annual production had risen to 4,600 tons. Once again, the deeply religious Taliban stepped in to suppress the practice. A 2000 ban on opium cultivation led to a precipitous drop in production, with just 185 tons harvested the following year. Although the prohibition hit local farmers hard, it did begin to combat Afghanistan’s terrible opioid crisis, again gaining the Taliban some legitimacy with the local population. Like with bacha bazi, though, the U.S. occupation reversed this trend. Under American supervision, opium production skyrocketed, reaching a high of 9,000 tons in 2017. Afghanistan became the world’s first true narco-state, with McCoy noting that by 2008, opium was responsible for well over half of the country’s gross domestic product. By comparison, even in Colombia’s darkest days, cocaine only accounted for around 3% of its GDP. land in Afghanistan was under cultivation for opium than was used for coca across all of Latin America. Many of those making fortunes from the business were the U.S.’ closest allies. This again included the Karzai family; the president’s brother, Ahmed Wali, was among the biggest and most notorious drugs kingpins in the region. Shortly after coming back to power, the Taliban again banned the production of opium, sending teams of men across the country to eradicate poppy fields. In what even Western corporate media called “the most successful counter-narcotics effort in human history,” production fell by over 80% almost overnight, and has only continued to decrease since then. The speed and success of the operation raised serious questions about the United States’ true relationship with the global drug trade. An Incredibly Lucrative Business Soldiers at Fort Bragg were closer than anyone else to the unseemly underbelly of the Afghanistan occupation. Units such as JSOC, Delta Force, the 3rd Special Forces Group and the 82nd Airborne Division worked closely with Afghan security forces, and had a front row seat to their activities. “The Fort Bragg Cartel” uncovers a giant gun and drug trafficking network centered around the base, revealing how soldiers used military planes to sneak arms and narcotics into America, distributing them across the continent. Criminals in the U.S. military, Aguilar notes, have learned a great deal about trafficking and smuggling contraband, stating that: “When you deploy as a military and you have all of your 90 cubic inch containers that get locked up will all your stuff in it. Those don’t get inspected when they fly back over on a military aircraft and land at Fort Bragg…[They learn] How easy it would be to transport and traffic weapons, drugs, and yes, even humans, back and forth, from country to country. It is all very doable. And it is all very lucrative.” Military bases are the perfect smuggling operation centers. There is little oversight or inspection, and soldiers can move around the country from base to base, and are less likely to be stopped and searched by the police. A disproportionate amount of those soldiers convicted came from backgrounds in logistics, where they were trusted with transporting large shipments of goods to and from the U.S., all with minimal input or scrutiny from higher ups. Selling guns and drugs is one thing. But trafficking and raping children is quite another. How could anyone consider engaging in such sickening behavior? And why has the practice exploded around Fort Bragg? For some, the answer was psychological: American troops, taught to dehumanize their enemies and exposed to child abuse on a daily basis come to see it as normal behavior. As Terrell suggested, “In some sick way…when they came back, maybe they just internalized it, and turned it into a sexual proclivity.” There is, however, a simpler explanation: money. Some Fort Bragg soldiers stationed in Afghanistan and exposed to bacha bazi came back to the United States and see an opportunity to make huge amounts of money trafficking humans, and creating and selling child pornography. “It is less of a matter of soldiers coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan and having this learned behavior of sexual deviance, child pornography, or abusing children, it is a learned behavior that child pornography and sex trafficking minors is very very profitable,” Aguilar said; “They see that, and they think, ‘This is really lucrative.’” The Taliban have once again made bacha bazi a capital offense. It is unclear if the new law has suppressed the practice, or merely driven it underground. After all, Afghanistan’s sanction-hit economy means that the economic incentives for destitute families to sell their sons to rich officials are as pressing as ever. over, there are reports that some Taliban commanders allegedly hold bachas themselves. What is clear, however, is that the tactics and practices used by the United States military abroad are increasingly being used against the domestic population. From surveillance and militarized policing to increasing intolerance of dissent, civil liberties are being eroded by forces using techniques honed on subjects in Western Asia. In November, an Afghan commando and former member of a CIA-trained death squad, carried out a mass shooting in Washington, D.C. While it is clear that the U.S. invasion destroyed Afghanistan, it also took its tole on America itself. The occupation directly contributed to the opioid crisis at home. And it appears that it is also connected to the epidemic of child sexual abuse documented here, as soldiers abuse children for profit. What has been happening at Fort Bragg, then, is part of the wider psychological degradation