TEHRAN Iran's morality police are cracking down on the sale of Barbie dolls to protect the public from what they see as pernicious western culture eroding Islamic values, shopkeepers said on Monday. 
 
 As the West imposes the toughest ever sanctions on Iran and tensions rise over its nuclear program, inside the country the Barbie ban is part of what the government calls a "soft war" against decadent cultural influences. 
 
 "About three weeks ago they (the morality police) came to our shop, asking us to remove all the Barbies," said a shopkeeper in a toy shop in northern Tehran. 
 
 Iran's religious rulers first declared Barbie, made by U.S. company Mattel Inc, un-Islamic in 1996, citing its "destructive cultural and social consequences." Despite the ban, the doll has until recently been openly on sale in Tehran shops. 
 
 The new order, issued around three weeks ago, forced shopkeepers to hide the leggy, busty blonde behind other toys as a way of meeting popular demand for the dolls while avoiding being closed down by the police. 
 
 A range of officially approved dolls launched in 2002 to counter demand for Barbie have not proven successful, merchants told Reuters. 
 
 The dolls named Sara, a female, and Dara, a male arrived in shops wearing a variety of traditional dress, with Sara fully respecting the rule that all women in Iran must obey in public, of covering their hair and wearing loose-fitting clothes. 
 
 "My daughter prefers Barbies. She says Sara and Dara are ugly and fat," said Farnaz, a 38-year-old mother, adding that she could not find Barbie cartoon DVDs as she was told they were also banned from public sale. 
 
 Pointing to a doll covered in black long veil, a 40-year-old Tehran toy shop manager said: "We still sell Barbies but secretly and put these in the window to make the police think we are just selling these kinds of dolls." 
 
 Iran has fought a running battle to purge pervasive western culture from the country since its Islamic revolution overthrew a western-backed king in 1979, enforcing Islamic dress codes, banning Western music and foreign satellite television. 
 
 As another swipe at the West, Iranians will soon be able to buy toy versions of the U.S. spy drone that it captured in December, Iranian media reported. 
 
 Models of the bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel - which Iran's military displayed on TV after it was downed near the Afghan border - will be mass produced in a variety of colors, reports said. 
 
 (Editing by Paul Casciato) ||||| Iran's cyber monitors often tout their fight against the West's "soft war" of influence through the Web, but trying to block Google's popular Gmail appeared to be a swipe too far. 
 
 FILE- In this Monday, Feb. 13, 2012 file photo, Iranian women use computers at an Internet cafe in central Tehran. Iran’s cyber monitors often tout their efforts to fight the West’s 'soft war' of influence... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Monday, Feb. 13, 2012 file photo, Iranian women use computers at an Internet cafe in central Tehran. Iran’s cyber monitors often tout their efforts to fight the West’s 'soft war' of influence... (Associated Press) 
 
 Complaints piled up _ even from email-starved parliament members _ and forced authorities Sunday to double down on their promises to create a parallel Web universe with Tehran as its center. 
 
 The strong backlash and the unspecific pledges for an Iran-centric Internet alternative to the Silicon Valley powers and others highlight the two sides of the Islamic Republic's ongoing battles with the Web. It's spurred another technological mobilization that fits neatly into Iran's self-crafted image as the Muslim world's showcase for science, including sending satellites into orbit, claiming advances in cloning and stem cell research and facing down the West over its nuclear program. 
 
 But there also are the hard realities of trying to reinvent the Web. Iran's highly educated and widely tech-savvy population is unlikely to warm quickly to potential clunky homegrown browsers or email services. And then there's the potential political and economic fallout of trying to close the tap on familiar sites such as Gmail. 
 
 "Some problems have emerged through the blocking of Gmail," Hussein Garrousi, a member of a parliamentary committee on industry, was quoted Sunday by the independent Aftab-e Yazd daily. What he apparently meant was that many lawmakers were angry and missing their emails. 
 
 He said that parliament would summon the minister of telecommunications for questioning if the ministry did not lift the Gmail ban, which was imposed last week in respond to clips on Google-owned YouTube of a film mocking the Prophet Muhammad that set off deadly protests across the Islamic world. 
 
 Even many newspapers close to the government complained over the email disruptions. On Saturday, the Asr-e Ertebat weekly reported that Iranians had paid a total of $4.5 million to purchase proxy services to reach blocked sites, including Facebook and YouTube, over the past month. 
 
