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U.S. Customs agents help guards along Iraqi border

Army News Service

Release Date: 11/12/2003

By PFC Thomas Day

IRAN-IRAQ Border (Army News Service, Nov. 12, 2003) - The tactics to combat narcotic movement along the American borders are now being taught in Iraq to thwart illegal crossings.

Special agents from U.S. Customs were in Northern Iraq last week providing assistance to border guards and a specialized company attached to the 101st Airborne Division.

At a remote location along the Iran-Iraq border, the agents were greeted by Soldiers from Company F, 51st Infantry Regiment. The customs agents immediately assessed that the task of patrolling the mountainous border area was not going to be an easy one.

"I can tell you right now that if I dropped 20,000 troops here, it wouldn't help," said Special Agent Larry O'Donnell. Clearly you need help, not so much people, but people who have specified knowledge," he told the "Foxtrot" Soldiers.

Isolated, lonely, and cold, the 61 Foxtrot Soldiers, who had been manning 660 kilometers of Iraqi border, did not immediately concur with O'Donnell's assessment. But they understood his point -- the number of Soldiers patrolling the border is not as important as the skill of the Soldiers.

The Foxtrot Company specializes in long-range surveillance, one of only a handful of units in the Army with that capability.

The team has also teamed up with Turkish Special Forces in patrolling the border. With the Kurdish and Turkish soldiers, the Coalition border patrol numbers are less than 1,000 - a light force, but one with more "specified knowledge" than the much larger force that patrolled the border before the fall of Saddam.

In front of a small classroom just a few hundred yards from the Iran-Iraq line, O'Donnell and Special Agent Allan Sperling went to work, introducing investigative procedures, a code of ethics and the techniques of working "confidential informants." The same instructions were given the next day to a group of Iraqi border guards along the Syrian border.

The border patrols now are meant to supplement the existing customs department, which as O'Donnell and Sperling quickly found out, doesn't compare to the system they are used to in the United States.

Weapon smugglers and terrorists have moved freely across the border through the remote snow-capped mountains, or by simply walking right by the customs patrol, said Chief Warrant Officer 2 Kevin Turner. One three-day operation rounded up 519 suspected terrorists that had crossed the border.

"They meet up with someone, get the cash and weapons and say 'go kill some Americans,'" Turner said.

As the two U.S. customs agents watched, unchecked personnel routinely walked around the border checkpoint without any action from Iraqi customs.

The 101st Abn. Div. is lobbying for more border soldiers from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

O'Donnell and Sperling wrapped up their training after five hours.

"It's pretty obvious that some of the concepts we came in with are pretty foreign to them," Sperling said of their Iraqi counterparts.

"This is a band-aid on a sucking chest wound," O'Donnell called the five-hour training block. "There are several problems. They're under-equipped, there is an issue of corruption and there are issues with the terrain working against (them)."

The 101st Abn. Div. Soldiers have trained more than 2,100 Iraqi border guards who man the borders of Iran, Syria and Turkey.

(Editor's note: Pfc. Thomas Day is a member of the 40th Public Affairs Detachment.)