Today’s Silk Road Carries a Different Kind of Import: Heroin

High in the jagged Pamir Mountains, where wolves and snow leopards prowl a desolate no man’s land, small squads of men are fighting a losing battle against a rising tide of opium and heroin sweeping toward the West.

Foot soldiers in the war on drugs, these police and customs agents stand sentinel along the remote alpine highway that threads north from Afghanistan into the rock-ribbed underbelly of Central Asia.

But often they are only spectators to the torrent of drugs streaming along the legendary Silk Road routes toward Russia and beyond.

“See those slopes over there?” customs officer Dzhanibek Abdulayev says, gesturing toward craggy peaks looming over his primitive checkpoint for trucks at Kyzyl-Art, some 14,000 feet high on the Tajikistan border.

“Often we see smugglers there, but what can we do? Practically nothing. We can’t run after them at this altitude. We can’t shoot at them because we have no weapons. And we’re not properly dressed or equipped to launch an expedition.”

He shakes his head in frustration. “Without assistance, we’re practically helpless.”

Once plied by ancient caravans carrying spices and cloth from the Orient to the West, the Silk Road has been transformed into one of the world’s primary drug routes since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.

Much of the contraband passes over the 450-mile highway to Osh from Afghanistan, the region’s top opium-growing country. The lucrative cargo is welded inside trucks, smuggled through remote passes on horseback or guaranteed passage by bribes.

Outmanned narcotics teams across Central Asia have confiscated several tons of opium and shut down dozens of labs that turn poppies into bricks of opium gum, morphine or heroin. At police headquarters in Osh, rancid bags of contraband are heaped high in a locked room full of seizures from recent years.

But authorities admit the hauls are only a tiny fraction of what gets through--an amount they won’t even guess at.

“This region is not yet as big in trafficking as Colombia or the ‘Golden Triangle’ [of Burma, Laos and Thailand], but it has all the ingredients to become the worst drug-trafficking zone in the world,” says Srinivasa Reddy, an expert in Uzbekistan for the U.N. Drug Control Program.

The hub is Osh, a 3,000-year-old settlement on a scorched plain whose role as a world drug center lurks beneath a timeless surface.

Long before mullahs’ mournful prayers break the predawn stillness, roads outside the city fill with villagers headed to the bazaar on horse-drawn carts piled high with hay. Men in traditional white-tasseled hats hawk Chinese goods next to women selling Frisbee-sized bread loaves hot enough to burn your hands.

But poverty and the end of Soviet authoritarianism have led many to succumb to new temptations, and this city of 500,000 people is now known for khanka--raw opium. Waiters in cafes know the going price, and a murmured exchange can close an instant sale of foil-wrapped opium the size of a stick of gum for 20 Kyrgyz soms, the equivalent of $1.30.

The potential for profit is enormous. A kilogram--2.2 pounds--of pure opium that costs $100 when it leaves Afghanistan sells for $750 in Osh and as much as $8,000 in Moscow. The same amount of heroin fetches $20,000 in Osh, $100,000 in Moscow.

No wonder you can spot Kyrgyz customs agents wearing Rolex watches.

While Soviet-era statues still exalt Lenin, today’s true powers are a half-dozen drug lords whose identities are Central Asia’s worst-kept secret.

In a country where 49% of the people live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank, these men brazenly parade their success in Mercedes and sprawling new houses.

Wearing a black silk shirt and black pants and flashing an acorn-size gold ring, potbellied Erlan--not his real name--reputedly runs one of the six primary trafficking groups in Kyrgyzstan, all based in Osh. While the average Kyrgyz income is 400 soms ($27) a month, police say he flew to Moscow this year and laid out $42,000 in cash for a new BMW.

The reputed drug baron and a police narcotics officer can be seen sipping cognac together occasionally at an exclusive government retreat.

Police claim the drug lords operate with impunity because officers do not have the resources or surveillance equipment to nab them. The 19 men in the Osh narcotics unit have no guns and just three battered Russian vehicles. Cops take taxis to drug busts, or walk.

“Our guys are working simply out of pure patriotism,” says the department chief, Kamil Abdurakhmanov. “These narco-criminals just laugh at us--we on our white horses.”

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Often, though, payoffs overpower patriotism. The U.S. State Department says Russian border guards, Afghan warlords, Tajik government and opposition leaders and Kyrgyz officials all are in on drug profits. In Osh, three narcotics officers were caught on the take this year and fired.

One policeman, whose monthly salary is 600 soms ($40), confides that he is sorely tempted to accept the gangs’ tantalizing offer to switch sides--”enough to take care of me for life.” He has resisted only out of fear of putting his family at risk, he says.

Osh police say the best they can do is tap the drug barons and their opium armies for information. Every so often, the smugglers will feed them the whereabouts of a drug runner, or a rival’s shipment.

Without such tips, scouring the Soviet-made cargo trucks that rumble over the Pamirs from Khorog, Tajikistan, is a needle-in-a-haystack search for hidden drugs.

At one of the main mountain outposts, surrounded by barren snowcapped peaks, six policemen in ski caps recently took turns checking the trucks rolling through on a frosty day.

They live for weeks at a time in a tiny wooden hut with a dirt floor. Conditions are so harsh that a team of drug-sniffing spaniels died of exposure or altitude sickness within days.

“Even if you have information a truck is carrying drugs, it can take a whole day to check it,” says police Capt. Baket Baterbekov.

Watching as selected Tajik drivers comply with orders to dismantle parts of their vehicles, he points out more than 40 nooks and crannies where he has found stashes in the past.

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By comparison, laser kits now available in the United States enable narcotics police to thoroughly scan a vehicle in 15 minutes.

“We need equipment, but all we get are promises, promises, promises” from Kyrgyz authorities and the West, Baterbekov says bitterly.

These mountain inspectors are the first and often last line of defense in the effort to stem the river of drugs, whose northward flow is facilitated by the chaos in war-stricken Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

Once in Osh, the opium and heroin will fan out across Central Asia and mostly move into Russia by plane, train or car, much of it destined for Europe or the United States, the number one heroin-consuming country.

The international community has been slow to react, although Western governments recently began to show more concern.

“It’s really an alarming situation,” says Renate Ehmer, a U.N. drug official in Central Asia.