The Iraqi Ministry of Interior said on Saturday that security forces had arrested 315 drug dealers and users during the past seven days across the country.

The ministry's intelligence agency said in a statement that its forces also confiscated 22 kilograms of narcotic crystal in Baghdad and other Iraqi provinces during the weeklong raids.

The raids also resulted in the arrest of 83 suspected terrorists and the seizure of 102 weapons, six sites for smuggling crude oil and its derivatives and 21 vehicles, the statement said.

The weeklong operation followed dozens of raids launched by the ministry across Iraq from November 2022 to May 2023, during which 8,676 drug dealers and drug users were arrested.

During the same period, more than 406,000 kilograms of various types of drugs, including 9.27 million Captagon pills, 456 weapons, 118 hand grenades, and 808 cars were seized, it added.

Over the past two decades, successive Iraqi governments have been unable to adequately confront the threat posed by drugs due to the chaos and conflicts that have engulfed the country since the U.S. invasion in 2003.

In May, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia' al-Sudani said that waging a "war on drugs" was as important as combating terrorism.

Drug dealing is one of the main ways to fund terrorism, and the circulation of drugs thrives in the shadow of terrorism, al-Sudani said.

(Cover: Iraqi firefighters walk behind burning confiscated drugs at Bismayah camp in Baghdad, Iraq, December 18, 2022. /CFP)