Alwaght- Border security is one of the important factors influencing the countries’ national security. It is among the most vital interests of them and a key feature used for assessing the nations’ status in military power, internal instability, development, and territorial sovereignty. It is also a cause for differences, tensions, and even military conflicts among the countries in the contemporary history.
With the rise of nascent trans-national terrorist groups, the security of borders grew important as the threats by these groups in regions like West Asia grew more and more serious.
Iran is one of the countries that, both because of its unique geopolitical position that puts it between the two crisis-prone regions of Central Asia and Arab world and because of existence of challenge of activities of terrorist and separatist groups on its eastern and western borders, is facing big border threats. In the meantime, Iraq is considered one of the most important areas of activities of terrorist forces posing a threat to Iran’s national security, and therefore, border security has played a significant role in regulating the relations between the two countries in recent years.
The rife activities of several separatist anti-Iranian groups that target security and stability of the western provinces once again aroused Tehran’s sensitivity about tolerant, passive and sometimes purposeful approach of the Iraqi Kurdistan region and even the Iraqi central government to these groups. This issue was raised as a key negotiation topic during the visit to Iran of the new Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani on November 30, and now with declaration of deployment of the Iraqi forces in Iran and Turkey in the Kurdistan region, he wants to demonstrate his resolve to address the security concerns of neighbors.
Last week, Hossein Allawi, the adviser to the Iraqi prime minister on security affairs, announced that there is full coordination and cooperation on the deploying security forces and border guards in the border areas, empowering the forces assigned for this mission, determining the location of the border checkpoints, financing, and building infrastructure.
“The Iraqi Ministry of Interior is currently trying to determine the basic places for establishing border checkpoints and reactivating old checkpoints with Iran and Turkey through the border guard forces,” Allawi said.
The challenges of border management weakness for Iraqi central government
A major part of the Iraqi borders with Iran and Turkey are witnessing security challenges. Iraq’s border with Turkey is 350 kilometers. Additionally, of the 1460 kilometers of shared borders with Iran, 750 kilometers are in the Kurdistan region, meaning that the troubled Iraqi borders are more than 1100 kilometers. At the same time, despite the fact that Iraq has a more common border with Iran than Turkey, the strikes of Iran against terrorist positions in Iraq, which often have a warning goal, have been less than 100 in recent years while Turkey launched several thousand direct attacks. This is a sign of excessive patience of Tehran and giving sufficient chances to the authorities of Erbil and Baghdad to fulfill their international obligations.
In addition to causing threats to the Iranian-Iraqi neighborly relations, the border activities of the terrorist groups are causing other challenges to Baghdad, the most important of which is oil smuggling from the northern borders. On December 5, Jassim Al-Mousavi, of the State of Law coalition in the Iraqi parliament, reported an agreement between PM al-Sudani and Erbil leaders on regulating oil exports and giving the Kurdish officials a six-month deadline to end oil smuggling. According to the agreement, Erbil authorities should export oil exclusively through the State Organization for Marketing of Oil (SOMO), Iraq’s national company responsible for oil marketing and sales.
This comes as Intesar al-Jazairi, of Fatah parliamentary bloc, had told Almaalomah news outlet that 450,000 oil barrels on average per day are exported to Israel from Iraqi Kurdistan region.
Earlier, Nahed Khanqini, one of the independent politicians of the Kurdistan region, spoke about the chaotic and unregulated oil exports in Kurdistan region and accused the Kurdish parties in power of smuggling a large part of produced oil. He told Almaalomah that many people in the Kurdistan region are united in thinking that there is no transparency in oil exports, to an extent that the influential parties sell a large part of the oil without any supervision and only 30 percent goes to the treasury for budget.
According to Khaneqini, over 600,000 oil barrels are exported from the autonomous region every day, but the economic challenges remain though every oil barrel is $90.
The obstacles ahead of the government’s plans and implementable ways to remove them
The Iraqi central government’s move to take control of the borders in not new. According to the Iraqi media, the new move is aimed at adding to the existing forces the fourth brigade. Since 2005, three brigades have been guarding the borders. Also, in September 2017, Iraqi Defense Ministry in a statement announced that Baghdad plans to control Kurdistan border crossings in coordination with Iran and Turkey. The decision came in response to an illegal independence referendum organized by Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Still, such a decision remained words without action and Iran’s Western borders with Iraq remain the scene of activities of separatist militias.
One of the main reasons behind realization of this decision is the opposition of Erbil leadership led by the Barzanis who took political and economic advantage of the Iraqi central government’s weakness of border control and supervision.
The Barzanis, who control a large part of the autonomous region and the local parliament, as well as the local government posts, allow the smuggling gangs and separatist groups to run rampant on the borders with Iran. By facilitating activities of these groups, many of them are mercenaries for the Mossad and the CIA and Arab intelligence agencies, Erbil is practically a partner to the countries hostile to Iran. In return, Erbil gets support for its autonomy and for the Barzanis’ rule over the Kurdish region. The KRG’s actions and powers, including border control, oil production and sales, and trade agreements with foreign sides, transcend powers the Iraqi constitution granted it.
The Barzanis advance their destructive and self-interested agenda under the guise of defending historical rights of the Kurds in the region and defending the ideal of forming a Greater Kurdistan state. They try to instill a sense of oppression in the public against the security and military measures of the neighboring countries— a tactic they learned from their Israeli allies. For example, an official of The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), in a conversation with Al-Akhbar newspaper about last month’s bombing of military sites of separatist groups involved in riots in several western provinces of Iran, compared these attacks to Saddam Hussein’s chemical bombing of civilians in the 1980s.
Another challenge raised by the observers has to do with the inability of the Iraqi army to control the borders. Jabar Yawar, a retired Iraqi army general, told Aljazeera that the border guards who were sent to the borders since 2005 include 3 brigades of 9,000 soldiers and officers that are insufficient for securing borders of over 1,000 kilometers length.
Also, Fadhel Abu Raghif, a security expert, believes that it is almost impossible to control the borders of Iraq and Turkey only through the deployment of military forces and without numerous checkpoints and thermal cameras and long-range drones, especially since the border areas are mountainous and rough, which often do not allow the movement of military vehicles.
Yawar adds that the Iraqi forces are still underequipped and the country does not have systems covering the whole of its skies. Additionally, Iraq lacks a radar system that covers all of the country.
Despite these challenges and obstacles, the pressures by the regional states and the central government on the Kurdistan government to abandon its tolerance and even facilitation of the activities of terrorist groups and foreign intelligence services on the one hand and bolstering military and security partnership with neighboring countries on the other hand are the main ways for sustainable border security. Moreover, the Iraqi government should not ignore the huge potentials of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), which are officially part of the country’s armed forces and have great maneuvering powers to battle terrorist groups and militants.
