Minister Calls Int'l Support for Iran’s Fight against Illicit Drugs "Insufficient"
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The international community does not support Iran’s fight against drug-trafficking sufficiently, Iranian Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli underlined.
Speaking to Russia Today TV network on Friday, Rahmani Fazli said that Iran has a long border with a state (Afghanistan) that is the world’s biggest narcotics producer, but the international community doesn’t provide any practical help for Iran’s fight against drug traffickers.
“If the international community is really serious about the issue, they should provide us with equipment, share their intelligence, and conduct joint operations to block drug transit routes,” Rahmani Fazli, who was in Moscow to sign an anti-drug document with the senior Russian drug official Victor Ivanov, underscored.
Iran is on a major transit route for drugs being smuggled from Afghanistan to Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the country's war on drug-traffickers has claimed the lives of nearly 4,000 Iranian police forces.
Elsewhere in his remarks, the Iranian official expressed Tehran’s serious concern with the use of drug trafficking money to sponsor extremism and called on all countries in the region to do their part to prevent extremists from receiving financial support from the illegal drug trade.
As regards the ISIL terrorists’ threat, Rahmani Fazli stressed that the Takfiris do not pose any threat to Iran, and there is no ISIL militant in the country.
The ISIL is a militant group operating in Iraq and Syria which is believed to be supported by the West and some regional Arab countries. The terrorist group claims as an independent state the territory of Iraq and Syria, with implied future claims intended over more of the Levant, including Lebanon, occupied Palestine, Jordan, Cyprus, and Southern Turkey.
The extremist group, which controls parts of Syria's northern territory, sent its fighters into neighboring Iraq in June, quickly seizing swathes of land straddling the border between the two countries.
Meanwhile, a combination of concentrated attacks by the Iraqi military and the popular forces, who rushed to take arms after top Iraqi cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa calling for fight against the militants, have blunted the edge of the ISIL offensive.
