The Opium Trail Has a New Stop

He was a threadbare child of 12 when he set out from his village for the city, a small, serious boy with a big mission: to sell 2 pounds of Afghan opium in the Tajik capital to help his parents feed his 11 brothers and sisters.

But in the venal, cutthroat underworld of Dushanbe, it is easy to cheat a village boy. The dealer who promised to pay him the following week simply disappeared.

So Oiyatula Rakhimov returned home empty-handed.

One August night several months later, more than 10 gunmen from just across the border in Afghanistan swept silently down the towering, verdant slope behind his house and seized the boy as a hostage for the family’s drug debt to them.

Nearly two years later he remains a prisoner, and the price for his life--$1,000--is so far beyond his father’s reach that, at mention of the sum, the old man just bows his head and weeps.

The remote valley where the Panj River divides northern Afghanistan from southern Tajikistan seems a place of rugged, calm majesty. But the peace has been sold for drugs, revenge and human sorrow. The wild red mountain tulips are watered by the tears of women and old men whose loved ones are stolen from border villages and spirited across the river, killed, or working as drug couriers to pay off debts.

Afghanistan is a major opium producer; in 2000 it accounted for 72% of the world crop. Neighboring Central Asian nations have been sucked into its vortex. Tajikistan, the poorest of these former Soviet republics, in particular has become a pipeline for Afghan drugs on their way to Moscow and then to Western Europe.

While the U.N. Drug Control Program reports that Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban wiped out the opium poppy crop in the last 12 months, Tajik authorities insist that increased quantities still are flowing across the border. Stockpiles may account for part of the increase, while in northern areas of Afghanistan not under Taliban control, drug production reportedly continues unabated.

Heroin, or “gera” in Tajik slang, is smuggled across the border in coarse, poorly sewn white cotton bags, cheekily branded, sometimes bearing the names and even the addresses of manufacturers.

“Abdurauf Brothers’ Shop, Wholesale Market, Djadidshahr, Faizabad,” runs the print on one bag, manufactured last year in northern Afghanistan. Hodgi Caravan Superpower brand advertises itself as 98% pure.

The border, heavily fortified in Soviet times, is sometimes just a maze of mountain passes. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago, Tajikistan has had to rely heavily on Russian border guards.

Russian Maj. Ruslan Kiselyov said seven armed smugglers killed in a recent ambush all turned out to be Tajik border guards. But there also are reports that Russians smuggle drugs to Moscow on military planes and trains.

For Tajik villagers, driven by poverty or opportunism, it is often tempting to put themselves in debt to the Afghan drug lords. With no cash to pay up front, the villagers take opium or heroin on credit. Some are robbed or tricked. Others, once they are paid, squander the money on cars, apartments and luxuries.

In recent years, the Afghans’ patience has worn thin. Twenty-six hostages from Tajikistan are being held in Afghanistan. Last year, 23 hostages from the Kulyab region were released, and five have been freed this year, according to the Tajikistan Security Ministry.

The Afghan gunmen come on foot at night. They float hostages across the river to Afghanistan on boats made of inflated animal skins or inner tubes.

A Villager Unable to Pay His Son’s Ransom

They came again and again to the home of Imam Rakhimov, who could not pay the ransom for his son Oiyatula.

“They took everything they could find. They took the horses, the sheep. They took all the rugs, my daughter’s dowry. They left me with nothing,” Rakhimov said.

His face is like gray stone, etched with grief. He has one blurry Polaroid of his kidnapped son, showing a grave, slight boy in a family group. In soft, halting words, the father tried to convey something of the lost son.

As he described a polite, handsome, respectful boy, the words tumbled out like an obituary. No conceivable miracle would put the ransom money in his hands.

Eyes downcast, the old man said the mistake that cost him his son was impelled by poverty. In mountain villages like this, there are no jobs. Pensions--$2 or $3 a month--are delayed for many months.

“It’s getting worse now because now the Afghans are starting to kill people. Everyone’s afraid. People try to stay indoors,” Rakhimov said.

Afghan gunmen came for his neighbors’ sons recently, ages 21 and 39, and shot them in front of their house, leaving two widows and their 13 children.

Zuratmo Ilyosova was one of the luckier ones. She was able to come home again, and described her ordeal as a hostage.

The rap on the window that changed her life came about 1 a.m. May 28 three years ago, rousing women from their sleep. There were no men that night to help defend the house in the village of Noachun, six miles from the Afghan border.

The women ran in panic from one hiding place to another. But for Ilyosova in particular, a chance overnight visit at her aunt’s house turned into a nightmare. She had left her 3-year-old daughter, Zulfiya, 15 miles away with her parents.

Afghan gunmen marched into her aunt’s house that night, seized her and took her across the river. The debtors, Ilyosova says, were her aunt’s neighbors. Their house was empty, so the gunmen simply raided the place next door.

The village where she was prisoner for nearly three years was called Obganda, or Bad Waters. She was kept mainly in a dark room and forced to wear a full-length shroud with a black net hiding her eyes. The area was controlled by anti-Taliban forces, and there was fighting.

One of the local commanders, named Abdullah Masobir, decided to take her for his second wife and warned her to give up hope of escape.

