TEHRAN - The Iranian Intelligence Ministry’s main strategy is countering major sources of narcotics, Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alawi announced on Monday. 

Addressing a meeting of the managers, secretaries, and officials of provincial anti-narcotic coordination councils, Alawi said, “The Intelligence Ministry’s strategy is confronting the major sources of drug trafficking networks.”

He added, “We must seek the causes, not the effects. We must also seek what the cause is behind resorting to drug trafficking. Paying attention to effects and ignoring the causes is meant that we have always to be engaged in the effects.”

“With reviewing the root causes of terrorism we will reach to drug trafficking trade,” he went on to say. 

Iran is at the forefront of the fight against drug trafficking. About 4000 Iranian police forces have so far been martyred to protect the world from the menace of drugs.

The Iranian anti-narcotic police stage periodic operations against drug traffickers and dealers, but reports - which among others indicate an improved and systematic dissemination of information - reveal that the world's most forefront and dedicated anti-narcotic force (as UN drug-campaign assessments put it) has embarked on a long-term countrywide plan to crack down on the drug trade since more than a decade ago.

In May, Iranian Police Chief Brigadier General Hossein Ashtari described Iran as a pioneering state in the campaign against drug trafficking.

"We have declared our information and needs to the international organizations and I should say that we have not pinned hope on their aid," he said.

"We do not have hope that the international organizations can seriously confront" the cultivation and production of narcotics in Afghanistan, General Ashtari said.

MJ/PA