Disclosure of loopholes exploited by traffickers to smuggle drugs into Iraq

Baghdad -INA

The General Directorate of Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances Control revealed, today, Friday, loopholes that traffickers exploit to smuggle drugs into Iraq, while it spoke in about numbers of traffickers and drug traffickers who were arrested during the past year and the first quarter of this year.

The Director General of the Directorate, Major General Mazen Kamel Mansour, told the Iraqi News Agency (INA), that "there are no specific border points for the purpose of drug smuggling, but there are gaps in the Iraqi borders, whether with the Islamic Republic or Syria, which are exploited by traffickers to smuggle drugs."
Mansour added, "The circumstances that Syria went through created loopholes that traffickers exploited for the purpose of smuggling narcotics into Iraq," stressing that "the directorate has good activity in this regard and has provided martyrs in order to curb drug smuggling into Iraq." 

He aslo revealed "the existence of strategic plans within the Ministry of the Interior and the General Directorate for Drug Control, for the purpose of curbing this phenomenon," noting that "these plans have yielded positive results and there is still an ambition to curb the phenomenon."

Regarding the number of drug traffickers and smugglers who were arrested, Major General Mansour confirmed, "In 2020 the Directorate managed to arrest more than 7 thousand people, more than 4 thousand of them were sentenced, while the rest are still under investigation stages for the purpose of their referral." For the competent courts. "