RABIYAH, Iraq – A convoy of U.S. Humvees streamed through the midnight darkness, following the border as soldiers scanned the endless flats with night-vision goggles. The thin earthen berm separating northern Iraq from Syria lay a few hundred yards to their right, but what was out there was a mystery.
“We've lost them,” Lt. Stuart Burnham, 24, of Springfield, Va., said with faint resignation, ordering the convoy to turn around and head back to the small U.S. base at the border-crossing town of Rabiyah. “Maybe next time.”
Less than an hour earlier, air surveillance of the area had picked up signs of as many as 20 people trying to sneak into Iraq near an Iraqi Border Patrol fort. Now they had faded away.
Soldiers and Iraqi border officials don't know who crossed into Iraq on Monday night, whether it was the usual parade of smugglers ferrying sheep, cigarettes and fuel, or perhaps foreign fighters hauling in bundles of cash. The 45 miles of border monitored out of Combat Outpost Heider and a series of Iraqi forts are porous, especially at night, and U.S. authorities say it is simply impossible to know who and what is passing through.
U.S. and Iraqi officials have been trying for years to crack down on foreign fighters and funds moving across the border from Syria. Training efforts for Iraqi border patrol officers have picked up steam during the past year. Better equipment, such as new pickups, arrived months ago.
U.S. trainers say the Iraqis are getting much better at their jobs but still lack vital resources, have far too few men to adequately monitor this stretch of desert and farmland, and are up against a furtive smuggling culture that has been in place for centuries.
“At night, it's impossible to cover all this terrain,” said Army Maj. Bill Tomlin, 37, of Kennedy, Ala., who is a border transition team leader in Rabiyah. “We're not seeing mass movements through here of bad guys, weapons and explosives, but it's very hard to catch individual people.”
Much of the smuggling traffic is strictly commercial. Sheep are moved from Iraq to Syria, where herders can garner nearly $100 more per head on the black market. Refined gasoline goes in the other direction, to Iraq, where prices are exponentially higher.
U.S. officials have seized stocks of baseball caps, women's underwear and cigarettes traversing the border in an attempt to avoid heavy tariffs at official border crossings.
Sometimes the smugglers are leading small groups of foreign fighters and young men recruited as suicide bombers, U.S. commanders say.
Lt. Col. Fred Johnson, deputy commander of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division in Mosul, said it's not so much the foreign fighters that draw concern but the sacks filled with cash that allow fighters to buy weapons and explosives in Iraq.
