Iran's Needs More Snipers to Combat a Rat Problem

Tehran, Iran is under siege. Couldn't have happened to a nicer regime:

Ten teams of sharpshooters armed with rifles equipped with infra-red sights have bagged more than 2,000 of the brutish rodents in recent weeks, city officials told state media.

That's a drop in the ocean: Iran's rat population easily outnumbers the sprawling capital's 12 million inhabitants. The city council is now boosting the number of sniper squads to 40, officials said.

"It's become a 24/7 war," a grim-faced Mohammad Hadi Heydarzadeh, the head of Tehran municipality's environmental agency, declared on state television last month. "We use chemical poisons to kill the rats during the day and the snipers at night."

See more of our coverage in your search results.

ADD THE DAILY BEAST ON GOOGLE

Justin Green

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.