Fri, May 14, 2010 page9

• Where Iraq meets Iran, guards watch shifting lines in the sand

  • By Timothy Williams / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, AL-ALGHWAT SHULHA BORDER FORT, IRAQ
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  In a barren stretch of desert in southeast Iraq, a US soldier recently waved to his Iranian counterpart pulling guard duty at a fort on the opposite side of the border.

  The Iranian appeared confused, but waved back before abruptly turning away. On another day, the American may have gotten a raised middle finger — or no response at all.

  The US soldiers who help Iraqi border guards patrol the Iranian frontier in this hot, dusty no man’s land find themselves in a peculiar role.

  They are stationed just a few hundred meters from an ostensible enemy toward whom they feel little animosity, in a place where the border itself is unclear, while undertaking what has turned out to be among the war’s most challenging assignments: training the Iraqi police to patrol their own porous frontiers before the US military withdrawal next year.

  The US government considers the soldiers’ mission, whatever its discomfiting aspects, to be so critical that the border troops will most likely be among the last US soldiers to depart before the scheduled withdrawal of US forces from Iraq on Dec. 31 next year.

  Since the 2003 US-led invasion, the US military has repeatedly accused Iran of fueling Iraq’s continuing violence and instability; and it is in this portion of Iraq’s 1,465km frontier with Iran that US intelligence officials say explosives capable of penetrating armor, trigger devices for roadside bombs, 240mm Katyusha-style rockets and sniper rifles, among other weaponry, have been smuggled.

  The area near the border fort, in Iraq’s Basra Province, is also considered strategic because it is near Iraq’s seaports and its largest oil fields.

  “Border security in Iraq is a fundamental capability required to achieve full sovereignty and ­international recognition,” said Major General Stephen Lanza, chief spokesman for the US military in Iraq.

  Because Iranians and Americans lack diplomatic ties, some of their closest actual encounters take place here along the Iraqi border, including the polluted 27m-wide canal at Shulha al-Alghwat — said to be mined during the Iran-Iraq war, and which only packs of wild dogs dare cross.

  “If there’s a show of force, they would reciprocate,” said Master Sergeant James Allen, a member of the US border enforcement team. “If we brought a tank up to the border, they would bring a tank up to the border, but when we came here, we waved to them and we didn’t point our weapons.”

  While there appears to be little tension, the Iranians do occasionally engage in Cold War-style gamesmanship, US and Iraqi soldiers said.

  At the Shalamcheh port of entry, 5km from the fort, Iranian workers recently erected a giant pole topped with a large Iranian flag that now towers over a much smaller Iraqi flag on the other side.

  One day this month, an Iranian military helicopter circled overhead before venturing more than 100m into Iraqi airspace.

  “Look at that,” Lieutenant Colonel William Girard, deputy team chief of the border transition team, said in a surprised voice. “They push it just to test things.”

  He paused, adding, “They know no one’s going to shoot at them.”

  ADVANCING BORDER

  Stranger still, US soldiers at Shalamcheh, one of the frontier’s main crossing points for millions of Iranian pilgrims headed to Iraq’s Shiite shrines, as well as for the import of Iranian cars, construction materials and produce, have seen the Iranian border itself slowly advance into what they believed was Iraq.

  Whereas US and Iraqi soldiers had treated the midpoint of the Shalamcheh Canal as the border, Iranian border guards during the past several months have gradually nudged the line westward by a few dozen meters.

  “These guys keep creeping it up,” said Captain Walter Lillegard, executive officer of the US transition team at Shalamcheh.

  Lillegard and other US soldiers say they do not take the Iranian actions seriously, and joke about the area’s gusting winds blowing their hats into Iran — wherever that may be — and sparking an international incident.

  There is often greater tension, however, between Iranian and Iraqi soldiers, who faced off in bloody battles in the same area during the Iran-Iraq war. The area remains littered with land mines, deserted observation posts and the skeletons of military vehicles.

  In December, a border incursion by Iranian soldiers into Iraq sparked a standoff in Maysan Province, north of Basra Province. The Iranians, saying an Iraqi oil well was actually in Iran, moved in tanks and artillery pieces. The dispute ended when the two countries agreed to hold talks, but that was not likely to be the last dispute, because fields containing millions of barrels of oil straddle the frontier.

  Preparing Iraqis to patrol the frontier has proved difficult, the US soldiers who work as trainers there said, in part because Iraqi border troops have received less attention than the Iraqi army or the Iraqi police.

  Though border troops attend the same academy as the police, they are paid less and are poorly supplied, often running short on fuel, replacement parts and ammunition.

  Though US soldiers say they are at the border only to advise and assist, they go on patrols without Iraqi forces and question the discipline and skills of the Iraqis.

  US troops are primarily concerned with smuggled weapons from Iran that are used against US forces. They acknowledge that there has not been a single instance in which a large cache has been interdicted, which has led to suspicions that smuggling is occurring farther north.

  The lack of captured explosives has also given rise to a number of theories, among them that weapons are being smuggled via trained donkeys loaded down with armaments, or that a secret cross-border tunnel is being used.

  “All the intelligence says ‘yes,’ there is arms smuggling here, but I’ve been here for 10 months and there hasn’t been a single time where either we or the Iraqis have found explosives coming across the border in any significant quantity,” Girard said.

  He looked back at the Iraqi border, directly across the canal from an Iranian border fort, and then gestured to the vast, empty frontier.

  “But it would be easy enough to get far enough away from all of this so you wouldn’t have to dig a tunnel,” he said.
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