By FUAD HAQIQI
SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region – Forced by unemployment and lack of opportunities, many in Iran’s deprived Kurdish areas risk arrest or death to eke out a living smuggling goods across the border with Iraqi Kurdistan.
“These are the lowest income people. They have not been able to go to school and they have no professional skills,” says Rebaz Qurbaninejad, a doctoral candidate in geopolitics at Tehran University who has studied the smuggling trade.
He says that the Kurdish border areas are the poorest in Iran, and that for many smuggling is the last resort to make a living.
“These people don’t want to become beggars, so they resort to smuggling or become porters,” says
Qurbaninejad.
But working across the treacherous mountain passes comes with grave risks: The smugglers must hazard minefields, and ambushes by Iranian border guards.
According to a study by the Kurdpa website, in 2012 alone more than 67 Kurdish border porters and smugglers were killed by Iranian frontier guards and more than 40 were wounded.
Muhammad, a Kurdish villager and border smuggler who has lost many close friends who were killed by Iranian sentries, says, “There is no other job whatsoever, that’s why I am forced into this work.”
He says he must carry loads of up to 110 kilograms at a time, and run for 20 kilometers during some parts of the hazardous trek. If he gets caught and his load is confiscated, he must repay the owner of the goods.
Qurbaninejad says that despite the great agricultural potential of the fertile border areas, the Iranian government has ignored the regions, failing to invest in projects that would generate jobs.
“Even though the central provinces of Iran are dry deserts, many people (from the poor Kurdish areas) still migrate there looking for jobs, because that is where the government runs most projects,” he says.
His research on the border smuggling shows that the porters only make enough money to survive, without being able to build a future.
“What little money they earn makes no progress in their lives,” he says. “It is money for day-to-day survival.”
Iran shares a several hundred kilometer border with the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and for years smuggling has been the only source of income for poor villagers on both sides of the border.
Strict border posts and ambushes, however, have not been able to curb the traffic, and Qurbaninejad does not think the Iranian government can succeed in closing the smuggling routes.
“As long as the people of the border areas have no job opportunities, the smuggling phenomenon will always be there,” he says, adding that the Iranian regime is not only to blame for the poverty.
“Many of the local businessmen have grown rich through border smuggling, but they don’t bother even to build a factory where 10 people can work,” according to Qurbaninejad.
“If these people have any other job, they won’t risk their lives like this,” says Abdullah Latifpour, a university professor in the Kurdish city of Saqez.
Kurdish-Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi recounted the bleak lives of the smugglers in his 2000 film, A Time for Drunken Horses. The film, which won an award at the HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannes_Film_Festival" \o "Cannes Film Festival" Cannes Film Festival that same year, involves a young boy forced into smuggling out of poverty, and shows how smugglers feed their packhorses with liquor to keep them warm during the harsh mountain winters.
