AFP Article: Iraq's northeastern border an open door for smugglers

by Thibauld Malterre
Thu Mar 8

A truck loaded with crates of fruit shuddered over the muddy stream marking the northeastern limit of Iraq and halted while customs agents gave it a cursory once over.

Despite being the front line in Iraq's battle against weapons smugglers and a potentially dangerous geopolitical flashpoint, there was little sign of tight security at the lonely Bashmakh guard post on the Iran-Iraq frontier.

The White House has accused Iranian agents of smuggling weapons and cash to Iraq's warring factions, including a deadly armour-piercing bomb that has been blamed for the deaths of 170 American soldiers.

But at Bashmakh, there is little to stop smugglers from getting through.

"We need huge improvements here. You can't secure Baghdad if you don't secure the borders," said Command Sergeant Major Bobby Moore, the chief non-commissioned officer in the US military training mission in Iraq.

Although high in the wooded and snow-capped mountains of Kurdistan, an autonomous region where Baghdad's writ runs weak, Bashmakh border crossing is only 300 kilometres (180 miles) from the killing fields around the capital.

Some 180 vehicles per day cross the border here, transporting fruit and vegetables and building materials. The simple frontier post has no modern scanning equipment nor even sniffer dogs, any many loads go uninspected.

"It needs a lot of work: There is no serious paperwork and inspection, and not enough manpower," said Andy Nevarez, a US border patrol agent who left Texas and New Mexico to help Iraq secure its own frontiers.

"We are not here to implement US structures, but to see what works best for them," he said, as a cavalcade of trucks rolled back over the border after being loaded from Iranian vehicles on the eastern bank of the stream.

"The standards are not at the level we want to see. In 2004 and 2005, the borders were neglected," admitted Major General Mohsen al-Kabi of the Iraqi interior ministry's border force.
"We don't have enough scanners for vehicle searching, and we don't have enough people who can use and repair them. Border, passport and customs are working on their own, there should be a director, a single authority."

Iraq's porous borders and unhelpful neighbours have allowed armed factions to reinforce their arsenals of looted arms with a modern terrorist's tools -- including roadside bombs and anti-aircraft missiles.

Senior officials have been complicit in much of the trade, US officers allege, with Iranian agents and shopping lists for Iranian weapons found in raids on the homes of top Shiite politicians in Baghdad.

Iran in turn has accused Iraq and the United States of allowing Pejak, a leftist Kurdish guerrilla movement at war with the Tehran government, to operate with impunity from bases in these northeastern mountains.

US officials have recently focused on the threat posed by the "explosively formed penetrator" -- a roadside booby-trap that Shiite militias use to cut through American armoured vehicles and slaughter trapped GIs.

Iraq's Shiite leaders, however, seek good relations with Iran and they are more concerned by Sunni insurgents coming from Iraq's western neighbour, and by the tactics they use to cause mass civilian casualties.

"The threat is coming from Syria. Up until now, nobody has come from Iran with a suicide vest. A lot came from Syria," General Mohsen said.

For the Americans, however, if few weapons have been found coming in from Iran, it's because the Iraqis weren't looking hard enough. Now, they are seeking to increase the border force's training and capabilities.

"If trucks are not being checked, you are not gonna find anything," said Brigadier General Dana Pittard, commander of the Iraq Assistance Group, which oversees the training of Iraqi security forces.

Pittard's simple inspection visit was enough to unleash Tehran's anger and underline the tension gripping even this remote corner of Iraq.

Iran sent a message to the Kurdish authorities in Sulaimaniyah to denounce what it billed as "the threatening presence of an American delegation".

The regional rivalries that bedevil this part of the Middle East have also undermined the border control mission.

Although both Kurdish and Iraqi flags fly over the border post, the agents are recruited locally from tribes with clans on both sides of the frontier.

"It is an issue, how people are recruited," said Pittard, noting the threat of complicity between smugglers and officials at what he termed the the "point of entry" (POE).

"Personnel manning the POE are locally recruited. There is obviously a danger in that. The ideal would be to mix up Sunni, Shia and Kurds on each border, but we don't want to change their culture," he said.

If weapons are coming across, not many have been stopped.

"They've only seized a small number of pistols coming from Iran," said Colonel Thomas Johnson.