Minister: Iran to Use Optical Cameras to Bolster Border Control

Iranian Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli announced the country’s plans to use optical cameras to increase control over bordering areas.

“At present, we are busy with transferring fiberoptics to the bordering areas to control the borders by mounting optical cameras,” Rahmani Fazli said on Sunday.

Reminding Iran’s lengthy border with its neighbors, he expressed displeasure in the neighboring states’ (Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq) lax control over the common borders.

Rahmani Fazli, meantime, underlined the Iranian border guards’ intelligence superiority and control over the terrorist and anti-revolutionary groups, including various Takfiri, Taliban, ISIL and al-Qaeda groups, and said despite the fact that some of them are active near the country’s shared borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t dare to make any aggression against Iran and a large number of their members have been arrested and their weapons and ammunitions have been seized.

He said that at present the terrorist groups don’t dare to approach areas any closer than 20km away from the Iranian borders, describing the overall security situation at the country’s borders as good.

In relevant remarks in 2014, former Commander of the Iranian Border Guards Units General Hossein Zolfaqari underlined that his forces would use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to patrol the country’s borders.

“We are in the process of signing contracts with the manufacturing companies to use drones for protecting the country’s borders,” Zolfaqari told reporters at the time.

Also in February, a senior Iranian official said the country’s border guards were using drones to monitor every move along the borderlines.

“The border guards are controlling Iran’s Eastern borders by the help of drones,” Deputy Head of Iran’s Anti-Drug Council Assadollah Hadinejad told FNA on Sunday.

“We have also erected closed circuit cameras along the Eastern borders …,” he added.

In November, Hadinejad announced that the country’s Eastern borders will be fully sealed to make any sneaking by drug traffickers (and terrorists) impossible.

“Nearly all borders of the country have been sealed off and only a small portion of the Southeastern borders is left, which will be sealed off in the coming months to prevent sneaking of drug traffickers into the country,” Hadinejad told FNA at the time.

He underlined that Iran’s all-out efforts to tighten control over the borders, and said it will not take much time to seal the remaining borders of the country.