Securing Iraq’s Frontier, Step by Step

This country’s 900-mile border with Iran is now officially closed at all but three remote posts. The mission of the lonely sentinels here: to prevent combatants and weapons from seeping into a nation that already has more than enough of both.

The reality is something quite different. As a long wave of trucks and visitors from Iran streamed past Friday, customs officer Hatim Sadoun had no metal detector to examine their cargo, and his counterpart in the 3-by-3-foot shack that served as passport control couldn’t keep track of passports because he had no computer.

The border guards had no uniforms, no desert-terrain vehicles and nothing but light rifles to counter the machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades sneaked in by smugglers.

Sadoun and his men earn $45 a month and sleep on the dirt floor of a tent. There are no toilets and no drinking water. They sit in their single spindly chair, they said, “in shifts.”

“If they keep me here in this dirt, under these conditions, how long should they expect that I will be faithful to them? Every day, my hatred for the American soldiers grows,” said Sadoun, a longtime customs officer under Saddam Hussein’s regime who was hired by the interim Iraqi government several months ago. “And if this situation persists, I can tell you, I will be the next one to fight against the Americans.”

This is the front line of defense against whoever tries to cross the border from Iran. Border guards here say Afghans, Pakistanis, Chechens, Tajiks, Saudis and Syrians have tried to pass through along with the thousands of Iranian Shiite Muslim pilgrims traveling each day to Iraq’s holy sites. They say they have been able to detain most -- but probably not all -- of those who lack appropriate travel documents.

“People who come from Iran and from all over Asia, even Europe, must pass through this horrible gate. And still the coalition forces have not offered this place even a single dollar,” Sadoun said.

Two weeks ago, concerned that insurgents and suicide bombers could be slipping in from Iran, the U.S.-led coalition forces took action, closing 16 of the 19 border crossings. The coalition also established a $310-million border enhancement program aimed at providing 8,200 new guards and some computerized passport controls to monitor what they admit is an out-of-control frontier.

“We recognize these borders are porous, and for the security and safety of Iraqis, it needs to be an ever-more-controlled situation,” said David Brannan, a former Ventura County sheriff’s official who is director of security policy for the interim Iraqi government, under the direction of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. “We are moving toward a more controlled environment ... with the Iraqi people’s help.”

Current enforcement, he admitted, “ranges from very good to not so great.”

L. Paul Bremer III, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, traveled to the Munthriya border post Monday with several local and national officials to inspect the new computer system that will provide officials with information about who is entering and leaving the country. Ten officers at Munthriya have been trained on the equipment so far.

“We are never going to have 100% security on the borders of Iraq -- we have to be realistic about that,” Bremer said. But he added that the coalition was making progress by limiting the number of crossings.

Many Iraqis believe that Iran has supported sectarian attacks in Iraq to destabilize its neighbor and expand its own influence as political renewal is underway.

The border crackdown was prompted in part by an orchestrated series of bombings by unidentified assailants of Shiite shrines in Baghdad and the southern city of Karbala on March 2 that killed at least 181 people. The crackdown has substantially reduced the number of pilgrims entering from Iran.

“There was a saying from the caliph Omar bin al-Khattab, peace be upon him: ‘I wish that I had a mountain of fire between us and Persia,’ ” said Hassan Ali, a 32-year-old shopkeeper in Baghdad, adding that the flood of Iranian worshipers had driven up prices and worsened the violence.

On the other hand, many have welcomed the influx of their fellow Shiites from Iran. Businesses are thriving in the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, as well as in the Kadhimiya neighborhood of Baghdad, site of one of the March 2 bombings. “The Iranians are the only ones who can afford to buy. The Iraqis don’t have any money,” said Fadhel Shawqir, a shopkeeper near the Kadhimiya shrine.

Still, he said, “I think controlling the border is a good move. Though it affects my work here, I think the security situation is more important than my work.”

