Army to tackle drug flows along eastern borders

The Iranian army said on Tuesday it had deployed a battalion of troops near the eastern border with Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight the flow of narcotics into the country, the official news agency IRNA reported. “These troops have been posted between 20 km to 150 km from the border with Pakistan and Afghanistan,” it quoted General Mohammad Salimi as saying. The mobile battalion, comprising four companies, would undertake air and ground patrols, and would be dispatched to the border itself as needed, he said. The army also intended expanding existing air bases and building new ones in the country’s eastern regions, Salimi added. The Iranian parliament had also ordered a special delegation to investigate the situation in Khorassan province, along the border with Afghanistan, amid a sharp rise in drug trafficking and related crimes, the report added.