of American society, one that is controlled a by a government that has sacrificed everything sacred to protect and advance its imperial ambitions. Indiegogo is withholding $51,000 in reader donations to MintPress News after we published investigations into US war crimes, Israeli intelligence influence, and Silicon Valley’s role in modern warfare. MintPress News is being financially censored. Indiegogo has cancelled our fundraising campaign and is refusing to release over $51,000 that you donated to keep MintPress alive. They claim our project “did not meet their guidelines.” However, they only told us this nearly three months after the campaign ended — after I had been repeatedly trying to access our payout since October. MintPress News has used Indiegogo for nearly a decade because we thought it was an independent crowdfunding platform – at least that’s what they’ve promoted themselves to be. Indiegogo says donations will be refunded, but the damage is already done. And this isn’t an isolated incident; MintPress has also been banned from GoFundMe and PayPal. Not for misinformation, but for journalism that challenges powerful war and security interests. Based on leaked emails, we believe these bans may be connected to pressure by pro-Zionist actors and British intelligence related to our reporting. This raises serious questions about government influence over financial platforms. It is also highly possible that Indiegogo has stopped our funding drive because of pressure from senior management. The company’s CEO and co-founder is Slava Rubin, a Conservative Zionist who has traveled to Israel many times. “I’m a big fan. I’m Jewish. I think Israel is a beautiful place,” he said in 2015. In the wake of October 7 and Israel’s attack on Gaza, Rubin came out publicly in support of Israel in its fight against “terrorism.” And while MintPress’ funding campaign has been denied, Indiegogo has allowed highly controversial pro-Israel funding drives to continue. In 2014, it allowed the Temple Institute, a Jerusalem-based Kahanist organization, to raise over $100,000 to complete “architectural plans for the actual construction” of a “Third Temple” on the site of the al-Aqsa Mosque – a far-right plan to bulldoze the third-holiest site in Islam. We’ve seen this before; when WikiLeaks exposed U.S. war crimes, it was not shut down in court. Instead, it was financially censored, cut off from Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and banks. This, it seems, has become the blueprint for how dissenting journalism is silenced today. This is what modern censorship looks like; financial chokeholds, designed to quietly starve independent journalism that holds power accountable. And that’s exactly what MintPress does for 14 years. MintPress holds the military and intelligence elite accountable — the networks that profit from endless war, surveillance, and repression. We were among the first outlets to expose how Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell helped create backdoor access into Silicon Valley that helped bring us A.I. kill lists used in Gaza, linking intelligence agencies, big tech, elite power networks and Israel’s genocide years before it became mainstream. In the last year alone, we have exposed Israeli military intelligence veterans from Unit 8200 embedded within big tech and media institutions, showing how surveillance, war, and censorship are deeply interconnected. I’m a Palestinian-American journalist who survived Israeli occupation, and I founded MintPress 14 years ago to expose the architects of war and the systems that sustain them. We work with some of the most respected and important independent journalists in the world — including Lowkey, Alan MacLeod, Greg Stoker, Robert Inlakesh, David Miller, and many others. MintPress will not back down. But I need to be honest: we are still at risk of shutting down if we don’t meet our fundraising goals. We are 100% reader-supported, and that support is under attack. If you believe in press freedom, please support us directly through our website. Help expose this financial censorship. Stand with us today. We need your support now than ever. Israel has no diamond mines, yet it dominates the global trade. This investigation exposes how diamonds sold in the West bankroll Israel’s war on Gaza, fuel violence across Africa, and are falsely marketed as “conflict free.” Did your engagement ring help fund a genocide in Gaza? Quite possibly. Despite possessing no mines of their own, Israel is a major player in the world’s diamond business, buying up minerals across Africa and selling them to the West, netting billions in the process. Diamonds are Israel’s most important export, and directly bankroll the country’s ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza. MintPress explores the dark world of Israeli blood diamonds. A Gigantic Industry Any visitor walking through Tel Aviv’s exclusive Ramat Gan district will be struck by its wealth. Skyscrapers are everywhere, and expensive jewelry stores lines the streets. Ramat Gan is the center of the world’s diamond industry, with than 15,000 people employed by the Israel Diamond Exchange in the business of cutting, polishing, importing, exporting, and marketing the stones. Israel’s largest export is not tech industry or its food. Diamonds alone account for over 15% of all the country’s exports, with other jewelry also contributing significantly to its economy. Between 2018 and 2023, Israel exported over $60 billion dollars worth of precious stones. Their number one customer is the United States. Historically, Israel has accounted for between