A powerful former U.S. contractor is silencing critical press coverage
The legal campaign targeting press freedom by a wealthy war profiteer is one more consequence of the disastrous U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.
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.
Following the sanctions announcement against the Rahmanis, local officials from the region where Quantum Gardens was to be based released a statement announcing a pause on the project. “The news of the US sanctions against the family and its associated companies took us as a community and all business partners completely by surprise,” the statement said. “We had no knowledge of the allegations made by the US government, nor of ongoing investigations. Due to the nature and severity of the allegations against Mr. Rahmani, further cooperation within the framework of the Quantum Gardens project is difficult to realize.”
IBM also appeared to pull its participation in the Rahmani-funded project, later announcing its involvement in a separate quantum computing project that was inaugurated this year. The tech giant did not respond to requests for comment from Drop Site about its involvement in Quantum Gardens.
OFAC’s move against the Rahmanis sent the family on the offensive. A month after the sanctions announcement, they filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the U.S. government challenging the factual basis for the sanctions and issuing a statement denouncing what they called "baseless accusations" of corruption. That lawsuit has since been withdrawn after German prosecutors dropped their probe into the Rahmanis and amid reports that they are attempting to negotiate their way off the sanctions list.
The Rahmanis have also launched what has become a largely successful attempt to shut down critical mentions of their past as allegedly corrupt U.S. contractors. Their target: the German news media.
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.
Feroz soon discovered he was not alone. taz, a Berlin-based publication, was pressured to pull articles on the Rahmanis after receiving similar legal threats. Public television broadcaster SWR, which covered the OFAC designation in a segment, also received a similar notice from the Rahmanis.
“I felt from the very moment I received the first letter from Rahmani’s lawyer that I was being put under pressure, and it was all over something very banal,” Feroz said. “In my television interview where I was brought on as an expert on Afghanistan, I just said the Rahmanis were known as influential figures in Afghanistan, they were major NATO contractors, and that it was well known that they had bought their way into Afghan politics. I had only repeated what was widely known about them, and everything that I said had also been stated in the OFAC report.”
The Rahmanis’ campaign to silence negative press coverage about them in Germany ignores the fact that information about their activities is publicly available and, now, has been documented in great detail by the U.S. government. Yet the Rahmanis continue to portray themselves to the German public as upstanding investors, threatening journalists who point to public information suggesting otherwise. "Instead of punishing the perpetrator of these actions, the people who attempt to report it are being punished," said Tina Fuchs, a journalist at SWR, which the Rahmani's lawyers have threatened over their coverage of the OFAC designation.
"The Rahmanis are not exceptional insofar as being perceived as the corrupt and discredited elites of the former Afghan government. What has made them exceptional is their willingness and ability to use the wealth they gained in Afghanistan to now wage lawfare against journalists in Europe," said Ahmed-Waleed Kakar, an political analyst on Afghanistan and founder of the publication Afghan Eye. "What is happening now is only an extension of what was also happening in Kabul during the U.S. occupation. Journalists were being threatened, intimidated, silenced and even killed in order to suppress critical coverage."
The Rahmanis’ legal tactics have been effective, particularly in targeting smaller publications and freelancers. Facing the prospect of expensive and time-consuming legal fights, taz retracted several articles on the Rahmanis that had cited the OFAC sanctions—not due to factual errors, but due to a lack of resources to fight the wealthy former U.S.-backed officials in court.
In a statement to Drop Site News, the Rahmanis defended themselves against the accusations contained in the OFAC sanctions listing and explained the rationale behind their aborted lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department.
“The lawsuit against OFAC was dropped following a joint motion by both parties, as both believed the matter could be resolved through a reconsideration request and negotiations.The sanctions, based on fabricated narratives rooted in ethnic, tribal, or business animosities, were addressed comprehensively with irrefutable evidence both in our court filings and the extensive submissions to OFAC. This led OFAC to consider resolving the matter through discussions,” the statement said. “The claim that IBM’s departure from our property was related to OFAC sanctions is unfounded. The project, which requires IBM to vacate the premises for redevelopment, is progressing toward completion, albeit with minor delays. Stakeholders remain committed to this transformative initiative, which is essential for the region’s technological leadership.”
“Concerning Mr. Emran Feroz, his allegations of victimization are not just misleading; they are fundamentally inaccurate,” the Rahmanis said. “His previous similar attempts resulted in others believing his story and later facing issues with the court for unlawful reporting. The court—not our attorneys—imposed restrictions on his reporting due to clear legal and factual violations. Mr. Feroz’s ideological opposition to Mr. Rahmani, driven by our unwavering support for the U.S., NATO, and Western initiatives in Afghanistan, undoubtedly taints his perspective.”
The Rahmanis also accuse Feroz of ties to the Taliban regime, which regained control of Afghanistan following the departure of US forces in 2021. “His documented connections and public endorsements of the Taliban regime cast serious doubts on his objectivity, further undermining the credibility of his reporting,” they said.”He has not hidden this relation but has promoted his bias towards favoring the current Taliban regime, highlighting his and his family’s long-standing relations supporting this group. Everyone who opposed them and supported the U.S. and other Western countries was considered an enemy, and he was found guilty by the specialized courts of using his platform to promote this agenda.”
Feroz fiercely denied the allegations by Rahmani, saying only a preliminary injunction had been issued against his reporting. He said the accusation that he was supportive of the Taliban was false, and an attempt to defame him and undermine his reporting on corruption and abuses during the war.
