Syrians tense as Iraq war laps at border

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Syrians tense as Iraq war laps at borderDeaths along frontier are part of escalating crisis between Bush, Assad

BAGHOUZ, SYRIA -- From Areed Mohammed Aoussa's sandbagged machine-gun post at the Syrian border with Iraq, he can hear and see the war next door.

There's the thin rat-a-tat-tat of automatic weapons fire from the troubled Iraqi city of al-Qaim, visible on the horizon and a known hotbed of insurgents fighting the U.S. occupation. Those sounds are interspersed with the louder whump-whump of heavier weapons fire. An occasional plume of smoke can be seen rising amid the date palm trees of the otherwise idyllic Euphrates River valley.

These days, however, it's not just the sounds of war that drift across the 700-kilometre-long Iraqi-Syrian border. More and more often, the fighting comes right up to, and even over, the frontier.

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"They shoot at us here every day, sometimes they're mistakes, sometimes they're not," Syrian security officer Ibrahim Brahim said as he stood on the roof of the concrete police station that is one of 557 such manned positions along the border. "The Americans want to show their power, to show us they're here. If we poke our heads up, they shoot."