zurbatia, Iraq • At a dusty border speck on the map where tanks once fought a bitter war in a brutal landscape, trucks now stretch to the horizon, a sign of growing contact between former enemies. Tensions still simmer and Zurbatia has become an outpost of US and Iraqi efforts to stem the flow of Iranian weapons and agents into Iraq's south and east.
"When we first got here about a year ago there was literally a gate and an open field where people and commerce passed," said Colonel Mark Mueller, commander of a US military unit working with Iraqi border guards in Iraq's eastern Wasit province.
"There were a lot of challenges for security," he said.
Washington and the US military accuse Shi'ite Iran of funding, training and arming Shi'ite militias in Iraq with roadside bombs, including armour-piercing "explosively formed penetrators". Tehran denies the charge.
Hundreds of trucks, piled high with bright yellow and green melons, bags of onions, building supplies and furniture, queue for miles every day on the Iranian side of the border, waiting to bring in imports on which Iraq's shattered economy relies.
Buses wait to unload tour groups full of religious pilgrims headed for Iraq's Shi'ite holy sites. Iraqis head the other way to Iran for medical treatment they can't get at home and to escape Iraq's remorseless heat.
"It used to be almost impossible to keep the incoming and the outgoing people separated," said Mueller's deputy, Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Baum, at Zurbatia's new checkpoint.
"It was horrible for us. You couldn't make rhyme or reason for what's happening. At least now we've got the inbound sorted from the outbound," he told Reuters.
The US military this year launched a "surge" of 30,000 extra troops in a last-ditch bid to stop the slide to civil war. Part of that effort has focused on stemming the flow of weapons. "We do know that explosively formed penetrators are getting across the border, we do know that ... rockets are coming across the border, so of course it's a concern," Mueller said.
Wasit's section of the Iraq-Iran border stretches for 143 km, so it is unlikely weapons smugglers would try to get through a heavily guarded checkpoint complete with two x-ray machines scanning every vehicle for arms.
