IRAN'S DRUG WAR: TERRORIZED VILLAGERS TURN MILITIAMEN IN WORLD'S WORST
NARCOTICS CORRIDOR

BAGHU-BAGHU, Iran - The desert was silent as the sun came up in the early
morning of April 16. The air was still, and no vehicles plied the road that
leads directly to the border with Afghanistan, only 46 miles away.

This parched village of 60 families on a desert highway, one of the main
conduits for the flood of opium into Iran, seemed to be asleep.

Then, out of nowhere, came the village patrol. They pointed automatic
rifles at Ghafoor Bakhti and his friend. The two men were sitting by the
roadside, and their being strangers in this place was reason enough for the
patrol to search them.

"Stand up, we're going to frisk you," said one of the villagers.

A quick search revealed a small amount of opium, seemingly for personal
use. But the strangers could be here for only one reason, the same as other
passers-by from whom the armed villagers have confiscated 1-1/2 tons of
opium in the past year. So the patrolmen followed Bakhti's footprints to a
patch of recently disturbed ground. Below the surface was a sack, and
inside it were five plastic packets of dark-brown opium.

"I came to find work as a shepherd here," said Bakhti, who is from a town
about 90 miles away. This claim drew laughter from the villagers, who
considered the idea of someone seeking employment in impoverished
Baghu-Baghu preposterous.

It was a newly confident laugh of a people who have within the past year
been given arms by the Iranian government to protect themselves from the
violent onslaught of the drug traffickers who have turned huge swathes of
eastern Iran into a war zone. Hundreds of villages, so long the targets of
kidnappings and murders by the drug smugglers, have now formed local militias.

The battleground

This is the battleground in Iran's war on drugs, by almost any measure the
largest, most successful and most deadly fight against opium and heroin
smuggling in the world.

Stuck between Afghanistan, producer of more than half the world's opium,
and the southern gateway to Europe, Iran is the unwilling corridor for a
crop that peaked at more than 4,500 tons in 1999, according to the U.N.
Drug Control Program.

In the past decade, the Islamic Republic has spent hundreds of millions of
dollars fighting the small armies of Afghani and Iranian drug smugglers. In
the process, more than 3,000 Iranian soldiers have been killed and whole
stretches of the mountainous, deserted eastern part of the country have
been turned into bandit lands.

With roughly 1.4 million drug abusers out of a population of nearly 70
million, Iran is highly motivated to combat the drug trade, often
mercilessly so. Police in Tehran, the capital, recently leveled an entire
neighborhood that was the hub of the city's drug dealers. Of all the opium
seized in the world, 90 percent is seized in Iran.

But in spite of the 22 mountain passes dammed up with concrete, the 48
miles of barbed wire, the 180 miles of 11-foot-deep, 11-foot-wide trenches,
the 434 miles of built-up embankments, the 400 forts and border observation
posts, and in spite of the 30,000 troops posted on the frontiers with
Afghanistan and Pakistan, about 90 percent of the heroin on the streets of
Europe comes from Afghanistan via Iran. Some also ends up in the United States.

European countries have donated more than $13 million to help the Iranian
government treat addicts and fight smugglers, but with the total cost so
far of Iran's war on drugs estimated at at least $1 billion, the outside
money is "a drop in the ocean," said Fariba Soltani, an Iranian specialist
on narco-trafficking at the U.N. Drug Control Program in Tehran.

"It's a war up there, it really is," said a Western diplomat in Tehran.
"The smugglers are very well funded and they use all the latest technology.
They're ruthless. It's a real drug-baron's business. The Iranians outnumber
them, but the eastern border is so vast that it's simply not possible to
shut it."

Wearing a light-blue prison-issue shirt covered in a pattern of the scales
of justice, Mohammad-Azam Teimouri sat in an office just off his cellblock.
If he's lucky, he will spend a lot of time wearing that shirt and living in
the Central Prison of Mashad. If not, he will be sentenced to death for
smuggling 14 kilograms of opium into Iran from Afghanistan.

"I used to be a shepherd, a farmer, making my own living," said Teimouri,
43, a father of six. "Then there was the drought, and I had nothing to feed
my family."

Teimouri lived in the heart of the biggest drug-producing zone in the
world, a cornerstone of an industry that is second in size only to the oil
industry in global terms. But it was poverty, not greed, that drove him, as
it does so many Afghans, to start the journey of opium and heroin smuggling
from Afghanistan through Iran, and on to the refineries of Turkey to the
streets of the West.

Throughout the 1990s the extremist Islamic Taliban government has
controlled most of Afghanistan. It has done so at considerable cost, waging
a civil war with Afghans opposed to the harsh Islamic regime. Towns have
been leveled and agriculture devastated and millions of refugees have fled
their homes.

Providing refuge for terrorists, including the Saudi-born Osama bin Laden,
has only strengthened the determination of Western countries to maintain
sanctions on the Taliban. A terrible drought also has compounded the
general poverty of Afghans.

In its isolation, the only way the Taliban saw to generate revenue, experts
in and out of Iran say, was to become the world's largest producer of
opium. Before long it had overtaken Myanmar.

Under international pressure, the Taliban clamped down on last year's poppy
crop, drastically reducing output from the opium fields, according to
Iran's drug czar, Mohammad Fallah.

But few expect this year's crop reduction to last.

The 30,000 Iranian soldiers guarding the border continue to have weekly
gunbattles with the convoys of professional smugglers that penetrate
Iranian territory every day. And Iran's prisons - where 80 percent of all
inmates have drug-related convictions, according to officials - continue to
overflow with men like Teimouri.

