Iran’s Own Desert Storm

A war is being waged on the barren wastelands of eastern Iran, but few outside this country are aware of it.

On one side are the forces of the Islamic Republic, in their kelly green uniforms, baseball caps and military boots, flying ancient U.S.-made Huey helicopters or hunkered down in newly built versions of medieval fortresses.

Marshaled against them is a criminal enemy--clever, ruthless and formidably armed--made up of Afghani and Pakistani drug smugglers and their Iranian accomplices.

The criminals are intent on getting hundreds of tons of opium and heroin that are produced each year in Afghanistan safely to the desert interior of Iran, to be sold for local consumption or shipped to Turkey and Western Europe. The Iranian forces are trying to staunch the flow of drugs across their border, as a matter of religious duty and of self-interest for the Islamic government, which is vexed by signs that many bored, underemployed young people are falling into the grips of a drug epidemic.

But closing the border to traffickers is a daunting task; there are more than 1,100 miles of unpopulated, unforgiving frontier with Afghanistan and Pakistan to defend. The region is among the most brutal terrains on Earth, a melange of craggy mountains and parched desert, where temperatures can range from below freezing in the winter to well over 120 degrees in summer.

On this harsh tableau, on any given day the smugglers may kill the Iranians or the Iranians may kill the smugglers. This nation has lost more than 2,500 police officers and soldiers in the war against drug traffickers during the last 15 years, from lowly police privates to army generals whose helicopters were shot down with Stinger missiles. More than 100 died in 1999, including 36 police officers captured in an incident in November by traffickers and executed after being tortured.

No one knows how many smugglers have died. But Iran’s prisons are bulging with the 9,000 or so apprehended since the early 1980s.

To give an example of the scale of the struggle, according to United Nations statistics:

* Each year the Iranians seize 90% of all opium confiscated worldwide by law enforcement agencies, and 10% of all heroin.

* The drugs seized by the Islamic Republic represent vast potential wealth. The Iranians say they have stopped 3 million pounds over the last two decades. The 77,000 pounds of seized uncut heroin alone--at more than $90,000 a pound--would sell on the street for about $7 billion. The Iranians routinely destroy it in bonfires.

* Iran has deployed 30,000 police officers along its border and mounted a massive construction effort--including earthen barriers, concrete walls, barbed-wire fences and deep trenches--in an effort to dam the flow of drugs. The works have included 80 miles of embankments, 22 walls sealing valleys, hundreds of miles of trenches 15 feet deep and 14 feet across, 12 miles of barbed wire, 100 military outposts and 16 border stations.

The problem is so acute for Iran because its neighbor, Afghanistan, accounts for three-quarters of the world’s annual production of opium, a crop that last year was estimated at a record 4,600 tons. Drug-control experts say the Taliban, the extremist Sunni Muslim movement that has conquered most of Afghanistan, uses the drug trade as a funding source. As much as 90% of the heroin consumed in Europe comes from Afghanistan, and U.S. officials fear more of it is crossing the Atlantic to North America. Iran sits astride the most direct route for those drugs to reach Western consumers, either directly from Afghanistan or through Pakistan.

Many Lives Lost in Fight Against Narcotics

Officials here say that over the last 20 years, Iran has expended billions of dollars and many lives in a war on drugs that benefits Europe. The estimate for 1999 expenditures alone was $800 million.

Yet Iran’s struggle has not garnered much attention because, for most of the last 20 years, since the Islamic Revolution, the country has been isolated diplomatically from the West.

“We do feel alone,” said Mohammed Fallah, head of Iran’s anti-narcotics effort. “Although most of the drugs trafficked through our country are aimed at Europe or other countries, most of the load is shouldered by us alone.”

Only now that reformers aligned with moderate President Mohammad Khatami are in the driver’s seat in Tehran have relations with the West started to improve.

That has brought the first acknowledgment from the Europeans of their debt to Iranian drug fighters, and a small but growing amount of material aid, such as four-wheel-drive vehicles, bulletproof vests and night vision equipment donated by nations including Britain, Italy and France.

The U.S. government also has quietly acknowledged Tehran’s positive role in fighting drugs: In 1998, the Clinton administration removed Iran from the list of countries that are considered to be major sources of illegal drugs, either as producers or transit nations, and are uncooperative in anti-narcotics efforts.

In fact, with the exception of U.S. efforts to interdict drugs coming from Latin America, there is arguably no country that has waged such a determined and costly war against drug smuggling.

A U.N. official suggests that the effort is one area in which the West and Iran have the opportunity and mutual interest to cooperate.

“If Iran seizes more, less is going to Europe,” said Antonio Mazzitelli, transferred from Colombia last year to open an office of the United Nations’ International Drug Control Program in Tehran. “The two sides have discovered this issue offers benefits to all.”

Gen. Ali Shafiee, head of the Iranian national police anti-narcotic division, recently escorted a delegation of European diplomats and journalists to the front lines of the conflict in Sistan-Baluchistan province in southeastern Iran, where the bulk of the smuggling occurs.

