Kabul, March 14 (Xinhua) The government of Afghanistan in its war on illicit drugs has destroyed more than 3,700 hectares of poppy fields over the past one month, a media report said Saturday.
“Some 3,750 hectares of poppy fields have been smashed over the past one month,” the Rah-e-Nejat newspaper quoted Deputy Interior Minister Mohammad Daud as saying.

During the period, he said, 30 heroin making laboratories were also destroyed in the country, mostly in Taliban hotbed Helmand province in the south and in Nangarhar in the east of the war-ravaged country.

The government, in a bid to check poppy cultivation in Helmand province, launched a campaign early last month and the process, according to officials, is going on.

Daud, according to the newspaper, stressed that five more provinces would become poppy-free this year and thus 23 out of the country’s 34 provinces would get rid of poppy plantation in 2009.