Iraqi officials plan to dig a series of trenches around Baghdad in the coming weeks to seal it off and control movement into and out of the city, the New York Times reported yesterday.
The Baghdad anti-terror trench is intended to curb attacks such as the two suicide car bombings yesterday morning that killed at least 11 people and wounded 20 more.
"We're going to build a trench around Baghdad" -- a distance measuring about 97km -- "so we can control the exits and entrances so people will be searched properly," Brigadier General Abdul Karim Khalaf told the Times on Friday in an interview.
PHOTO: AP
"The idea is to get the cars to go through the 28 checkpoints that we set up," the newspaper quoted him as saying.
US officials have approved of the plan, which has been in the works for weeks, the Times said. It calls for cars to be funneled through the checkpoints along the main arteries leading out from the capital, and for smaller roadways to be closed. The trenches themselves would run through farmland or other open land to prevent evasions of the checkpoints, the newspaper said.
The Washington Post, quoting a US military spokesman in Baghdad, said yesterday that checkpoints would be placed along key arteries in and out of Baghdad to ensure that people move through "predictable paths" that can be controlled.
Traffic patterns are being studied and if the plan's outer perimeter is effective some current checkpoints inside the city's borders could be closed to help traffic move along, the Times story said.
The Iraqi official said he did not know the expected cost of the ambitious project, which follows a US-backed security program that set up traffic checkpoints throughout the capital but failed to quell escalating sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites.
last month, a new tactic involved moving troops into trouble zones and conducting block by block searches before leaving battalions behind to bolster local residents. That program is expanding into eastern neighborhoods, the Times said.
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