Region | Iraq
Borders with Iran and Syria shut as crackdown widens
Iraq closed its borders with Iran and Syria as US and Iraqi troops tightened their grip on Baghdad yesterday, searching neighbourhoods and setting up checkpoints that stopped and searched even official convoys.
- Reuters
- Published: 00:00 February 16, 2007
- A US military Apache helicopter releases an anti missile decoy flare as it flies over Baghdad.
- Image Credit: AP
Baghdad: Iraq closed its borders with Iran and Syria as US and Iraqi troops tightened their grip on Baghdad yesterday, searching neighbourhoods and setting up checkpoints that stopped and searched even official convoys.
Residents of Sadr City, stronghold of the Mehdi Army of anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr, reported seeing fewer militiamen on the streets as Operation Imposing Law, a new crackdown to pacify the lawless capital, gathers pace.
The whereabouts of Al Sadr himself remained a mystery - US officials said he was in Iran, but his aides insisted he was in Iraq's holy Shiite city of Najaf. An Iraqi government official said he was in Tehran, but only for a short visit.
Insurgents defied a sweep by US and Iraqi troops of the capital's volatile southern, mainly Sunni Doura district, exploding two car bombs that killed four people. A bomb planted on a bus in Sadr City killed three people.
Transfer points
An Interior Ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the closure of Iraq's four border crossings with Iran and two with Syria took effect yesterday.
US officials have long accused Syria of allowing foreign fighters to cross its long, porous border into Iraq, and at the weekend presented evidence of what they said was Iranian- manufactured weapons being smuggled into Iraq.
Iraq had said it would shut the borders for 72 hours. The US military said yesterday border checkpoints were to be revamped to establish "transfer points" to search vehicles.
A British military spokesman, Major David Gell, said two Iranian border crossings, in Basra and Maysan provinces, had been sealed by British and Iraqi forces.
The closures came as US and Iraqi troops stepped up operations in a new offensive in Baghdad, the epicentre of sectarian violence between minority Sunnis and majority Shiites that has pitched the country toward civil war.
As low-flying fighter jets thundered over the city, rattling windows, US forces spread out across the city. A spokesman for the US military in Baghdad, Major Steven Lamb, said 17 suspects were arrested and three weapons caches seized.
Killing fields
The crackdown aims to clear Baghdad's neighbourhoods of militants and weapons and then secure them in a bid to break the power of Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents who have turned the capital's streets into killing fields.
But military analysts say the advance publicity given to the Baghdad security plan means many militiamen are likely to have left Baghdad or are lying low until the operation is completed, rather than confront security forces.
A Reuters photographer said Mehdi Army militiamen were helping police at the scene of the Sadr City bus bombing but were unarmed and wearing plain clothes. There were reports that several commanders had fled the capital.
The United States has identified the militia as the greatest threat to peace in Iraq and hundreds of Mehdi Army members have been arrested.
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