one third and one half of all the diamonds sold across America, a growing market already worth $20 billion per year. Genocide Stones Unlike gold, diamonds are rarely hallmarked, meaning that few American brides know that their engagement and wedding rings were crafted and polished in Israel. Even fewer are aware that their purchase directly funds the slaughter in Gaza and Israel’s ongoing seizure of land in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria. “Overall, the Israeli diamond industry contributes about $1 billion annually to the Israeli military and security industries … every time somebody buys a diamond that was exported from Israel, some of that money ends up in the Israeli military,” Israeli economist, Shir Hever, testified at the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in 2010. Perhaps the key figure in the Israeli diamond industry is business magnate, Beny Steinmetz. Considered by many to be Israel’s richest man, the 69-year-old founder of Steinmetz Diamond Group first entered the industry in 1988, purchasing a production factory in Apartheid South Africa. Through his charitable foundation, Steinmetz has poured money into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), including “adopting” a unit of the Givati Brigade, buying equipment for them. During Operation Cast Lead in 2009, the brigade carried out a massacre, forcing dozens of Palestinian civilians into a house in Gaza, bombed the house, and prevented ambulances from approaching. Rescue workers who eventually found their bodies also reported seeing the words “The only good Arab is a dead Arab” daubed in Hebrew on the remains of the building. recently, the Givati Brigade has been filmed setting fire to Palestinian food supplies, and a Gaza sewage plant, as well as demolishing homes. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has destroyed 92% of the schools and residential buildings of Gaza, shot around 300 journalists, and killed at least 20,000 children. UNICEF estimates that 3,000 to 4,000 children in Gaza have lost one or limbs. In addition to its violence in Palestine, Israel has invaded and occupied Lebanon and Syria, and bombed Iran, Tunisia, Yemen, and Qatar. The US Pays in Dollars, Africa Pays in Blood Israel’s appetite for diamonds is directly fueling civil war and bloodshed across Africa, where it supplies military hardware with governments, warlords, and local armed groups in exchange for access to the continent’s mineral wealth. Israel-based International Diamond Industries (IDI), for example, secured a monopoly on diamond production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in a deal that, according to a United Nations panel, included covert weapons transfers and the training of Congolese security forces by IDF commanders. The deal was fantastically lucrative for IDI, who paid only $20 million for a monopoly generating $600 million per year. Meanwhile, in 2002 in war-ravaged Sierra Leone, for just $1.2 million in cash, Steinmetz himself managed to acquire half of the Koidu Ltd., a company that accounted for 90% of the country’s diamonds. In 2011, Koidu produced a reported $200 million worth of diamonds. Why authorities would agree to such ludicrously low purchase prices might be explained by a 2021 ruling by a Swiss court, that found Steinmetz guilty of paying $8.5 million in bribes to the wife of the president of Guinea. These bribes, the court ruled, secured him the rights to lucrative iron ore concessions in the country’s Simandou region. Steinmetz was sentenced to five years in prison. The Israeli billionaire is currently facing similarly grave corruption charges in Romania. The diamond rush in D.R. Congo, Sierra Leone and other African nations has resulted in civil war, human trafficking, forced child labor, and other serious human rights violations by groups intent on securing a slice of the diamond industry for themselves. But they are relatively small players in comparison to the Israelis. “Conflict Free” Minerals Much of the brutal reality of the gemstone industry is now well-known in popular culture, thanks in part to the 2006 Leonardo DiCaprio movie, “Blood Diamond,” set in Sierra Leone. In response to the growing public outcry over their ethics, the industry established the World Diamond Council, which helped create the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, a system designed to prevent so-called “conflict diamonds” from entering the world market. From a marketing perspective, the Kimberley Process was a great success, providing consumers with (an illusion of) peace of mind, which helped worldwide diamond sales to increase. Yet there are a number of key flaws with the system. Chief among these is that the process’ certification of conflict free minerals applies only to the source of the diamonds, leaving Israel free to import billions of dollars’ worth of diamonds into a country bombing seven of its neighbors, process, cut and polish them, and continue to sell their products as “conflict free.” All this while carrying out against Palestine what the United Nations has consistently termed a “genocide.” over, in 2009, the U.N. accused Israel of surreptitiously importing illegal blood diamonds from the Ivory Coast. That, in a nutshell, is how the global industry works. Sixteen of the twenty largest diamond-producing countries are poor African nations, who see limited economic benefit from them. Meanwhile, none of the top five global exporters of diamonds – the United States, India, Hong Kong, Belgium, and Israel – actually produce the gems in any discernible quantities, a reflection of the