A Glimpse into our job on the Tour...

Some of you out there are probably wondering what exactly we do over here on a Border Transition Team. I've been in the army for over 18 years and this is the first time I have ever done anything like this. Anyway, David Botti is a reporter for Newsweek and he wrote the following story. Mr Botti traveled with and interviewed the team that we replaced over here. It is a pretty interesting article.



Posted Friday, August 22, 2008 6:43 AM

Frustration and Hope on the Syrian Border
By David Botti

Roughly 250 miles northwest of Baghdad, the border between Iraq's Ninawa province and Syria is marked by nothing more than a single dirt berm. The mound is easy enough to walk, and in some places, drive a vehicle over. While the terrain is mostly flat, nighttime often brings a consuming darkness and electricity here is non-existent. Snaking through this terrain are countless dried-up canals, affording the area's smugglers concealed routes through which their cross-border business is conducted with relative ease.

Meanwhile, members of Iraq's border police (the IBP) wait, watch, and listen from their forts and outposts, some with little more than a flashlight, a few rifles, and handheld radios frequently turned off to conserve what little battery life remains.

Equipment shortages, lack of fuel, poor training, and the large swaths of terrain to cover have hampered the force's effectiveness. And, the life out here is hard. Between the more livable forts spaced along the border, IBP soldiers can find themselves working for days at smaller outposts that can consist of only a small tent. Around them the desert stretches endlessly in all directions, with no one and nothing in sight.

Tasked with advising and training the nearly 3,000 members of Ninawa's border force are three small groups of senior U.S. Army soldiers assigned to units known as border transition teams. Lead by Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Rainey, the soldiers have a 12-month mission to strengthen this force, while trying to ensure needed changes ultimately come from the Iraqis themselves. It's a difficult balance for the Americans to find.


Threats to the Border

On a day-to-day basis, the two main threats to the Iraq-Syria border are the smuggling of various products, and the crossing of foreign fighters; though the degree to which these types of operations are intertwined is still murky. There is the possibility that the smugglers are simply trying to make a living the only way they know how, while foreign fighters arrive in Iraq with the aid of sympathetic residents living in border villages. Or, smugglers are aiding the fighters, using their knowledge of the terrain to facilitate movement.

The reality may also be some combination of the two, but while the IBP and Americans can quantify smuggling operations by goods confiscated (50,000 packs of cigarettes were confiscated in July), it's difficult to track the foreign fighters.

"The IBP has never caught foreign fighters in the act [of coming through]," said Lieutenant Colonel Todd Wasmund, head of a transition team here. "It's all been done through intelligence."

These fighters never cross the border carrying weapons or other identifying equipment, choosing instead to blend in with the locals. It isn't until they travel further into the country, that they join the various insurgent groups.

One result of this is the relatively low number of violent incidents, though they do occur. The border police have found themselves the targets of roadside bombs and small arms fire, as smugglers seek to harass and intimidate. It's not uncommon to see IBP vehicles driving around with all their windows blown out from a bomb blast, though the resources to repair this damage are scant.

American commanders also cite the isolation of the border area as another reason for so few attacks, saying insurgents prefer to hit higher profile, more densely populated areas. Still, earlier this year a suicide bomber detonated himself steps from the border in the town of Rabiyah, one of two official points of entry from Syria. His targets: machines in place for biometrically scanning travelers to Iraq.


The One Thing Everyone Needs

Among IBP forces all along the border, the single common denominator is almost always the same: fuel is scarce. Out here, having enough fuel means being able to fill a vehicle to a quarter tank. Without fuel the IBP's machine gun-mounted Chevy pickup trucks cannot patrol the border, or deliver supplies. Generators which could provide electricity for recharging radio batteries and spotlights sit idle. Major James Moses, head of a transition team responsible for the southern portion of Ninawa's border, recounted with amusement seeing one border policeman mix small amounts of gas and kerosene to make diesel fuel.

"I don't know how he knew what to do, and what amounts to mix, but he did it" Moses said. "These guys know how to make something out of nothing."

Moses also pointed out that even if the border police were able to strengthen their numbers to fill in the unguarded gaps along the border, there wouldn't be enough fuel to sustain the larger force.

Iraqi Colonel Abed Al Karem, head of a local IBP battalion, expressed hopelessness over his unit's fuel shortages. The problem, he said, exists at the IBP's higher levels, and is beyond his own control.

"Sometimes I just sit down and I think: why [do we have this problem], it's only fuel," he said. "Iraq is all fuel. It is the first nation of fuel. Here in Iraq the fuel is more than water."

