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OfflineSirTripAlot
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Dukes of Hazard, Iranian Style!!!!!!!!
    #5097106 - 12/23/05 07:49 AM (18 years, 3 months ago)

Poor Bastards.........

Iranians want booze, say Iraqi bootleggers
By MATTHEW GUTMAN
PENJUEN, Iraq



Talkbacks for this article: 5

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.

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."


--------------------
“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

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Offlinerawtoxic
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Registered: 10/06/02
Posts: 2,097
Loc: smokey mountains
Last seen: 13 years, 7 months
Re: Dukes of Hazard, Iranian Style!!!!!!!! [Re: SirTripAlot]
    #5097143 - 12/23/05 08:11 AM (18 years, 3 months ago)

Quote:

The thriving black market trade is also an indicator of some Iranian's dissatisfaction with their regime






It's funny you would never read something like this used in context with America,  but some 3rd world country we are considering of invading, no problem :smile:

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OfflineSirTripAlot
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Registered: 01/11/05
Posts: 7,633
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Re: Dukes of Hazard, Iranian Style!!!!!!!! [Re: rawtoxic]
    #5097213 - 12/23/05 08:48 AM (18 years, 3 months ago)

Well its true......no music or booze? You are depriving people. Of course they will turn to ways of obtaining the things they want, they are human.


--------------------
“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

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Offlinedaimyo
Monticello

Registered: 05/13/04
Posts: 7,751
Last seen: 12 years, 1 month
Re: Dukes of Hazard, Iranian Style!!!!!!!! [Re: SirTripAlot]
    #5097480 - 12/23/05 10:54 AM (18 years, 3 months ago)

I need to get over there and set up a distillery in the mountains. We should have an SF team over there flooding Iran and making some money as well.


--------------------
"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

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OfflineCatalysis
EtherealEngineer

Registered: 04/23/02
Posts: 1,742
Last seen: 15 years, 8 months
Re: Dukes of Hazard, Iranian Style!!!!!!!! [Re: SirTripAlot]
    #5097614 - 12/23/05 11:47 AM (18 years, 3 months ago)

I know someone who lives in Iran. He says they drink regular European and American beers, the only difference is that you can get up to 10 years in prison for it if you are caught. At least it is not as bad as having sex before marriage, for that you could be put to death.

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Offlinegregorio
Too Damn Old
Male

Registered: 09/08/05
Posts: 2,837
Loc: Classified
Last seen: 13 days, 14 hours
Re: Dukes of Hazard, Iranian Style!!!!!!!! [Re: SirTripAlot]
    #5103331 - 12/24/05 10:21 PM (18 years, 3 months ago)

Quote:

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.





I didn'y know that they were the largest stateless people in the entire world.

Another thing that left me shaking my head while I was reading that article is that the guy has Satelite TV  rigged up to the roof of his hut. :crazy:

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