Syria stops insurgents on Iraq border

US military intelligence official says Syrian security services have passed on information about extremists inside Iraq.

Villagers carry the coffins of relatives who died when US military helicopters launched an attack on Syrian territory.

MOSUL, IRAQ // Syria has been helping US and Iraqi troops catch extremists trying to cross the border, a US military intelligence official said in an interview with The National. In addition to arresting insurgents on their side of the frontier, Syrian security services have passed information to US forces that is being used to target insurgents inside Iraq, according to Major Adam Boyd, the head intelligence officer with the third armoured cavalry regiment. His unit is responsible for Mosul, the Jazeera desert and policing a 380km stretch of the Iraqi-Syrian border in Nineveh province.

"We don't deal directly with the Syrians, but I will tell you that they have been relatively good in the near recent past, arresting people on their side of the border," he said in an interview at the regiment's headquarters in Mosul, in northern Iraq. "We are still working on some specific targets after individuals were arrested on the Syrian side and that information has been passed over and that has allowed us to target on this side of the border."

Major Boyd said such intelligence sharing had not happened on a "regular basis", however, and that foreign fighters were still infiltrating. The likelihood of continued co-operation by Syria has been thrown into doubt by a cross-border attack launched by US forces last week. Eight people died in the raid on Oct 26, when helicopter-borne US troops landed inside Syria, near the frontier town of Abu Kamal.

US authorities have so far refused to make any official statements regarding the attack, but anonymous sources have said the target was an al Qa'eda figure, Badran al Mazidi, known as Abu al Ghadiyah, originally from Mosul, and that he was killed. It was the first such foray by US forces inside Syria despite persistent claims over the past five years that Damascus has been aiding extremists and insurgents entering Iraq to fight US soldiers.

Syria called the attack "an outrageous crime" and a "serious aggression". Major Boyd declined to comment on the raid, which happened south of his area of operations. He also declined to talk about its possible effect on border security, saying that US and Iraqi forces would try to "kill or capture" foreign fighters as long as they continued to enter the country. It appears there will be a direct effect on border policing. In response to the raid, Syria has said it will reduce its troop presence on the border. To date, tougher security on both sides of the frontier has helped to cut the number of foreign fighters crossing into Iraq from about 90 a month to approximately 20, US military officials said. Syria insists it has been trying to police the border with Iraq, and that its efforts have been hampered by a lack of co-operation from the US side. Gen David Petraeus, who was the top US military officer in Iraq and credited with tamping down the insurgency, was reported to have favoured engagement with Syria as a way of sealing the border and trapping militants, but the idea was apparently vetoed by the Bush administration. The White House has tried to isolate Syria for its support of Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian Territories, as well as for its close alliance with Iran. George W Bush, the US president, branded Syria a state sponsor of terrorism and part of what he called an "axis of evil". The United States also accuses Damascus of having a secret nuclear weapons programme, an allegation denied by the Syrians and one that has not been proven despite recent UN inspections of suspected atomic sites. Israeli warplanes bombed a Syrian military facility in the northern desert region in Sept 2007 that the United States claims was the construction site of a nuclear reactor. Despite strained US-Syrian relations, however, it appears Syria's security agencies, at least on their northern section of the border, have been picking up insurgents, as well as passing on information to joint US and Iraq forces. Major Boyd said concerns about the effectiveness of Syrian frontier police remained, although he stressed that their failures might be a result of local corruption and tribal alliances - which also affect the Iraqi border force - rather than Syrian policy. "For every example of co-operation from Syria, there are an equal number of incidents that are not helpful," he said. "We just captured someone who was trying to escape into Syria and found out that he'd been arrested last November on the Syrian side after they caught him with a bunch of fake passports. But he bribed his way out and managed to get back in. "But, again, I don't know I necessarily attribute that to the government as to an individual Syrian border patrol unit." Illegal crossing between Syria and Iraq remains fairly commonplace, although most crossers are traders, smugglers and shepherds, not insurgents. "The Iraqi border forces themselves are mainly locally recruited and from the Shammar tribe," Major Boyd said. "The Shammar also control trade routes through the western Jazeera and their people are on both sides of the border. "The reason they can get across, aside from the Shammar helping them, is that the berm along the border is broken in many places, or worn down so you can back up two trucks and pass things back and forth." US officials dealing with the border admit it remains porous. "There's no barrier there, no wire, no minefield; you have to see them crossing," said Lt Col Robert Molinari, executive officer with the cavalry regiment. "It's local economics. The people crossing have been doing it for hundreds of years where someone just happened to draw a boundary after World War One. It's not challenging to get across, but our efforts don't need to focus on the entire border. "You have a fake passport, it's not hard to get in. They're not crossing with truckloads of weapons, there's no need to. "You just need a religious fanatic willing to take life and as soon as you're over the border." There is a single official point of entry in Nineveh province, at Rabiyah. The US forces have installed a biometric monitoring system. Everyone crossing into Iraq has his fingerprints and eyes scanned, and is processed into a huge central database. On the Iran-Iraq border, only males between 16 and 65 years - so called military-aged males - are put into the system. Even children and old men are included on the Syria crossing, Major Boyd said. "We have 10-year-olds who threw grenades in the city," he said, "and you can have a 60-year old-man that is still firing an AK or RPG at you." In March, a suicide bomber attacked the biometrics centre at Rabiyah, killing two US soldiers and an interpreter. Four other contractors working for the US military were injured. [e-mail]