unequal world we live in. Worthless Rocks and Marketing Campaigns The diamond industry sustains itself through a number of myths, the first of which is that they are rare minerals. They are not. In the late 19th century, massive diamond deposits were found in South Africa, flooding the global market. However, the businessmen operating the mines quickly realized that only by maintaining strict control over the supply of the commodity could high prices be maintained. Today, well over 100 million carats of diamonds are unearthed annually, enough to produce hundreds of millions of pendants, rings, and earrings. Nor are diamonds inherently precious. Thanks to their extreme hardness, they are useful to toolmakers producing saw blades and drill bits. Beyond this, however, their value is limited. And, contrary to popular belief, they are not intrinsically connected to courtship, marriage, or anniversaries in Western culture. In fact, the link in popular culture between diamonds and love is the result of a marketing campaign. The phrase “diamonds are forever” is, in reality, a marketing catchphrase devised by Madison Avenue executives in 1947. Professor Sut Jhally, producer of the documentary, “The Diamond Empire,” describes “diamonds are forever” as “perhaps the most famous advertising slogan ever invented.” “That slogan, that idea that comes out of Madison Avenue, now defines the way that we think about rituals that define our most personal activities, marriage, and courtship,” he added. The success of this campaign was little short of astonishing. In 1940, only 10% of American brides received diamond rings. By 1990, that number had risen to 90%. Wholesale diamond sales in the U.S. rose from $23 million in 1939 to $2.1 billion in 1979 – a 9000% increase in 40 years. Some gambits, such as the attempt to market diamond rings to men, were not as successful. Flush with success, the diamond industry tried the same product placement and advertising strategies that worked in the U.S. across Asia, adding in a flavor of Western values and allure to their marketing. In Japan, the trick worked. In 1967, fewer than 5% of engaged Japanese women received a diamond ring. But by 1981, it had ballooned to 60%. The diamond industry also ran into another problem: if their product was so expensive, how could they sell it to a mass market? To solve this, they again turned to Madison Avenue, who suggested telling men to spend 2–3 months of salary on an engagement ring. By 2014, the average engagement ring in the U.S. cost a hefty $4,000, according to The New York Times. “It was a brilliant strategy,” Jhally said. “They managed to convince some men to go into debt to buy these worthless things that they have billions of sitting in warehouses.” In recent years, the global economic downturn has meant that smaller, cheaper diamonds are in demand. These small stones are usually cut in India. Children, who possess sharper eyes and smaller and dextrous fingers than adults, are used to cut and polish these tiny diamonds, adding a new layer of moral ambiguity to the industry. An Industry in Crisis Diamond sales are currently in crisis. 2024 saw a 23% drop in revenue across the sector, as younger consumers increasingly see diamonds as overpriced rocks hewn from the ground by child slaves in a war zone, and inauthentic tokens of their love. The global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement has also drawn attention to the fact that diamond sales are irrevocably linked to the carnage in Gaza. As the Palestinian BDS National Committee write: Revenue from the diamond industry helps fund Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, its brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people and its international network of saboteurs, spies, and assassins.” A less political but perhaps existential threat comes in the form of lab-grown diamonds, which are priced at around only one-tenth the price of traditionally-sourced stones. Lab-grown diamonds (around half of which come from China) now account for around 20% of total sales, and are projected to both increase their market share and reduce in price. Three-quarters of Americans would be happy to receive a lab-grown diamond engagement ring, according to a 2025 poll, which noted that the public consider them to be better value-for-money, and a ethical choice. Another serious and unforeseen blow to Israeli diamond merchants has been the new Trump-era global tariff regime. Currently, the United States imposes a 15% tax on all Israeli diamonds. In September, the European Union managed to negotiate a diamond exemption to their 15% tariff, meaning that competitors such as Belgium now hold a serious advantage over Israel in the crucial U.S. market. As a result, Israel Diamond Exchange president, Nissim Zuaretz, stated that his industry faces an “existential threat”. “We are slipping backward,” he warned, adding: My message to the government and the public is clear: it’s now or never… We have a golden opportunity to restore Israel to the center of the global diamond industry, but the window is closing fast. Every day without government action means another diamond dealer lost, another family without income, another piece of our national heritage gone.” However, if the Israeli government does indeed step in to safeguard its national industry and take a interventionist approach, it will only further underscore the fact that the purchase of diamonds is inherently funding the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, supercharging blood diamonds into genocide diamonds. Original article: mintpressnews.com

