posted August 03, 2001 09:46               

In February, Iranian police destroyed several dozen houses and evacuated some 2,000 people in Tehran's eastern Khak-e Sefid (White Dust) area during an unprecedented two-day operation against drug traffickers that netted 70 arrests.

In that poor neighborhood, also known as Djazireh, or island, trafficking in all kinds of narcotics was carried out in the open, and it had become a refuge for car thieves and other petty criminals over the past few years.

Iran is a major transit point between drug producers in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the markets of Europe and the Persian Gulf.

It has mounted a crackdown on drug trafficking, but security forces manage to seize only about one-tenth of the estimated 2,000 tones of narcotics that pass through the country each year.

Iranian authorities also regularly accuse Afghanistan's ruling Taliban fundamentalist militia of complicity in the cross-border drug trade.

According to an anti-drug official quoted earlier this week by the state IRNA news agency, legal authorities currently have five million open files on drug-related offenses.