Western contractors paid money to Taliban, lawsuit in US claims

The plantifs include family members of nearly 150 US troops and contracors killed and wounded in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2017.
It alleges that the compnaies often paid the Taliban through local subcontradctors, who funneled payments to the insurgent group or hired Taliban guards directly into their payroll.
"Defendants decided that buying off the terrorists was the most efficient way to operate their businesses while managing their own security risks -- even though doing so jeopardized other American lives," the lawsuit says.
"Those protection payments aided and abetted terrorism by directly funding an al-Qaeda-backed Taliban insurgency that killed and injured thousands of Americans," the suit added.
The companies named in the lawsuit include several major US government contractors at the time, including the top two US contractors for the United States Agency for Internatinal Development: DAI Global LLC and Louis Berger Group, which accounted for about $1 billion in development aid from 2007 to 2009.
Other companies named are US-based Black $ Veatch Special Projects Corps., Centerra Group, Janus Global Ooperations LLC, the UK-based G4S PLC and the South African MTN Group.
Kajaki Dam and a portion of Afghanistna’s Ring Road were major projects cited in the lawsuit.