IRAN'S OWN DESERT STORM

Deadly Fight Against Drug Smugglers Along Nation's Eastern Border Has
Gone Largely Unnoticed Due To Tehran's Isolation From West. Next To
That Of U.S., It May Be Costliest And Most Determined Such Effort.

SORKHE KALAT, Iran--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."