"I'm a Bedouin from an area in Herat province," Teimouri said. "A year ago
a man, a rich Talibani, came and told me to take this to Iran. I was
hungry, my children were hungry. If only we could grow wheat and barley
because this opium is a plague upon us in Afghanistan and a plague here in
Iran, too."

Before last year's drought, Teimouri owned more than 200 sheep. His family
was among 60 who lived their nomadic lives together in a mountainous region
in the north of Afghanistan, living in tents with no electricity. When the
family needed money to buy food, Teimouri would sell a sheep for a dollar.
By the time the drought had finished with him, he was left with only 30
sheep, five camels and a bag of flour, he said. That's what he left his
family last June, when he finally accepted the Talibani man's offer.

As Teimouri told it, he and eight other nomad men, all in similar straits,
were each promised a fee of $190 for delivering the drugs just over the border.

The frontier

They drove in a jeep to the border on a moonless night. Some distance from
the frontier, the vehicle stopped and the nine couriers jumped out along
with an armed smuggler.

Teimouri carried a gallon of water, a loaf of bread and about 30 pounds of
opium. Told to remain silent, the men trudged into the darkened desert hills.

The plan called for a guide to receive them on the other side, and take the
couriers to a village where they would unload the opium. But instead, once
they had scaled the embankments constructed by the Iranian government, the
couriers were met by Iranian soldiers.

The armed leader of the group ran into the night, but the nine couriers froze.

Since that night in June, Teimouri has been living in the huge prison in
Mashad, home to 11,531 other inmates. He has not seen his family since he
left Afghanistan. He has not been sentenced yet. And he fears the worst.

The prison warden, Mahmoud Amini, thinks Teimouri will escape the death
sentence.

No one in villages like Baghu-Baghu has much time for the hard-luck stories
of smugglers like Teimouri and Bakhti and the armed drug lords.

"They've got a lot of equipment and weaponry and some of them are rich,"
said Gholam Hossein Sabeghi, 31, a sheep farmer and head of the local
militia. "When you see smugglers like... (Ghafoor Bakhti), they're going to
take this opium and make 10 other families addicted. You can't feel sorry
for them."

It's the professional smugglers, though, who make life so hard for these
people who are already fighting against the elements to survive.

"Before the Basij were armed here, the smugglers would force us to give
them bread and tea and threaten us with guns," said Sobhan Ghadiri, 26, a
member of the militia and a farmer of barley and wheat. In Baghu-Baghu,
there isn't much spare bread or tea to go around.

One evening, a few years ago, there was a knock at Mohammad-Hassan
Ghadiri's front door. The farmer opened it to find a group of armed
smugglers demanding food and shelter.

Ghadiri said no. The men grabbed him and told him they were taking him to
the mountains.

"I started making a lot of noise and that woke my brother up," Ghadiri
said. "And then I wrestled myself free as they were taking me and they
fired one shot in the air, a second that went through my shirt and a third
that passed into my ankle and out the bottom of my foot."

Deciding that they had had enough trouble, the smugglers left the village.

The czar

Fallah, the drug czar, is the one who gave the order to arm the villages.

"A lot of the time the smugglers come into villages and kidnap the locals,"
said Fallah, a retired army general who greets visitors in his office at
the Drug Control Headquarters in Tehran.

"They will call on relatives of people they've kidnapped and say, `Here's
50 or 100 kilograms (23 to 46 pounds) of opium. Either buy it from us or go
and sell it. Then we'll release your relative.' The villages are very
spread out, and it's harsh terrain, and they're very exposed and hard to
protect. So the military has taken to going to the villages and finding
selected people, those with military service, and training them, giving
them guns and teaching them how to protect the villages.... But have we
solved the problem 100 percent? No, we have not."

And so, for the sake of defending themselves and the small finder's fees
that the government pays them for the drugs they seize, the villagers of
Baghu-Baghu have waged 26 gunfights with smugglers in and around the arid
Marzdaran Mountains.

"The Island"

When the drugs carried by men like Teimouri have made it past the soldiers
on the frontier, and past village militias in places like Baghu-Baghu, they
usually end up in Tehran, Iran's huge capital city.

And until Feb. 24, when the government-demolition squad came calling, many
shipments ended up in a warren-like neighborhood of East Tehran known
locally as "The Island" because drug traffickers thought it was safe for them.

There is little left of The Island now: just a few trees, open sewers, the
occasional shoe and some freestanding walls covered in a patchwork of
wallpaper, paint and tiling. Until Feb. 24, there were 130 houses here,
home to thousands of people, many of them drug dealers.

Inspired by a postrevolutionary 1979 mission that leveled an entire area of
Tehran that was home to prostitutes, the razing of The Island was the
Iranian police's aggressive answer to dealing with the distribution system
of drugs inside Iran's capital.

It started at 1 a.m.

The gas and electricity companies shut off their supplies. A force of 1,500
police officers encircled the neighborhood. A bank of floodlights powered
by generators burst into life.

First the police rushed in to arrest the major suspects, targets of a
two-year investigation. Drug-sniffing dogs unearthed caches of opium and
heroin and police officers found large amounts of cash.

By the end of the operation, 12 hours later, the police had arrested 500
people they considered serious criminals and had in a guarded tent city
another 1,500 they regarded as lower-level dealers. These latter were
passed to the care of social services for rehabilitation and counseling.

An unspecified number of other people who lived in The Island but were not
involved in drugs were given new housing, officials said.

Then the bulldozers moved in. Before too long, The Island was just a pile
of rubble.

The people who live in East Tehran are happy to see The Island swept away,
but some say many of the dealers have just moved a few blocks away and
continue their trade.