PENJUEN, Kurdistan-Iraq, Atta Muhammad, his
mouth muffled by a keffiyeh, offers what in Iraq is
an unusual parting gift: "Beer, whiskey?"
Muhammad, 36, is a key liquor smuggler in this
bootleggers' heaven high up in the Zagros Mountains,
a short mule's ride from the Iranian border. And
while electricity, culture and women are scarce
around here, he has hundreds of cases of liquor in
stock.
In Iraq, the stuff is frowned upon but is legal,
cheap and untaxed. Just a few kilometers down the
road in Iran, alcohol is banned and increasingly
expensive as Teheran clamps down on anything that it
claims detracts from the Iranian Islamic Revolution
of 1979.
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has recently
banned Western music, but Muhammad and his team of
pack mules intend to brave the driving rain,
landmines and Iranian border guards to smuggle
liquor to Iran, as they do nearly every night.
Amstel, Heineken and cheap whiskey are popular in
Iran, according to Muhammad, who has been smuggling
for the better part of 20 years. Demand has never
shrunk. "Even the clerics drink," he said. |
A liquor smuggler meets friends along a mountain
track outside the Kurdistan-Iraq border town of
Penjuen.
Photo: Matthew Gutman |
|
Alcohol is also the most profitable bootleg item,
explained Muhammad and several other booze-brokers
interviewed in this half-deserted border town of
bootleggers and security agents.
A sniper's rifle, an AK-47 and magazine clips droop
from the walls of the hut-like artwork. Muhammad, an
ethnic Kurd and a Peshmerga, or a Kurdish
militiaman, said the weapons are for fighting Ansar
al-Islam, an antigovernment Kurdish Islamic
terrorist group. A bribe of a few dollars - which he
called "tips" - and a clever mule are the best
defenses against Iranian border guards, he
explained.
Some 25 million Kurds, the largest stateless people
in the world, are scattered over Syria, Turkey, Iran
and Iraq, and their common language often
facilitates trade.
Alcohol is one in a constellation of products traded
daily across the border here at Penjeun. Everyday
dozens of porters trudge in thick rubber boots over
muddy hills to reach Iran. A few logs thrown across
a stream lead men carrying anything from people to
tea to washing machines illegally over the border.
On their way back, they may bring expensive Iranian
candies, kerosene, benzene, or more people, said
Bakhtyar Dewdil, 24, a college-educated Kurd born in
Iran. He earned a degree in chemistry there but
couldn't afford to make ends meet. "My wife left me
because I could not pay the rent," he said.
"The money as a porter is not good, but I am getting
out of debt," he explained, guiding a journalist to
the Iranian side of the border.
Most often the border guards who stop the smugglers
are bribed. For a dollar, people and products are
most often overlooked.
When alcohol is involved, they may shoot the mules
and sometimes their riders, as punishment.
During the day, liquor smuggler Muhammad sleeps, or
sips tea while watching the satellite TV rigged up
to the thatched roof of his hut. At night this clump
of huts clinging to a mountain becomes a staging
ground for Muhammad's men and mules, "sometimes with
10 cases of wine, sometimes with 500," he said. He
sells whatever he sends for at least 5 times the
cost.
"Wine," the local word for both beer and spirits,
softens the term. Hard liquor, specifically "Black
Jack" whiskey, is the drink of choice for most in
Iran, or even those Iranians who cross into Iraq on
a day's jaunt through the bootleggers camps, as
though on a tour of a wineries in Napa Valley.
The thriving black market trade is also an indicator
of some Iranian's dissatisfaction with their regime.
"Iran is a good country, but we have a very bad
government. We have no freedom, no satellite TV, no
justice," said Ali Reza Dodelband, 42. Shivering in
a jeans-jacket, he stood just feet from the official
border crossing, gathering a crew of stout porters
to carry about three tons of tea across the border.
He would like to move from Iran to Iraq, "then I
want [US President George W. Bush] to bomb Iran.
Tell Bush he must bomb the -," Dodelband then
pantomimes the wrapping of a turban over his
combover, referring to Iran's clerics.
Meager pay and Dodelband's hate for the regime
pushed him to flee his job in the Iranian air force
as a helicopter crew chief, he said.
Dodelband now takes home a modest $400 a month, only
$150 more than he did in the army. The waiting in
the biting cold and the risk of arrest are just part
of "being my own boss, like in America," he said
nudging this reporter.
Times have certainly changed. Before the US invaded
Iraq in March 2003, the lively cross-border
smuggling was the Kurdish lifeline. With economic
sanctions on Iraq, and Saddam's sanctions on the
Kurds, this border town and a couple of others
served as the Kurd's umbilical cord. Fuel, food and
basic building materials were all trucked over the
border to the isolated Kurdish regions, often
through this mountainous border crossing.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Iran also
sheltered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds
fleeing Iraq's chemical gas attacks. Iranian troops
even evacuated the wounded from Halabje, and opened
the town to foreign film crews to document the
chemical gas attacks there in 1988.
Back then, the smuggling also existed, observed
Muhammad, and "no matter what, it will continue to
exist. And we will continue to provide the win. That
is the way it is."
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