Baghdad clamps down on cross-border arms smuggling
While security along the Iraqi-Syrian border has improved with the near defeat of the Islamic State, Iraqi security forces still have their hands full trying to prevent arms smuggling and attacks by what is left of the terror group.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi visited the headquarters of the Joint Operations Command in Baghdad on March 31 to take a look at the state of military operations to secure Iraq's borders. Iraqi security forces are primarily concerned about the 372-mile border between Iraq and Syria. Iraqi border guards regularly fend off Islamic State (IS) attacks, which have recently involved arms smuggling operations into and out of Syria across the shared border.
On March 18, the Directorate of Military Intelligence foiled an operation transporting weapons from Syria to Ninevah. The directorate said in a statement, accompanied by photos, that it had confiscated a vehicle loaded with light weapons, rifles, blasting detonators, anti-tank launchers, machine guns and other weapons in Badush, a village northwest of Mosul. On March 8, security forces interrupted another gun run, this one headed to Afrin from Mosul. Afrin was the site of battles at the time between the Turkish army and its Free Syrian Army allies against US-backed Kurdish forces.
In mid-2012, arms smuggling between Syria and Iraq soared, and the prices for light and medium weapons on the Iraqi black market rose due to increased demand when protests in Syria descended into civil war. The Iraqi government acknowledged that it was aware of the influx of weapons and Iraqi jihadis into Syria to fight regime forces there. The current situation is different from that phase, during which large segments of the Iraq-Syria border were essentially under IS control, one of the factors that led to one-third of Iraqi territory falling into the hands of IS, in June 2014.
Hisham al-Hashimi, an expert on terrorist groups who works as a security adviser to several security departments in Iraq, told Al-Monitor, “The situation has changed, and the borders are now in the hands of the security forces.”
