Tighter Borders Take a Toll In Iraq

Success of Effort Against Smuggling Hits Villagers Hard

OM AL-KABARI, Iraq -- In this once-thriving smuggling village on Iraq's border with Syria, the last donkeys are dying.

Mothers complain they have no shoes for their children and only soup to feed them. Men sit idly playing checkers and bemoaning the night when American scout helicopters swooped overhead, spelling the end of their livelihoods.

"We could get around everything, but not the helicopters," sighed Mahmood Ahmed, 29, who, along with most of the men in this village of 400 people, admitted he was a smuggler. "We're having nightmares about them."

With their income shriveling, the smugglers could no longer afford food for the hundreds of donkeys they used to haul 30-gallon drums of benzene, cartons of cigarettes and other goods into Syria.

"There is no grass, no money to feed them. So they all died," said Yassin Ali, 39, pointing to a mangy, skeletal white donkey lying listless nearby.

The dramatic downturn in the fortunes of villages along the border is one sign that a surge of American and Iraqi troops into the region in recent months has sharply curtailed illegal traffic over the frontier, U.S. and Iraqi officials and local residents say.

U.S. commanders last year launched a plan to gain better control of Iraq's borders to try to stop the flow of outside fighters, weapons and cash to the Iraqi insurgency. Several thousand additional U.S. and Iraqi troops have been sent into regions near Syria since last summer to bolster a growing contingent of Iraqi border guards. Scores of border forts have been built or refurbished and manned, and there are plans to erect a double chain-link fence along the border during the coming year, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

"It's much more than just a line in the sand right now," said Lt. Col. Gregory Reilly of Sacramento, Calif., commander of a U.S. cavalry squadron that oversees about 115 miles of Iraq's northwestern border with Syria, from the Tigris River to the Euphrates. "It's not like a vast open border, not at all. It's a very difficult border to cross."

Syrian border police are also aggressively patrolling their side, Reilly said, in contrast with official statements in Washington accusing Damascus of lax control. "The Syrians are actually doing their job. They are more violent than we are. If they see someone, they will open up shooting," Reilly said as he walked along a dirt berm in view of Syrian guards several weeks ago. Iraqi officers said Syrian guards had recently shot at Iraqi border police, leading to skirmishes.

Controls have been tightened at official border-crossing points. At the town of Rabiyah, a 10-wheel cargo truck rumbled past a newly constructed Iraqi customs station toward a Syrian checkpoint marked by a huge portrait of Syria's late president Hafez Assad. A few months ago, the Iraqi entry point here was in disarray, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. Inbound and outbound traffic were mixed together. Iraqi guards had only five rifles, lacked ammunition and "had no idea what passport was fake and what was real," said Col. Fadel Shaaban Abas, commander of Iraqi customs police at Rabiyah.

"It was complete chaos. You had no idea who was coming and going," said Reilly, commander of 1st Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which finishes a year-long tour in Iraq this month. A suicide car bombing in late May closed the entry point for two weeks.

Today, up to 5,000 people, mostly on foot, and about 300 vehicles cross the border daily through divided lanes. Customs revenue has almost tripled. The 120 Iraqi customs police are armed with AK-47 assault rifles or pistols and are backed up by a new, 260-man police battalion, which arrived in December, Abas said. A U.S. customs team recently trained the police officers to spot false passports, and now they find three or four a day, said Staff Sgt. Robert Lowery of Naples, Fla.