War-torn Iraq is emerging as a key conduit in the global drugs trade, as criminal gangs exploit its porous border with Iran to channel their illicit goods to the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
The Iraqi authorities say that since the 2003 US-led invasion the trade in illegal opiates, cannabis and synthetic pharmaceuticals has risen steadily, and that many drugs originating in Afghanistan enter Iraq via Iran.
Statistics are hard to come by in devastated Iraq, but the Baghdad government says a rising number of traffickers are being caught at border crossings with Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
“A large numbers of smugglers are being arrested,” interior ministry spokesman Major General Abdul Karim Khalaf said, adding that many were being detained in the provinces of Basra and Maysan.
Maysan’s capital Amara, a stone’s throw from the Iranian border, is suspected by the authorities of being a growing drug-trafficking hub for the Gulf states and north toward the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.
About 65km south of Amara, the long reeds of the al-Ezeir marshes that extend well inside Iran make ideal cover for smugglers, who are thought to transport thousands of kilos of opiates a year in the area.
Farther south in Basra, also bordering Iran, the drug trade is flourishing there, too, police said.
“The smugglers transfer hashish and opium across at al-Shalamja at the Iranian border and Safwan near the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border,” an anti-narcotics agent in Basra said on condition of anonymity.
“Some of them are arrested from time to time, including Iranians and even Syrians,” he said.
Meanwhile, Samawa city in Muthanna province has become the main crossing point for smugglers headed to Saudi Arabia, said a local police officer, who asked that his name not be used.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime said that Afghanistan’s opium production soared to 8,200 tonnes last year from 6,100 tonnes the year before, accounting for 93 percent of global production.
Iran’s police chief Esmaeel Ahmadi Moghadam said last month in Tehran that only about 900 tonnes of the 2,500 tonnes of drugs that entered his country from Afghanistan were seized last year.
Iraqi police refused to provide estimates of how many tonnes of drugs passed through the country last year, but Tehran authorities say well over 1,000 tonnes are going overseas, most of it thought to be exiting along Iran’s western border.
A growing slice of that trade is believed to be passing through Iraq, said the International Narcotics Control Board, the independent and quasi-judicial monitoring body associated with the UN.
“Illicit drug trafficking and the risk of illicit cultivation of opium poppy have been increasing in some areas with grave security problems,” it said, referring to Iraq in a report published last year.
An Iraqi police captain in Amara said that drug trafficking arrests in the city, long a home to anti-government militias, had jumped from 26 in 2005 to 46 last year.
A state of general instability in Iraq has only made it easier for drugs traffickers, and a lack of infrastructure has made collecting data especially difficult.
“Drugs follow the paths of least resistance, and parts of Iraq certainly fit that description,” an official of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said. “There is a shortage of reliable information about the drug situation in Iraq.”
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