 Iranian authorities _ perhaps recognizing the risks at hand _ decided against taking a symbolic twin shot at Google and cut access to the Web browser in a country with 32 million Internet users among a population of 75 million, according to official statistics. 
 
 That would rank online Iran among the world's top 20 in terms of sheer numbers of users, and equivalent to some European countries in per capita Web use at more than 40 percent, according to the private monitoring group Internet World Stats. The World Bank, however, puts Iran's Internet link rate at just 21 percent last year. 
 
 The U.S. is among the world's highest at more than 75 percent. 
 
 Iran's deputy telecoms minister, Ali Hakim Javadi, told reporters that Iranian authorities were considering lifting the Gmail ban. But he also used the opportunity to again promise development of Iran's domestic alternatives: the Fakhr ("Pride") search engine and the Fajr ("Dawn") email, Aftab-e Yazd reported. 
 
 When reporters noted the quality of Gmail services, Javadi quipped: "If there is Mercedes Benz on the street, that doesn't mean everyone drives a Mercedes." 
 
 Iran's clerical establishment has long signaled its intent to get citizens off of the international Internet _ which they say promotes Western values _ and onto a "national" and "clean" domestic network. Earlier this year, Iran's police chief, Esmail Ahmadi Moghadam, called Google an "instrument of espionage" rather than a search engine. 
 
 But it is unclear whether Iran has the technical capacity to follow through on its ambitious plans, or is willing to risk the economic damage and the social shock waves. 
 
 The Internet has steadily become part of Iran's fabric since the first Farsi-language sites developed a decade ago by Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakshan, who is considered one of the founders of Iran's social media community. Derakshan, however, was detained in 2008 and sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison two years later as the battles heated up between liberals seeking open access to the Web and authorities trying to erect their own version of China's "Great Firewall," the name given to Beijing's extensive filtering and censorship of the Internet. 
 
 Sites such as Twitter and Facebook were pillars of the street revolts after the disputed 2009 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The powerful Revolutionary Guard responded by recruiting and training its own cyber force to patrol the Web and, later, try to defend against virus attacks on nuclear and other sites that Iran has blamed on the West and its allies. 
 
 Some Web security experts also have raised the possibility of Iranian hackers being behind some recent high-profile computer attacks, such as disruptions at Saudi Arabia's state oil giant Saudi Aramco and Qatari natural gas producer RasGas earlier this month. Iran has denied any links. 
 
 In a video message for Iranian new year in March, President Barack Obama denounced what he called the "electronic curtain" that keeps ordinary Iranians from reaching out to Americans and the West. 
 
 A few weeks later, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered the creation of an Internet oversight agency that included top military, security and political figures in the country's boldest attempt yet to control the Internet. The panel is headed by Ahmadinejad and includes powerful figures in the security establishment such as the intelligence chief and the commander of the Revolutionary Guard. 
 
 It's not Iran's first attempt to hold off what hardliners call a Western "cultural invasion." The so-called Barbie wars have gone on for more than a decade with periodic raids to confiscate the iconic American dolls from toy stores. Iran also introduced its own dolls _ twins Dara and Sara _ designed to promote traditional values with modest clothing and pro-family values, but it hasn't significantly dented the demand for Barbie dolls. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Murphy reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
– As the US tries to crack down on Iran, Iran is doing some cracking down of its own—on that oh-so-American symbol, the Barbie doll. The country's morality police have begun enforcing a Barbie ban issued in 1996. (Authorities blasted the doll's "destructive cultural and social consequences" at the time.) Reuters reports that the doll had been stocked on Tehran shops' shelves all the same, until about three weeks ago, when the morality police "came to our shop, asking us to remove all the Barbies," says one shop owner. Of course, some Barbies are being tucked behind other toys, rather than removed all together, to keep up with demand. If seems that Sara and Dara, two government-OKed dolls released in 2002, haven't grabbed the hearts and minds of Iranian children. One mother says her daughter "prefers Barbies. She says Sara and Dara are ugly and fat." (Barbie, clearly, to the rescue.) But what should obedient parents buy for their kiddies instead? How about a toy soon to hit shelves: a mini RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone ... a replica of the one that went down in Iran last month. The AP notes that the manufacturer plans to send the US one of the models, in response to Washington's demand that the drone be returned. Iranian kids can get theirs for about $4.