“The situation in the country was tough. Go try to find a job, but there was no job,” he says. “Once, twice and I got stuck (with crystal methamphetamine). I got trapped. I couldn’t get out.”
The woman he says was the love of his life left him.
Throughout this report, Iraqi drug users have been identified by pseudonyms to protect their privacy.
“We don’t have the capacity,” says Colonel Mohammed Alwan, the commander of the drug unit in this part of the capital. “Sometimes we have to slow down work because we don’t have the capacity to keep detainees and prisoners, especially not with the pandemic.”
He estimates that 10% of the population in his area of operations is addicted to drugs, overwhelmingly methamphetamine.
Several officials told CNN that the Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated drug trafficking in Iraq.
Years of war severely fractured the Iraqi state, with several powerful armed forces operating out of government control. Corruption is rampant and the economy, for most Iraqis, is in a seemingly endless downward cycle.
Iraqi youth are struggling to find work, regardless of their level of education. In 2020, the pandemic hit an already fragile economy. According to a World Bank report in the fall of 2020, millions of Iraqis are expected to plunge into poverty due to the twin collisions of the Covid-19 and a global collapse in the price of oil, which feeds the Iraqi economy.
Legions of disillusioned youth who wanted to escape harsh realities began to increase and drug trafficking prospered.
“Drug traffickers have their way, they usually give drugs for free to unemployed and poor people to attract them until they become addicted,” General Amad Hussein told anti-drug police as he handed out flyers with a hotline number in an impoverished Baghdad neighborhood.
“That person then starts stealing money to pay for it or even turns that person into a dealer.”
Under the rule of former President and dictator Saddam Hussein, the ultimate punishment for drug use was death. That draconian legislation boosted trade deep underground and kept the streets largely clean.
In addition to triggering chaos in Iraq, the 2003 U.S. invasion that overthrew the country’s brutal former ruler also weakened its borders, bolstering drug trafficking.
Officials say the traffic culminated in 2014 with the arrival of ISIS and Captagon, a popular amphetamine among the group’s fighters, which arrived in Iraq from Syria.
But a U.S.-led coalition campaign against ISIS sparked a strengthened security presence on the Iraqi-Syrian border. Trade moved south of the Shiite majority in Iraq and its porous border with Iran.
The vast majority of crystal methamphetamine, which accounts for about 60 percent of the drug trade in Iraq, comes from that border area, senior anti-drug officials told CNN.
“Neighboring countries are using this to destroy Iraqi society, the Iraqi economy,” Colonel Alwan alleges. “We have established several channels with the Iranian side to address this issue, but we have not reached an agreement to address it.”
The Iranian foreign ministry has not responded to CNN’s request for comment on cross-border smuggling operations.
The anti-drug unit, undervalued and underfunded, has not yet captured any major traders anywhere in the country, despite raids nationwide. Officials say the beneficiaries of the trade range from Sunni extremist groups and Shiite militias backed by Iran to criminal gangs.
Thuraya was arrested next to her husband inside a house where she was dealing. They had 300 grams of crystal methamphetamine, with a street value of about $ 18,000. Someone whom Thuraya is known as his “friend”, an intermediary who made regular runs to the Iranian border to pick up drugs from a supplier, was also detained during the raid.
Sitting in the Baghdad women’s prison, she says she has only a vague notion of the shadow of the supply chain at the border. They received crystal methamphetamine “from the big dealers,” he continues, adding that he has no information about their names and origins.
Thuraya would help smuggle it through checkpoints in the cities where the trio operated, handing it over to other dealers or selling it themselves.
The prison where we know her is specifically for women involved in drugs or prostitution. She says her husband introduced her to crystalline methamphetamine before they got married, when she saw he had fallen into a depression. At that time, their previous marriage had just failed and she was forcibly estranged from her children.
“As a woman, it’s easy to go through checkpoints. They don’t look for us. I would hide it all over my body,” Thuraya says, gesturing to her chest, hips and legs under her long black abaya.
Over the years, several insurgent groups and militias have used women to smuggle explosives and weapons to evade security forces ’radar. Recently, according to security authorities, drug networks have increased the recruitment of women to facilitate trafficking.
“For women, working in drug trafficking is easier than for men, they can work covertly, they don’t get too much attention,” says Col Alwan, who pulls out the phone to show us pictures of two women their unit was captured a few days earlier. They stand behind a small table lined with glass methamphetamine, pipes and the rest of the stock they came across.
“We don’t have a female force, capable of looking for women,” she adds, pointing to one of the photographs. “He told us he was going with a man to a rental place and told him that if you want to have sex with me, you have to buy drugs or take drugs.”
Stuck in a network of addictions, users struggle to get to the exit. A recent reform of the law has lifted legal sanctions for users seeking help, but many are unaware of this, according to security officials.
Without advancing, dealers who are trapped are jailed for up to 15 years. Users, regardless of the drug, serve a one-year sentence.
Enass Kareem, a small dark-haired woman, scrolls by phone reading messages from an Iraqi drug-conscious Facebook page.
“I beg you; I want to be treated. I am fifteen years old from Basra, please treat me like your brother.”
About a year ago, Enass, a middle school biology teacher, noticed that some of her students were using it.
“They skipped classes and when they attended they weren’t focused,” he explains. “I noticed other signs like in his teeth, in his aggressive responses.”
He was reluctant to inform the school administration about the suspicious users, for fear that they would be expelled. Instead, he quietly reached out to his parents and had them rehabilitated.
“I started a Facebook page to raise awareness about drugs and options for addicts.” She explains.
People started texting him, asking for help for them, for their loved ones, for their friends.
“Through my contacts with users, I realized that one of the most important reasons is downtime. Most users don’t have a job. Even those with college degrees can’t work,” he says.
He compares drugs to a form of terrorism, which can easily escape scrutiny when it quietly enters homes, schools, and universities.
“It’s the destruction of a society through drugs. It destroys people psychologically, crime increases and families break up,” he says. “In the future, the impact of that will be severe.”
He works closely with the anti-drug department, which would also rather recover addicts than end up behind bars.
The rehabilitation block of the Ibn Rushd mental health center in Baghdad is full; doctors and nurses need to get out of patients faster than they would like.
Abdulkarim’s eyes are bright, his teeth and jaw hurt, he says; his brain seems to be able to explode. He is sitting on one of the rickety beds swinging slightly back and forth.
“I’m going to go through it,” he promises the nurse to register. He’s only been here three days; the crystal methamphetamine cravings running through her body seem overwhelming.
Abdulkarim was a day laborer. He would be on the street with the others stopped, angry and downcast.
“They made me get into this. To forget, to escape,” he recalls. “Unemployment pushed us towards that. And the situation in Iraq, the miserable situation.”
Anti-drug officials say the country is at war, a war they fear they will lose.
“The era of traditional war is over with two opposing armies,” General Hussein says. “The enemies of this country will do everything possible to prevent us from developing and that is a form of war. They want to destroy the core of our society, our youth.”
Aqeel Najm contributed to this Baghdad report.