The Corner Where Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan Meet

Joël van Houdt for The New York Times

The Afghan National Police, near the Iran-Afghanistan border.

On the southern outskirts of the city Zaranj, where the last derelict shanties meet an endless, vacant country — beige desert and beige sky, whipped together into a single coalescing haze by the accurately named Wind of 120 Days — there is a place called Ganj: a kind of way station for Afghan migrants trying to reach Iran. Every day except Friday, a little before 2 in the afternoon, hundreds of them gather. Squatting along a metal fence, Hazaras, Tajiks, Pashtuns, Uzbeks and Baluchis from all corners of the country watch the local drivers move through a fleet of dilapidated pickups — raising hoods, inspecting dipsticks. A few hope to continue on to Turkey, Greece and ultimately Western Europe. Most harbor humbler dreams: of living illegally in Iran, of becoming bricklayers, construction laborers, factory workers or farmhands. When one of the drivers announces he is ready to go, as many as 20 migrants pile into the back. The leaf springs flex; the bumper nearly kisses the ground. Arms and legs spill over the sides. Finally, apprehension gives way to expectation, and a few men laugh and wave goodbye.

Joël van Houdt for The New York Times

Gulbadeen, injured in the land-mine attack on the truck, at the bus station in Zaranj.

Two days before I first visited Ganj, early this September, one such pickup, speeding south through the desert toward the lawless border region of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, struck a freshly planted land mine that killed the two smugglers in its cab and sent airborne its human cargo like firewood or fruit. My interpreter and I happened to be walking by the provincial hospital, in downtown Zaranj, shortly after the victims were admitted. At the front gate, a young orderly viciously punched a man trying to enter the premises on his motorcycle. With his feet firmly planted on the ground, the man on the motorcycle revved his engine, spinning the back tire in place and churning up a thick cloud of dust even as the orderly continued to assail his head and face. The man on the motorcycle, it turned out, was a relative of one of the dead smugglers, and in his grief, he appeared almost to welcome the blows.

Zaranj is the capital of Nimruz — by many measures the most isolated province in Afghanistan, at the remotest southwest corner of the country — and the hospital's resources were predictably limited. Most of the survivors had been advised to get themselves to Herat, some 300 miles north, where doctors would be better equipped to help them. For all the billions of dollars that have been invested over the past decade, parts of Afghanistan remain beyond the reach of Western influence. While neighboring Helmand Province has represented the epicenter of counterinsurgency efforts, Nimruz feels like a different country altogether. There are no coalition troops or Afghan soldiers or foreign NGO workers. Instead, the Afghans have been left to find their own way — and fight their own wars. We hailed a rickshaw and headed to a bus stop outside town. There we found a man in his early 20s slouched against the wall of a small store. His shirt and pants were darkly soaked with blood. A bandage was wrapped around his head. A kinked tube ran from his arm to an IV bag tied to a door handle with a loose piece of gauze. His name was Gulbadeen. He told us there had been 10 other men in the truck from his village in Faryab Province, each of whom was determined to try again. Gulbadeen himself sneaked into Iran three years earlier, working as a laborer, sending money home, until he was deported last winter. "I'm done," he said. "I can't do this another time."

In Ganj, no one wanted to talk about the episode. Clearly the local drivers did not appreciate my bringing it up with their prospective customers. The longer we lingered, the tenser the atmosphere became. An old man with a missing finger pulled me aside and admonished: "Our life depends on this smuggling business. If this ends, we will have nothing. There's no other work here. I advise you to leave this place." Eyeing me appraisingly, he added: "Be careful. You would be worth a lot of money."

One reason for the hostility, no doubt, was that the people-smuggling business in Nimruz was suffering. Until recently, Zaranj profited immensely from the tens of thousands of Afghans, displaced by war and poverty, who emigrate west each year. The border is only a 10-minute drive from downtown, where more than 150 hotels, owned by local smugglers, once catered exclusively to a steady flow of migrants crossing the open desert into Iran. In those days, you could walk up to a checkpoint, pay a bribe and get into a car, Tehran-bound. The highly efficient system was administered by the Baluchis: a small ethnic minority who remained united through a distinct language and culture long after their homeland was divided among three often-rivalrous nations. Indeed, the Baluchis from each of those nations had become adept at working together to ferry from one country to another, and sometimes to another, humans, goods, drugs, fuel, weapons and — especially since the recent collapse of the Iranian rial — currency.

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