"There is nothing on the record that would support his claims about me. I have never endorsed the Taliban regime, I have never supported them. In fact, the opposite is the case. I have a very straight record as a journalist," Feroz said. "This is only an attempt by Rahmani to defame me and to suggest that anyone who critically covers drone strikes, human rights violations, corruption, and other abuses during the war in Afghanistan is somehow a supporter of the Taliban."
Despite what he described as the spurious nature of the charges leveled by the Rahmanis, the legal threats have imposed a burden on Feroz and others in Germany who have attempted to cover the family and been hit with threats of lawsuits in response.
"The intention of these lawsuits is to create psychological and financial pressure on journalists to make them avoid covering certain issues," said Sven Hansen, an editor at taz. "The whole court process is extremely time consuming and expensive. For small publications and independent journalists, it simply becomes not worth it to fight such a battle. This is now becoming a press freedom problem in Germany, where people are being threatened to pull stories and not cover this issue if they want to avoid being dragged to court."
On his website, Ajmal Rahmani—who holds a Cypriot passport reportedly obtained in a controversial investment-for-citizenship scheme once run by the Cypriot government—describes himself as a "leading global citizen and entrepreneur." But before making a fortune as an international investor, he and his father began building a relationship with the U.S. government and providing logistical support to forces stationed at Bagram Airbase, a major U.S. military facility during the war located near where the family lived.
Over time, they leveraged these relationships with the U.S. to gain access to funds intended to support the war against the Taliban and the reconstruction of Afghanistan. According to allegations from the U.S. government and journalists who have tracked the Rahmanis’ investments, they siphoned this money into expensive real estate assets and business projects abroad.
The OFAC report released last December accused the Rahmanis of engaging in systematic corruption during the war, including tax fraud, bribery, contract inflation, and widespread theft of fuel that reportedly cost the U.S. government hundreds of millions of dollars. The family was accused of "bribing their way into the Afghan parliament," and working to "inflate fuel contract prices by fraudulently submitting contract bids from multiple companies."
While announcing sanctions on dozens of Rahmani-linked companies, the OFAC report minced no words, describing the duo plainly as "corrupt officials" who had used their ill-gotten wealth to enrich themselves at the cost of the U.S. government. "Through their Afghan companies, the Rahmanis perpetrated a complex procurement corruption scheme resulting in the misappropriation of millions of dollars from U.S. Government-funded contracts that supported Afghan security forces," the statement read. "In nearly every step of their corruption scheme, the Rahmanis created opportunities to enrich themselves at the expense of others."
Investigations into their assets suggest that the family now boasts hundreds of millions of dollars in real estate investments in Germany alone, along with additional assets in Dubai and other European Union countries. Investigations by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project have found luxury properties registered to the Rahmanis and their relatives across Europe and the United Arab Emirates. Among these are investments in villas and apartments in Dubai totalling $15.2 million, as well as a luxury home in a ski resort town in Austria estimated to be worth €10.5 million, and registered in the name of Ajmal Rahmani's wife.
The Rahmanis were far from the only contractors to gain exorbitant wealth during the war at the expense of the U.S. and Afghan governments, as billions of dollars poured into the country with little accountability or oversight. "Virtually everything the U.S. sent to Afghanistan that had a market value or alternative use was taxed, appropriated, expropriated, and fully exploited or stolen by powerful actors," said Barnett Rubin, an expert on Afghanistan at New York University. "Some people in the U.S. government knew to at least some extent what was going on, but the guilty Afghans were sometimes deemed to have intelligence value. So they were immune."
In the U.S., the type of lawsuits that the Rahmanis have filed in Germany against news outlets and journalists generally fall under the category of "strategic litigation against public participation," or SLAPP. The purpose of SLAPP lawsuits are not necessarily to win a case, but to impose tremendous financial and other pressure on the intended target, compelling them to abandon their criticism.
To protect journalists and other members of civil society from being bankrupted or intimidated by spurious lawsuits, many U.S. states have passed anti-SLAPP laws. But although the European Union announced its own anti-SLAPP measures in May, in Germany, such protections remain weak. Ralf Höcker, the Rahmanis’ lawyer, is known in Germany for pursuing aggressive litigation on behalf of the far-right, including the Alternative für Deutschland party.
"What Rahmani and his lawyers have done with their legal threats is allege that the way that the OFAC report was cited did not give them an opportunity to respond, or was somehow unfair to their perspective," said Heribert Hirte, a German legal scholar and former member of the Bundestag. "But even if there is allegedly a flaw in the framing of a story, it is not acceptable to use legal threats as an instrument to block reporting. What we see here is that true facts and publicly available information are being blocked from publication by reporters as a result of aggressive legal tactics."
Feroz, a journalist who had reported extensively on the U.S. war in Afghanistan as well as the corruption of the former Afghan government, has been particularly impacted by the Rahmanis’ legal actions, accumulating thousands of Euros in legal expenses. He is now running a GoFundMe to pay the exorbitant legal bills that the lawsuit has imposed on him, which, he says, the Rahmanis have suggested they will drop if he retracts his reporting.
His efforts to defend himself have drawn even more ire from the Rahmanis. Feroz has received threats from their lawyers over the language on his fundraiser page, including demands that he include their version of events in the text.
The attacks on his reporting, as well as those of others in Germany, have sent a message that individuals who enriched themselves from the war in Afghanistan and stifled criticism of their actions there now feel that they can deploy similar tactics to silence dissent in the West.
"The Rahmanis are multi-millionaires, potentially even billionaires, and they know that using financial and legal pressure can help them achieve their goals," he said. "No independent journalist, or even smaller media outlet, is able to stand up against that."
It is unsettling when wealthy crooks use their wealth to silence critics.
Good grief! Are you guys next? Here's wishing for a better year, next year. Let's do all we can to make it happen!