The Criminal Empire of Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Part 2: The Narco Corridor
From heroin and meth to captagon, the IRGC oversees one of the world's most profitable drug empires.
On the morning of March 7, 2012, the United States Treasury Department issued a press release. It named Brigadier General Gholamreza Baghbani as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Act. He was the commander of the Quds Force base in Zahedan, a city of half a million people pressed against the Afghan border in Iran’s southeast, and the first Iranian military officer so designated.
The language was careful but the charge was extraordinary. Baghbani, the Treasury stated, had used his position as a senior military commander to allow Afghan drug traffickers to move heroin and opiates through Iranian territory. He had also supplied those traffickers with precursor chemicals for producing drugs inside Iran.
In exchange, he had arranged for the smugglers to deliver weapons to the Taliban, then actively fighting and killing American soldiers in Afghanistan. His direct superior in this arrangement was Qasem Soleimani, the Quds Force commander who would become, in the years before his 2020 assassination, perhaps the most powerful military figure in the Middle East.
“Today’s action exposes IRGC-QF involvement in trafficking narcotics,” said Under-Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen, “made doubly reprehensible here because it is done as part of a broader scheme to support terrorism.”
Baghbani was not an ordinary drug trafficker. He did not sell drugs and did not move drugs. Instead, he controlled a border through which vast quantities of the world’s heroin had to pass, and monetized it.
He ran the world’s most consequential drug corridor the same way the IRGC now runs the Strait of Hormuz: not as a trafficker but as a toll collector.
The IRGC is not a drug trafficking organisation in any conventional sense. It does not own laboratories, distribute product, or employ street dealers. What it owns is are borders, the ports, the checkpoints, and the authority to decide who passes and who dies.