Her wedding day was the saddest in her life. A sheep was killed, a prayer was read and everyone in the village was invited. Everyone except the bride agreed that it was a big success.

Masobir was rarely home, and “he never beat me without reason,” she recalled. But when he discovered her effort to smuggle a letter to relatives in Tajikistan, he thrashed her.

“I grieved that my life turned out that way. But I never gave up hope. Three times I tried to run away at night when everyone was asleep. They would wake up next morning, see I was gone and come for me,” she said.

In January, Ilyosova finally won her freedom from her Afghan husband’s military commander, after Masobir left both her and his other wife--and, ironically, moved to Tajikistan.

She returned home with a second child, Najibula, age 2, who is Masobir’s son, and lives once more with her parents. Her first husband long ago disappeared in Chechnya. Her father does odd jobs, and the family subsists largely on flat, brown bread.

Other Tajiks die for their mistakes or play a high-stakes game that offers great profits for the risk of dealing or running drugs.

In the tiny mountain settlement of Kumrog, population about 100, eight miles from Dashtidzhum, Satorali Nazirov, 76, has been left with 11 mouths to feed, including his wife, his daughter-in-law and eight children ages 1 to 14.

His son, Grez Nazirov, was 37 when he was kidnapped early one morning more than two years ago while hunting grouse.

Satorali Nazirov went to the state security service, equivalent to the Soviet-era KGB, which told him that his son had been executed in Afghanistan. The Afghan drug dealers claimed that his son just ran away.

Amid such poverty, it is not difficult to pick out those who are managing not only to survive but also to profit from the drug trade.

Local newspaper editor Turko Dikayev in desolate, typhoid-ridden Kulyab said everyone knows who the drug dealers are, but no one talks about it. Dikayev is paid $2.50 a month to put out his newspaper, a reflection of the economic crisis that he says forces people to trade drugs.

“No one talks about tomorrow, let alone next week. Every day people lose belief in themselves. They don’t believe they can lift themselves up,” he said.

Dikayev eyed a new foreign car that stood out among the ancient Soviet cars and begging children. A man who looked to be in his mid-20s slid out, his baseball cap pitched at a cocky angle, and slouched off with two buddies.

“If someone’s got a good house or a good car, that means he’s a bandit, dealing narcotics,” Dikayev said. “Because you can’t buy a car on $2 a month.”

The drug pipeline often goes through Moscow on its way to Western Europe. So when a flight from Dushanbe lands in Moscow, the Russian customs officers have their dogs ready.

A long queue of Dushanbe passengers snaked through a Moscow airport one recent day, while customs officers searched the luggage with bored hostility. Risko, a German shepherd trained to sniff drugs, hurled himself at the cheap bags and handmade wooden crates. Customs officers were looking not only for drugs but also for antacids--a possible clue to drug couriers who swallowed heroin tied into the fingers of rubber gloves and wrapped in plastic.

Eight plainclothes police and customs officers eyed the crowd looking for telltale signs of sweating or nervousness.

Forty-nine drug smugglers were caught on the Dushanbe-Moscow flights last year, and 15 in the first five months of 2001, with fewer cases recently.

From this flight, two dozen suspects were peeled off and taken downstairs for a more thorough search and questioning. The number of suspected couriers X-rayed for signs of containers in their stomachs averages about one a week.

Occasionally a courier with a burst packet flies in and has to be raced to the hospital to have the containers removed surgically.

Couriers receive between $300 and $700 for the journey--enough to live for a year in Tajikistan.

Last year a couple with a 4-year-old Down’s syndrome child were both found to have swallowed drug packages. On two separate occasions, children of 11 and 13 swallowed packages along with their parents. Each family was promised $1,200 for the flight. There was even a case in which a Muslim mullah was found to have swallowed packets of drugs.

Looking for Drugs in a Crate of Cherries

In the cramped customs operations room at the airport, Capt. Igor Aksyonov combed through a wooden crate of fresh cherries with rubber gloves, speculating on the chances of finding narcotics, chatting relentlessly to his nervous suspects.

He searched a man accompanied by his small daughter and fished dozens of flat loaves of bread from the father’s bags. The officer gouged his fingers into a homemade cake.

“How much bread have you got?” Aksyonov asked in amazement.

“Even more,” the child replied, as more flat loaves emerged.

A second customs officer, Lt. Alexander Poleyev, said he sympathized with the Tajiks. “These people are the least to blame of all because the entire Tajik nation has been brought to its knees and they’re forced to do it,” he said.

But the head of the customs shift, Lt. Col. Viktor Bylinkin, has little sympathy. “They’re forced by poverty to become drug couriers. But I wouldn’t have any problem if all the drug packages in all their bodies leaked. I feel no pity. They poison the nation,” he said.

As the father and his daughter walked free with their bags full of bread and ruined cake, a Russian named Sergei, 34, also went free. The police were sure that he was carrying drugs in his stomach. They shadowed him, hoping to catch his contacts. Police have not released his full name.

The contacts showed up, but spooked, they melted into the airport crowd.

When the police later picked up the Russian, they found 79 packets of drugs in his stomach. And he explained his motive.

He needed the $700 he was promised for the trip to pay off a drug debt.

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Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.