U.S. to spend $300 million to boost Iraq border security

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BAGHDAD, Iraq — After months of blaming foreign fighters for terror attacks, U.S. officials yesterday unveiled a $300 million plan to beef up border enforcement along Iraq's porous 2,260-mile frontier by adding more forces, sensors and computer tracking of visitors.

Iran comes first. U.S. and Iraqi authorities will slam shut 16 eastern border crossings next week, leaving just three entry points for millions of Shiite Muslim pilgrims and other would-be guests. Syrian border changes come next.

"Foreign terrorists are present in Iraq. The numbers are not known with precision, but recent attacks and their continuing presence underscores the importance of improving security at Iraq's borders," said L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator. He also announced a blueprint to double Iraq's trained border police to 16,000.

Dan Senor, Bremer's spokesman, said the United States had been reluctant to tighten the border with Iran because Shiite pilgrims poured across after Saddam fell to pray freely at their spiritual centers in Najaf and Karbala for the first time in more than 30 years.

Next week, 16 border posts will be closed along the Iranian border, leaving just three legal entry points to Iraq, Senor said. Fewer visitors would be allowed, and those who are will get shorter visa stays than the traditional three months.

By mid-2005, immigration officers will increase to 1,000, from 86 today, to track visitors' arrivals and departures through a computerized identification system.

Coalition intelligence has found no Iranian link to the twin March 2 suicide attacks at Shiite shrines in Karbala and Baghdad that killed at least 181 Muslims, said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy operations chief. U.S. officials planned to fix the border even before the bloodshed stoked resentment toward U.S. troops.

The $300 million comes from a special congressional allocation to rebuild Iraq, Kimmitt said. Authorities will spend $150 million on equipment, including 300 new trucks to patrol the border, $104 million in frontier construction, and $46 million training guards.

Kimmitt said that of the 10,000 Arabs in coalition custody, only 150 were foreigners. There was "no substantial evidence" that foreign fighters had arrived through authorized Iraqi border posts, he said, as opposed to slipping into the country across thousands of miles of rugged frontier, mountains and desert, marshland and the Shaat al-Arab waterway.

In related developments:
 
• With less than four months before a deadline to transfer Iraqi sovereignty to the people, the Bush administration has dispatched a senior White House official, Robert Blackwill, deputy national security adviser for strategic planning at the National Security Council, to Baghdad to help the Iraqis form an interim government.

• U.S. forces in Iraq have agreed to hand over the body of Palestinian guerrilla leader Abul Abbas for burial in the West Bank, a Palestinian Cabinet minister said yesterday. Abbas, who led the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro passenger ship in which Leon Klinghoffer, a Jewish American tourist in a wheelchair, was killed and thrown overboard, died Monday in U.S. custody in Iraq, where he was captured in April.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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