BASRA, Iraq - Hussein Karim sold his three cars, he sold the land where he planned to build a house, and he spent his savings - several thousand dollars - all on his crystal meth habit.

He is one of thousands of meth addicts in Iraq, a country where drug problems have been rare. But growing addiction here is the most recent manifestation of how the social order has frayed in the years following the American invasion in 2003.

Mr. Karim, 32, now lives in a windowless room with his wife, his three children and his disabled brother.

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Unit Accused of Abusing Drugs and Alcohol

Officers Relieved of Duty After Killing of 24 Iraqis

The marine unit involved in the killing of Iraqi civilians in Haditha last November had suffered a "total breakdown" in discipline and had drug and alcohol problems, according to the wife of one of the battalion's staff sergeants.

The allegations in Newsweek magazine contribute to an ever more disturbing portrait of embattled marines under high stress, some on their third tour of duty after ferocious door-to-door fighting in the Sunni insurgent strongholds of Falluja and Haditha.

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Fears that lawless postwar Iraq is becoming a haven for international drug trafficking have escalated after the country's biggest seizure of heroin.

Officers posing as would-be buyers have found 20 kilograms of the drug hidden in a car, the latest in a string of increasingly large seizures in the past year.

The Afghan-produced heroin comes in via Iraq's porous border with Iran, creating what United Nations officials say is an important new drug route to Europe.

During Saddam Hussein's rule, heroin was virtually unknown in Iraq because of his police-state law enforcement, which imposed the death penalty even for possession.

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Fears that lawless post-war Iraq is becoming a haven for international drug trafficking have escalated after the country's biggest ever seizure of heroin.

Officers posing as would-be buyers found 20kg of the drug hidden in a car on Monday, the latest in a string of increasingly large seizures in the past year.

The Afghan-produced heroin comes in via Iraq's porous border with Iran, creating what United Nations officials say is an important new drug route to Europe and Britain.

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IRAQI militant group Army of Ansar al-Sunna said it killed what it called a drug dealer in the northern city of Mosul and posted a video of the shooting on its website today.

The video showed a man standing in front of a banner bearing the group's name and holding packets of pills in his hands.

"My name is Hussein Ali Hussein, also known as Hussein Haya, and I sell narcotics," the man said before he was blindfolded and shot in the back of the head.

The Sunni Muslim group, which has claimed several attacks and kidnappings in Iraq, has said that the country should be governed by Islamic sharia law and blasted planned national elections this month as an "infidel" practice.

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Militiamen fighting under the banner of radical Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr are pumping themselves up with drugs before confronting coalition forces, according to U.S. military reports and State Department and Iraqi sources.

Although quelled in Najaf in August, the Mahdi's Army militia is still active around southern Iraq and continues to largely control the Baghdad slum known as Sadr City -- the target of repeated U.S. military air raids and tank patrols.

"They give their suicide bombers barbiturates, and the amphetamines are for street fighters who are facing off with the U.S.," a State Department analyst said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

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BAGHDAD -- Every night around 8, Mohammed Fakhri watches the street boys emerge from the shadows of the capital's rough-and-tumble Betaween neighborhood. They roam past Fakhri's metalworking shop, watchful -- he says -- for an opportunity to commit robberies.

He believes they are not driven simply by boredom and poverty, but by drugs. From his narrow workshop amid the warren of small streets and sagging British colonial-era buildings, Fakhri has watched drug use soar in the capital since the war ended, he said.

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An Epidemic of Narcotics Is Making Thugs More Aggressive and Life More Perilous, Reports Peter Beaumont in Baghdad

Zala and his friends live in the gardens of Baghdad. They hang around the banks of the Tigris to beg and steal. Last week Ala and his friends fished a bloated corpse out of the river and handed it to the police, hoping to get some money. Mainly, though, Ala and his gang do drugs.

When I meet them one morning at 10am they already stink of 'tannar' - the paint thinners and glue that they sniff in bags. A small medicine bottle costs 1,000 dinars (60p). The only girl in Ala's gang, a skinny, filthy child probably in her early teens, is clasping a full bottle. What they really like, when they can get it, is 'capsils'. They list the pills you can buy on the streets, especially by the Babb al Sharq, the Eastern Gate: 'pinks' and 'Lebanese', 'eyebrows' and 'crosses', 'reds' and 'Syrians'. Most of all, what these children like is a drug they call Artane, Baghdad's most popular intoxicant.

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Porous Borders, Lack Of Security Are Cited As Cause

BAGHDAD -- Drug trafficking and drug abuse, crimes once punishable by death or long imprisonment during the regime of Saddam Hussein, are infiltrating postwar Iraq, where porous borders and a lack of security make the crimes hard to control, according to Iraqi and foreign officials.

Senior officials from the United Nations drug-monitoring agency say heroin and cannabis have been entering Iraq through the eastern border with Iran.

Gangsters are bringing in illegal drugs from Central Asia through the Kurdish area in the north, and drugs are also moving into Iraq through the southern port of Umm Qasr, said Bernard Frahi, chief of the operations branch of the UN's office of drugs and crime in Vienna.

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BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Ahmed Abid Sadeh is waiting to inhale.

Just 12 years old, he stares vacantly with bloodshot eyes. He tugs at his soiled red-and-white striped shirt and staggers around the filthy public park, where he sleeps at night and gets high by day.

Removing a dirty blue rag from his pocket, Ahmed douses it with ether and takes a big whiff. By 6 p.m., he has consumed half a clear glass bottle that once held cough medicine. When asked why he likes to get high, he can barely stitch together the words.

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The killing of two US soldiers in Baghdad within 24 hours last week shows how far the US and Britain still have to go to end the chaos gripping the Iraqi capital a month after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Anger is growing among Iraqis at the Allies' failure to restore order in a cityawash with weapons and gangs. Heroin - banned under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship upon pain of hanging - is now being traded in back streets.

Residents of Baghdad - a conservative city with a large Shia Muslim population - are complaining that the breakdown in order has accompanied the emergence of some western practices they view as offensive, and which were prohibited, or tightly restricted, under Saddam.

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