Chief of Sistan and Baluchestan Border Guards Second Brigadier General Mohammad Mollashahi said on Monday that the border guards gathered intelligence on the activities of a drug band at Mirjaveh border regions and found out that the smugglers had plans to transfer the consignment from the southeastern regions to the country.
The guards ambushed the hideout of the smugglers and confiscated the consignment which included 333kg of opium, he added.
According to Mollashahi, in another operation in Saravan, after several days of intelligence activities and operational planning, the border guards of Saravan in an armed clash with drug traffickers in the Esfandak border area managed to seize 2 vehicles and confiscate 273 kilograms of different kinds of narcotics, including 95 kilograms of opium and 178 kilograms of hashish.
The Islamic Republic has been actively fighting drug-trafficking over the past three decades, despite its high economic and human costs. The war on drug trade originating from Afghanistan has claimed the lives of nearly 4,000 Iranian police officers over the past four decades. The country has spent more than hundreds of millions of dollars on sealing its borders and preventing the transit of narcotics destined for European, Arab, and Central Asian countries.
According to reports, in 2018 alone, Iranian forces carried out 1,557 operations against drug traffickers, seizing approximately 807 tons of different types of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances.
According to the World Drug Report 2019 of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in 2017, Iran had seized the largest quantity of opiates, accounting for 39% of the global total.
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