The U.S. has said it believes Iran is harboring members of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, although Iranian officials say they have arrested the suspects they know about.

At the Munthriya border crossing east of Baghdad, authorities since June have detained 60,000 foreigners who were unable to present legal travel documents, including Iranians, Pakistanis, Afghans, Syrians and Saudis, said Brig. Nazim Sharif Mohammed, border troop commander.

Most were immediately turned back to Iran, but some have been sent to Baghdad for interrogation by coalition military officials.

Unlike the chaos that prevails at Zurbatiya, officials at Munthriya require all entrants to display passports. National guardsmen from North Carolina’s 30th Brigade last week installed computers to track entrants ahead of Bremer’s visit, and already, they said, the effort had borne fruit.

From a desk drawer, Mohammed pulled two dozen fake passports confiscated over the last few months. “We have sent 200 false passports to the [Interior] Ministry,” he said. “People who present them we have been detaining and sending to Baghdad.”

Half of those detained have been Pakistanis and Afghans, he said, and “most of them like the Al Qaeda organization. They like the Taliban. So you can see what we are facing.”

Iran has reportedly been cooperating, to a certain extent. It shut down the border after the Karbala bombings, and is now said to be carefully checking travel documents on its side of the border.

The Islamic Republic News Agency reported that 5,000 would-be pilgrims were prevented by Iran from entering Iraq at Zurbatiya last week after apparently trying to cross the border illegally with the aid of smugglers.

Iraqi border officials said hundreds of smugglers work the rough terrain around Zurbatiya, aiding immigrants who don’t have proper travel documents and smuggling drugs and consumer goods as well.

“The dangerous people are heavily armed. Their weapons are more sophisticated than ours. We cannot just go into competition with them with Kalashnikovs,” said Naqib Jassem Obeid, border troop commander at the crossing.

Obeid said he wore his old military uniform from the Hussein era because he had not been supplied with any other, but people ridicule him because of it.

“These people we’re dealing with, they’re like the ones you see in Hollywood films,” said another border officer, Hadi Mohammed Qadim. “Mafia. Wild Mafia.”

Facing far more immigrants than the number entering at Munthriya, the dozen or so passport control and border police on duty last week at Zurbatiya said they were unable to check individual passports, and instead relied on group documents prepared by the Iranians for convoys of 40 pilgrims each.

If someone looks suspicious, the individual passport is checked, said Lt. Mohammed Ali Otaiby, head of passport control.

In the customs lot, Sadoun and his three fellow customs officers watch carefully as goods are unloaded from Iranian trucks and reloaded onto Iraqi trucks -- no vehicles are allowed to cross the border.

Often, he said, Ukrainian troops who are part of the U.S.-led coalition forces order him to allow goods to pass when he has rejected them, and he believes this is because they have been paid bribes.

When he worked as a customs officer on the Jordanian border before the war, he said, “we had a fortified headquarters, supplied with essential supplies, a heating and cooling system.

“We had money and bonuses and above this, power. And security, too. Now nothing of this exists,” Sadoun said.

“I am in charge here. I am the chief customs officer here. I am an Iraqi. This is my land. And yet when that Ukrainian soldier over there talks to me, he talks to me with the point of his gun,” he said. “The other day, one of them told me I must stand at attention when I talk.

“He can say this because he is making $700 a month by letting smugglers do whatever they like, and I am making $45.”

In the long run, many Iraqi officials believe, the border with Iran will become a thriving avenue of trade and tourism.

Entifad Qanbar, spokesman for Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi, said a recent delegation of Iraqi officials to Tehran discussed how both sides could cooperate in ventures including new oil pipelines and the use of Iranian airports and shipping ports.

“We must make it clear to the rest of the world that Iraq is not going to be a passage for [U.S. and British] actions against Iran,” Qanbar said, appearing to suggest that the border crackdown was politically motivated. “When sovereignty is handed back to Iraq, you will see a great improvement in relations with Iran.”