Terrorist Traffic Via Syria Again Inching Up

Syria, Odierno said, "has the opportunity" to stop it. He called on the Syrian government to "demonstrate a commitment to eliminating the use of its soil as a staging area."

Overall violence in Iraq is "at or near the lowest level since the summer of 2003," Odierno said in a news conference, but the recent suicide attacks "remind all of us that the situation still is fragile in some areas." He said that the "high-profile attacks" in and around Baghdad, the capital, and Mosul were designed to "garner attention and spark sectarian discord" as U.S. troops prepare to withdraw from Iraqi cities by this summer and from the country by the end of next year.

The military is particularly concerned about the area around Mosul, in the northwest near the Syrian border, which officials have described as the last bastion of al-Qaeda in Iraq's strength. U.S. and Iraqi officials have accused the Sunni group in all the recent attacks, perpetrated against Shiite neighborhoods and shrines.

The flow of foreign fighters through Syria reached a high of 80 to 100 a month in mid-2007, the senior military official said, most of them would-be suicide "martyrs" increasingly recruited from extremist communities in North Africa by jihadist Web sites and networks abroad. But as overall security in Iraq improved later that year, the numbers began to drop. In December, as U.S. and Iraqi troops increased security measures coinciding with Iraqi elections, the traffic reached an all-time low, into the single digits.

"There was a period right after the elections where we were probably seeing less than half a dozen foreign fighters being pushed through the network," the official said. "In January and February, probably even less than that."

More recently, he said, the estimate has risen to 20 a month, and various intelligence sources have noted an increased "demand call" for foreign fighters. The leadership of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the official said, determines "that conditions are right that they can conduct attacks. They will talk to their facilitators, and they will ask for bombers, ask for supplies."

Security along the Iraq-Syria border and elsewhere has deteriorated since the elections, the official and others said. Iraqi border interdiction efforts have been hindered by a chronic shortage of fuel, which keeps border police grounded for weeks at a time, and by corruption within their ranks, U.S. military officials in Iraq said.

Iraq's budget -- which has shrunk because of slipping oil prices -- has in recent months forced the Interior Ministry to halve its fuel stipend for border teams. "They can only operate 15 days" in a month, Col. Nawat Salar, commander of an Iraqi border police brigade near the Syrian border, told an American general during a recent meeting.

In the meantime, the senior U.S. military official said, Iraqi vigilance in general has decreased since the elections, and al-Qaeda in Iraq has "been able to rebuild the network."

"Frankly," he said, "you can't keep 100 percent alert 100 percent of the time. It gives the enemy the opportunity to identify gaps and weaknesses."

Correspondent Ernesto Londoño in Baghdad contributed to this report.