From a helicopter flying over the eastern frontier, the nearby mountains of Afghanistan look like jagged black teeth, forbidding and wild as they rise up out of the desert. When rain falls in the mountains in winter, the water washes down in a torrent, carving the land into stark valleys and rivulets. In the heat of the desert, the water quickly vanishes. But the gashes left behind become the pathways for smugglers.

Anti-drug police and soldiers from Tehran assigned to the narcotics war keep lonely vigils in this land, watching the passageways from mountaintop towers and walled fortresses that Iran has constructed along the frontier, redoubts that look like castles from the Middle Ages.

It was down one such dry stream bed on a moonlit night in September, Shafiee recounted, that agents observed a caravan of 60 camels laden with drugs threading its way into Iran. In this border region, he explained, many clans have relatives on both sides of the border cooperating in the illicit trade. The officers were told to hold their fire so that the smugglers would lead them to their contacts.

By morning, the line of camels had successfully negotiated a 3-mile-wide plain just inside Iran and looked as if it was about to escape into a range of hills. Police moved in with jeeps and helicopters to surround the smugglers.

Immediately, the traffickers answered with machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades. Some tried to make a dash back to Afghanistan.

The shooting lasted several hours. When it was over, five smugglers were dead and two were under arrest. No police were killed. It took the rest of the day to round up the camels and cargo: more than 3 tons of opium and 3,300 pounds of morphine.

Police have made headway against the smugglers only in recent years, Shafiee said, helped by the barriers that have been erected.

“When there were no trenches, this [area] could be passed easily,” he explained. “Sometimes, up to 60 vehicles could pass through with no problems. Confronting them was a hard task, because they were armed heavily with advanced weapons and ammunition.”

With the ravines blocked, the smugglers can no longer use four-wheel-drive vehicles to get across the desert, he said. “Now they have to use camels, donkeys, motorbikes or their backs.”

Undercover Agents and Informers Are of Help

Through the use of undercover agents and informers, the police try to anticipate when a shipment is due. But Shafiee has no illusions: He doubts that his officers get even half of the contraband flowing across the frontier.

Meanwhile, smugglers are developing other ruses. One is to addict camels to opium and then train them to know where in Iran they can go to get their next fix, Shafiee said. In this way, the camels will cross the frontier unescorted by smugglers and deliver their cargo to accomplices.

The center of the government’s anti-drug fight is Zahedan, a spare frontier town near Afghanistan that is dismissed in one Western guidebook as the ugliest city in Iran and not worth a visit. But it does have an unusual museum--an exhibition assembled for international law enforcement and drug-control officials.

The museum displays documents that the Iranians say show how smugglers are given certificates on the Afghan side of the border allowing them to move the “white goods.” These certificates are stamped receipts showing that the duties have been paid for the drugs to the Taliban authorities, and saying that the bearers should not be molested. There are piles of the confiscated drugs, packed in burlap or disguised inside containers of canned fruit or boxes marked tomato paste and sausage. Also on display are rifles, heavy machine guns and bazookas used by the smugglers. Over the displays are painted portraits of Iranian “martyrs” in the drug war.

Down the road from the museum is the prison, which houses thousands of Iranians, Afghans and Pakistanis incarcerated for drug offenses. Most are serving sentences of five years or more. Major offenders are hanged. (Armed smuggling and possession of more than 1 ounce of heroin or more than 11 pounds of opium are punishable by death in Iran, but in practice, that punishment is reserved for repeat offenders or people handling larger quantities of narcotics, Iranian officials said.)

According to the United Nations’ Mazzitelli, Iran was one of the major producers of opium in the region before the Islamic Revolution in 1979. But within four years, the clerical government had managed to virtually stamp out its production.

However, with the influx of drugs from Afghanistan, officials admit that they are facing a serious abuse problem of their own, with about 1.2 million Iranians habitually using drugs.

“We are part of the world, and in the whole world this problem is on the rise and increasing every day,” parliament member Marzieh Seddighi said.

Seddighi has set up a nongovernmental organization that advises addicts and their families how to overcome the drug habit. In Iran, she said, addicts are not stigmatized as much as they are in the West; opium eating has a long history in this nation’s rural areas.

But she noted that the new drug influx from Afghanistan is another matter and that it is taking a terrible toll on the young. There also are signs that more people are using heroin, which smugglers produce from raw opium because it is easier to conceal and carry. The sharing of needles among drug abusers is raising concerns about a future epidemic of AIDS. About 1% of drug abusers sampled are HIV-positive.

Boredom and lack of economic opportunity are causing many young people to become involved in drugs, Seddighi said. Addicts can be seen sleeping in Tehran parks, and drug pushing goes on around Azadi Square, site of many vociferous pro-Islamic demonstrations.

In 1997, the country’s laws were changed to allow users to come forward for treatment without fear of prosecution. But traffickers in large quantities of drugs still face long prison terms or, in some cases, death.

One recovering addict, Hossein Dezhakam, said he could not point to a single reason for his 15-year involvement with drugs, which eventually cost him a contracting business. “When you have so many drugs around, it is just like a disease, and you catch it.”

Fallah, the anti-drug czar, said the government is determined to stop the torrent of narcotics that threatens to overwhelm Iran.

“The important point is that we should have assistance and commitment from all the other countries,” he said. “Should we get this assistance from the world, we could definitely intensify our efforts.”