SOLEYMANIYEH, northern Iraq - His desk was
cluttered with two Motorola walkie-talkies, a
handgun and several thousand dollars' worth of
confiscated opium and hashish.
Despite
this impressive display - all 25 or so kilos of it
intercepted in just the past month as it entered
the country across the Iranian
border - the high-ranking
Kurdish counter-narcotics official was not happy.
"Drugs are a new phenomenon in our
society," he said. "Iran is trying to funnel the
drug into Kurdistan and spread it among us.
They're trying to weaken our society in every
possible way, so as to discourage us from forming
our own state."
Iran's enormous land mass
forms a land bridge between the poppy fields and
hash plantations of Afghanistan and users in
Kurdistan, Turkey and Europe. Well-organized drug
networks employ an array of sophisticated
techniques to move heroin, opium and hashish from
the arid plains of Iran's lawless
Sistan-Balochistan province across the barren
Dasht-e Kavir desert and on to the ports of
Abadan, Bushehr and Bandar Abbas. From there or
across the land routes of Iranian Kurdistan, the
drugs are
transferred in anonymous bags or
containers by ship, airplane or donkey over the
mountains of the northern Arabian Peninsula and
through northern Iraq.
"If
they spread it in our universities, our people
will become weaker," the official told Asia Times
Online. "They seek to paralyze our economy, our
community, our society." Such anti-Iranian
accusations are increasing in northern Iraq, where
a Kurdish majority is anxious to claim
independence as soon as possible from an ever more
disintegrating federal Iraq. In Baghdad, Kurdish
leader and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has
redrawn post-Saddam Iraq's political map by
ditching his Shi'ite allies and throwing his
support behind the same Sunni community that once
formed the Kurd-oppressing backbone of Saddam
Hussein's regime.
The geopolitical shift
has not gone unnoticed in Tehran, which - aside
from supporting Iraq's majority Shi'ite community
- has also cultivated both sides of the Kurdish
leadership in the past. It is now reportedly
unhappy over the new alignment. The Kurdish
defection and Iran's search for new strategic
partners may have been part of the reason Tehran
decided to hold talks over Iraq's future with US
Ambassador to Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad.
In
the provincial capital Soleymaniyeh, the
stronghold of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
(PUK) and arguably the safest city in the north,
the calm was shattered last week by riots in
Halabja, a provincial town one hour's drive away
that achieved notoriety in 1988 after Saddam
gassed to death an estimated 5,000 of its
residents.
The disturbances occurred on
the morning of the anniversary of the gas attack
that launched the town's notoriety. About 7,000
demonstrators protested that they have been
forgotten by the central government, whose
officials make a once-yearly appearance to
commiserate with them about the tragedy but
allegedly forget about them the rest of the year.
The security forces are reported to have opened
fire, killing a 14-year-old boy and injuring
several others.
"It was terrible the way
the authorities handled the protests there," said
Araz Kamal, 24, a cigarette seller sitting in a
Soleymaniyeh tea house. "Until now, the government
has done nothing for them."
But PUK
authorities are sticking by their accusations that
Iranian elements are hiding behind the
disturbances. The town is also in the center of an
area that used to be the stronghold of an
Iranian-backed Islamist organization called Ansar
al-Islam. Witnesses at the scene of the rioting
recalled seeing well-known Islamists among the
crowd shouting "Allahu akbar" as the
monument burned. PUK intelligence claims that some
of the demonstrators used mobile telephones to
call the 12th branch of the Kurdistan Democratic
Party, which enjoys close relations with local
Islamists and Iran, and update it on the latest
developments.
Iran's new-found
unpopularity comes as its favored allies in Iraq -
the Shi'ites - seek to form a controversial
government against Kurdish- and Sunni-led
opposition in Baghdad. Increased clashes between
the Iranian army and a Kurdish militia called
Pezhak in Iran's Kordestan province have led to
the deaths of at least 40 Kurds in recent months
and dismayed the Iraqi Kurdish leadership. Pezhak
is the Iranian militia offshoot of the separatist
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that has been
battling the Turkish government in southeastern
Turkey.
At a time when the rest of Iraq
spirals into bloodshed, Kurdistan is seen by
regional powers Iran and Turkey as an increasingly
critical strategic region. The political impetus
is shifting from the clutch of mostly secular
politicians who have spent the past three months
huddled in Baghdad's isolated Green Zone fortress
to the Sunni and Shi'ite clerics who are in daily
contact with people in the streets. The Kurds hope
to stem this tendency, even as the ruling clerics
in Tehran watch with approval the Iraqi drift
toward popular Muslim figures.
In Arbil,
the political capital of northern Iraq, Kurdish
politicians are sounding cautious notes about the
prospect of independence. The Speaker of the
Kurdish parliament, Adnan al-Mufti, has been
forced to erect a checkpoint outside his pleasant
house and barricade it behind suicide-bomb
barriers. A victim of attempted poisoning and the
target of a bombing, he is described as the
ultimate Kurdish political insider.
"The
Iranians have their own policy and it's something
very complicated," he said. "The Iraqi people
cannot be used as a card in this game. We cannot
be used as pawns by the region's powers."
Iason Athanasiadis is an
Iran-based correspondent.
(Copyright
2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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transferred in anonymous bags or
containers by ship, airplane or donkey over the
mountains of the northern Arabian Peninsula and
through northern Iraq. 
