On Syria border: smugglers nabbed but nothing to back Iraq claims of Saddam-era insurgents

On Syria border: No sign of Saddam loyalist

RABIYA, Iraq — Iraq’s border with Syria runs for hundreds of miles through barren land patrolled by a relative scattering of security forces. But despite claims about exiled Saddam Hussein loyalists sneaking across to disrupt Iraq’s upcoming elections, the only evidence around one key outpost is faded slogans of Saddam’s banned Baath Party painted on the wall of a decaying grain elevator.

Cigarette smugglers? Certainly. Foreign fighters? Sometimes.

But Iraqi and American security forces alike around the border town of Rabiya say they’ve neither seen nor heard of Baathists illegally crossing the border in recent months.

The claim has been raised with increasing force recently by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has blamed horrific bombings in Baghdad — including the ones Tuesday that killed at least 127 people — on an alliance of Sunni insurgents and Baathist loyalists who want to derail Iraq’s elections planned for March.

On Thursday, al-Qaida’s umbrella group, known as the Islamic State of Iraq, posted a statement claiming responsibility for the attacks this week.

“Nothing’s been communicated to me about Baathists, but absolutely about foreign fighters and insurgents,” Maj. Gen. Tony Cucolo, commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, said in an Associated Press interview this week. “What we’re seeing is some illegal smuggling, some contraband, smuggling of cigarettes — things like that.”

To be sure, it is hardly likely that Baathists would identify themselves if captured. And though the number of arrests of obvious insurgents or foreign fighters crossing the border is relatively small, “we don’t know what we’ve driven elsewhere, and we also don’t know what we’ve denied,” Cucolo said.

In Syria, the Iraqi Baath Party spokesman Khudair al-Murshidi denied any links to attacks in Baghdad during an interview with al-Jazeera TV on Wednesday. But at nearly the same time, al-Maliki was clearly pointing his finger at Syria by calling on “neighboring countries that condemn the attacks to turn their words into actions.”

Iraqi officials have accused Syria of harboring Baath Party militants — a charge denied by Damascus.

Despite officials denials of any Baath-linked insurgents found along the border, there have been some recent arrests that point to insurgent ties.

Iraqi intelligence officers said officials has stopped a Syrian man in a village near Rabiya last month who was disguised in a woman’s abaya — a black shapeless cloak worn from head to toe — and turned out to have inside information about the Oct. 25 ministry bombings in Baghdad that killed at least 155 people.

The officers gave no further details and spoke condition of anonymity because of their roles in intelligence gathering.

Earlier this week, on Monday, a U.S. Army patrol in al-Tamma, south of Rabiya, captured a donkey caravan with seven people who were crossing the border into Iraq. They were carrying guns and bullets designed to puncture body armor worn by security forces, and they tried to destroy their cell phones before they were caught.

On average, about five people are caught each month trying to sneak across the Syrian-Iraq border, U.S. military officials said. Most of them are smugglers, continuing along generations-old trade paths with cigarettes and other bounty.

Cigarette smugglers have become of particular concern to military and police forces, who believe the profits from the illicit tobacco that is brought to Syria from Iraq ultimately funds insurgents. “What we’re trying to figure out is whether the money they are making in Syria is financing violence in Iraq,” said Capt. Adam Taliaferro, commander of the U.S. Army’s border outpost in Rabiya.

The smugglers themselves usually are poor Iraqi farmers whose wheat and barley crops have been hit by the area’s ongoing drought and have few other ways to make money. Smuggling offers up to $20 for a trip of carrying a box of 10 cartons — usually Miami or Gauloise cigarettes — to Syria.

“The smuggling is not going to be finished,” said Iraqi Border Police Lt. Mohammed Hamad, the second-in-command at a border fort on a muddy swath a few yards from the Syrian line. “In Iraq, other counties, even in the United States, there is a lot of smuggling. We do our best.”

Even so, “it’s been a long time in my shift since I have seen any smugglers,” Hamad said. “We have not given them a chance to pass.”

At Hamad’s fort, a thin strip of grass — land whose ownership is claimed by both nations — lies between the official border line. On the Iraqi side, a waist-high wall of dirt and a shallow canal of water provides natural obstacles to crossers.

The U.S. army and Iraq’s border patrol conduct night-long sweeps across vast, deserted swaths of land, often idling in the dark in hopes of ambushing smugglers, foreign fighters and other criminals. Overhead, American spy planes and helicopters use heat sensors and night vision to search for people sneaking over the border.

“It’s pretty much hit or miss,” said Lt. Dan Davison, a platoon leader who does the nightly searches known as “screen lines.”

Last week, Iraq’s Ministry of Interior agreed to buy $49 million worth of equipment — including cameras, sensors, radars and communications systems to help secure its borders with Syria and Iran. The high-tech surveillance won’t cover the entire Syrian border, however: only about 171 miles (286 kilometers) of its 363-mile-long (605-kilometer-long) boundary with Iraq, according to the American military.

In Rabiya, a dusty border town surrounded by empty farmland, an estimated 500 truckloads of potatoes, apples, eggs and other foodstuffs enter Iraq each week through the port from Syria. The trucks themselves do not continue into Iraq: the produce is loaded off one tractor-trailer and onto another that has been cleared to carry the cargo into the country. The port itself is watched over by Iraqi police and border police, as well as the U.S. military.

An Iraqi army post is also nearby, and officials from all three Iraqi security agencies work in a small hut next to the U.S. Army camp at the base of the dilapidated grain elevator bearing the Baathist slogans.

Rabiya’s mayor, Jasim Mohammed Kahoush, said he’s far more worried about his city’s weak power supply and 10 percent unemployment rate than he is about foreign fighters — much less Baathists — crossing the border. An estimated 12,000 people live in Rabiya.

“The security in Rabiya is very good right now because of the Iraqi army, Iraqi police and the coalition forces,” Kahoush, a Sunni who has been mayor for three years, said in an interview. “The security is very good here. There’s not a lot going on.”