NYT: Iraq Battles Smuggling (2 Years After U.S.-Led Invasion)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/international/middleeast/27border.html?th&emc=th

Boats, Cows, Tasty Lamb: Iraq Battles Smuggling
By EDWARD WONG

ZOWER CHUM, on the Iran-Iraq Border - With a Kalashnikov rifle slung over one shoulder, Kadhum Mahmoud took a few brisk steps on the snow-packed earth and crossed from Iraq into Iran.

The mountain trail snaked through clusters of denuded pomegranate trees and fields of land mines to a hamlet of mud homes clinging to a hillside. The Iranian guards had left their concrete watchtower for lunch. Mr. Mahmoud, a wiry Kurdish border guard dressed in American desert fatigues, said it was near this valley that he recently arrested a man headed into Iran with 60 pieces of antiquities - masks, plates and stone or clay busts of women, among other things.

"The local newspapers all wrote about it," he said, with more than a hint of pride.

So goes life these days along the 2,268 miles of border that separate Iraq from its six neighbors. Newly minted guards are arresting smugglers with camels, cows, cars, computers, cartons of cigarettes, even boats along the southern waterways. In 2004, the border police seized 13,039 sheep, most of them being taken illegally across the western desert to Syria, where Iraqi sheep are reputed to be "the tastiest in the region," said Maj. Gen. Hussein Mustafa Abdul-Kareem, the head of Iraq's border police.

The interim Iraqi government is struggling to deal with this sharp rise in smuggling two years after the American-led invasion left the borders wide open, even as it grapples with the border's more heralded problem: the movement of money and fighters that is helping to sustain the guerrilla war. The list of items seized by the border police last year reads like a catalog of the riches of the region - 3,350 pieces of antiquities, 2,200 tons of oil and fuel products and 23 tons of minerals, not to mention 112 cows and buffalo.

MORE AT LINK