Shafaq News- Erbil

More than 1,000 drug traffickers have been arrested in the Kurdistan Region since the current cabinet took office in July 2019, a senior KRG official declared on Wednesday.

Dindar Zebari, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Coordinator for International Advocacy, told a counter-narcotics conference that the KRG had not limited its response to enforcement, noting that six specialized health centers had been established inside correctional institutions to rehabilitate people recovering from addiction.

The current KRG cabinet, led by Prime Minister Masrour Barzani, took office on July 10, 2019, when the Kurdistan Parliament approved the cabinet and ministers took the oath of office. Under this cabinet, official KRG data shows drug-related detainees rising from 1,182 in 2019 to 2,728 in 2024, while traffickers listed in the same data increased from 212 to 831 over the same period.

The KRG previously cited federal-Regional operations that led to the arrest of 13 major traffickers in Baghdad, Mosul, Al-Sulaymaniyah, and locations outside Iraq. In May, Iraq’s National Intelligence Service seized more than one million Captagon pills and about 100 kilograms of other narcotics in coordination with authorities in Al-Sulaymaniyah.

To combat rising drug crime, Iraq, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and the World Health Organization launched a national drug situation report in 2025 that UNODC described as Iraq’s most comprehensive drug-use review in more than a decade, focusing on synthetic substances, treatment, and rehabilitation systems.

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