Fuel and power shortages affect not only the IBP, but also the civilian populace. As one drives along the border road at night, the differences are quickly evident. Across the berm in Syria, nearby villages appear as clusters of bright lights while on the Iraqi side only the occasional porch light powered by a generator is visible.

American commanders here said one reason the IBP lacks supplies is its distant proximity to Baghdad where the force is administered by the Ministry of Interior. They said other M.O.I. forces, such as the National Police and Iraqi Police, are first in line for money and gear.

"The further you are from centers of influence, the less you get," said Lt. Col. Rainey, "Things are just very slow to trickle down. Until we get the resources to replace what we expend, it's going to be a struggle"


Confronting Reliability

When Lt. Col. Wasmund arrived at the border this past January, he found a force unable to adequately train itself. Compounding his challenges was the realization some in the IBP, including officers and key leaders, were actually involved to some degree in smuggling operations.

"We were cruising along feeling like we were doing some good work, feeling like we were making progress," Wasmund said. "We hadn't heard any negative reports about our police yet. Then we got the first report from a detainee that, by name, some of our guys were corrupt. And it was like someone took a pin and just popped our little bubble. For about three days it felt like it was a funeral—it was so demoralizing. You're looking ahead almost nine months before you are done doing this mission, and it's futile. It just feels like it's a waste."

As the leader of a small team constantly working in close proximity and living at a Spartan combat outpost, Wasmund knew back in January that the success of his mission depended on reinventing how they approached advising the IBP. He described his assessment of the situation as existing in layers: the tasks of training, improving IBP logistics, and rooting out those border police deemed unreliable.

"We had to be careful not to generalize that because one leader is corrupt that the entire organization is corrupt," he said. "Everybody wants to hang a label and it's not that simple."

Still, among the rank-and-file IBP soldiers, some of whom are thought to take bribes from smugglers to look the other way, Wasmund said their motives are understandable. The rudimentary conditions the IBP works under can easily foster discontent.

"If you're not motivated, and you feel like you're destined to fail, you'd be pretty vulnerable to take a bribe or get involved in opportunity for profit," he said. "And if your income provides for 12 to 15 people, moonlighting would be tempting."


Glimpses of the Future

Since their arrival in January, the border transition teams here in Ninawa cite progress with the IBP, although it's often slow, frustrating, and requires long days and nights of traveling 180 miles of border.

Earlier this summer Lt. Col. Wasmund began what he calls the "IBP Leaders Academy," a five-day course that brings about a dozen border police to the Americans' small combat outpost for training in all manner of soldiering. The idea here was to educate small unit leaders on how to train their own men upon returning to the border forts. Topics range to everything from weapons use, to searching enemy prisoners, to calling in casualty evaluations.

"These guys are seasoned fighters, but they're not skilled trainers and leaders. [Under Saddam's army] they did as they were told," Wasmund said. "You make assumptions, and we found in the first few months our assumptions were really pretty bad. We overestimated their ability to do their mission."

So far the transition team considers the class a success, though it is often dependent on the quality of Iraqi soldiers present, and their willingness to learn. The Iraqis are capable of making rudimentary mistakes like picking a machine gun up by its hot barrel just after the weapon's been fired, or shying away from leading their comrades in simple physical training routines. Still, there is also an obvious dedication among most of these soldiers, and a general willingness to listen and learn—even if the process is a slow one.

Wasmund believes with time this model of training will trickle down to the individual border policemen, and the Americans will ensure this is happening rather then taking on the responsibility themselves. Still, it's the wider institutional changes that may end up having the greatest influence on the IBP's effectiveness. One cause for hope on this front came unexpectedly to Wasmund only a couple of weeks ago.

At a meeting he attended between leaders of the border police, the Iraqi Police, and the Iraqi Army, Wasmund watched as the men took turns criticizing their counterparts for the quality of their forces and operations. Such conversations are often the norm all over Iraq, but then Wasmund noticed a curious thing: each leader seemed to become more driven to outdo the other, vehemently defending the quality of their men.

It was this simple act of peer pressure, Wasmund thought, that could force commanders to push their men further in training.

"They don't want to come back to meetings and always be the guy who's not doing his job," he said. "What's neat about that is now it's not me holding my commander accountable, it's Iraqis holding other Iraqis accountable…when Iraqis are in charge of Iraqis that starts to go down the road of governance. They're starting to make decisions for themselves about what's right and what's wrong."