IRAN'S DEADLY WAR AGAINST DRUGS

Forces try to check smugglers at the border

ORKHE KALAT, Iran - A war is being waged on the 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 old US-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 Afghan 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 stanch the flow of drugs across
their border, as a matter of religious duty and self-interest for the
Islamic government, which is troubled 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 terrain on Earth, a
mix of craggy mountains and parched desert, where temperatures can range
from below freezing in the winter to 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 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 November by traffickers and executed after being
tortured.

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

To give a picture of the scale of the struggle, according to United Nations
statistics:

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

In an effort to stop the flow of drugs, 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. 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 percent
of the heroin consumed in Europe comes from Afghanistan, and US officials
fear that more of it is coming to North America. Iran sits astride the most
direct route for those drugs to reach Western consumers, either directly
from Afghanistan or through Pakistan.

Officials 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 antinarcotics
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 have relations with the West started to improve as reformers have
aligned themselves with moderate president Mohammad Khatami.

With the exception of US 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 UN 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 UN
International Drug Control Program in Tehran. ''The two sides have
discovered this issue offers benefits to all.''

General Ali Shafiee, head of the Iranian national police antinarcotic
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
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.

Antidrug 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.

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 the contraband flowing across the border.

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.

According to the UN's 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, with about 1.2 million Iranians
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.