On Syrian-Iraqi border the only certainty is shelling at sundown

By Hugh Macleod

For The Economist
October 20, 2004

Ali Ahmed Shumar, head of immigration and passport control at Abu Kamal on the Syrian Iraqi border does not have any details of the extra patrols or how many new checkpoints have been built in recent months, but he is sure of one thing.
“If you were in my shoes you would say it is impossible to smuggle across the border. We have very strict surveying. Even a bird cannot get across undetected,” says the Syrian jokingly.

Across fifty meters of littered borderland the American soldiers in their base at Qaim are not laughing. They are preparing for the next of the attacks, which come almost daily at sundown.

Syria’s border with Iraq is one of the more tangible manifestations of George Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ analogy. During Saddam’s rule, under the UN oil-for-food programme, an efficient network smuggling arms and oil into Syria scammed the Iraqi economy out of billions of dollars.

After Saddam’s fall and the rise of the insurgency, the network remained, but the axis began moving the other way, drawing in militants to the border from across the Arab world before turning them over into Iraq to battle American troops.

There are now thought to be a dedicated core of up to 12,000 insurgents fighting in Iraq, with the figure rising to 20,000 when active sympathisers are included, far above previous Pentagon estimates.

The US believes the majority of the foreign fighters in Iraq have made their way unchecked across the Syrian border and has imposed economic sanctions, co-signed a UN resolution and sent delegations to Damascus to get the Syrians moving on the issue.
So what’s new? Shumar had some figures for us. Just 30 travelers pass across the border from the Syrian side a day, he said, and they now require a visa from both their own consular and Syrian immigration.

And as for military measures? There are two patrols a night rather than one, comprising twelve men rather than eight, and a 2 meter tall sandbank is being rebuilt along the entire length of the border.

But looking across the Euphrates into Iraq, with the black smoke from another explosion in Qaim rising across the plain, the border police openly admitted they have never actually caught anybody crossing from Syria into Iraq.

And as for the notion that Syrian and US troops might conduct joint patrols and intelligence sharing? Well, as one official admitted in a rare moment of candor, “there is not political will for this to happen.”

The Americans are keeping a careful eye on things, however. A team from the US embassy in Damascus arrived back from the border last Friday (22nd October), but the official line is still that of Donald Rumsfeld’s “too soon to tell”.
US commanders at Qaim, however, continue to accuse the Syrians of not doing enough to protect their soldiers from mortars fired at them from within Syria.

Tell that to Rafaeh Awad Oubeid, whose son was hit by shrapnel fired from Iraq into Abu Kamal on the first day of Ramadan a fortnight ago, after the US soldiers came under attack (October 15th).

Or the family of Moae Khabur Hassan, an 18 year old Syrian killed by a bullet, fired, villagers say, from the Qaim base.

Back in his office Ali Shumar vents his frustration.

“The accusations that we are not doing enough to stop the mortar fire are totally false,” he said, before turning to show us the hole in the window behind his desk.

“Look, this was shrapnel from the Iraqi side,” he said. “Once they are attacked the Americans just start shooting in all directions.”

From its own experience trying to keep Mexican immigration at bay, the US knows only too well the impossibility of sealing hundreds of kilometres of desert to those who want to cross it, even when there’s money to spend and the political will to do so.

The Syrians, currently, have neither.

The only certainty, on both sides of the border, is that sure as the sun sets in the west, so the mortars will continue to fly.