Iraq pushes for Syrian border wall, threatening Iran's regional influence

 Iraq is forging ahead with the construction of a wall it is building along its 600-kilometer border with Syria. Even though, in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, walls have been shown to be a less reliable solution, Iraq continues to believe this wall will work.

So far, Baghdad has built 350km. of the wall, the North Press Agency in eastern Syria said on Sunday. The report said this section is a concrete barrier. It noted that these fortifications began to be put up in 2022.

“Iraq has accelerated construction of a concrete security wall along its northwestern border with Syria, a stretch that also marks the frontier with the Kurdistan Region,” according to the North Press Agency.

As a reminder, ISIS invaded Iraq from Syria in 2014. But it was not just the Islamic State that had Iraq worried. After ISIS was defeated, mainly in 2019, Iranian-backed militias were the ones to infiltrate Syria via the unguarded border.

As such, any wall would actually hurt Iran’s agenda of taking control of the region. When Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell, the Iraqi government decided to increase work on the wall because it is interested in security with Syria.

Syria and Iraq have a complex history

It is worth noting that Syria and Iraq have a complex history. Following the Great Arab Revolt in World War I, Faisal I, one of the sons of the prominent Arab leader Sharif Hussein bin Ali, sought to seize Syria and crown himself king. The French expelled him, but he nevertheless became king, being crowned as such in Iraq. His family’s rule ended in 1958.

Eventually, both Syria and Iraq were led by versions of the Ba’ath Party, which promoted an ideology of Arab unity, freedom, and socialism. Later, Saddam Hussein was overthrown and Iraq shifted closer to Iran. This suited the Assad regime because it was also close to Iran.

Today, things are a bit different; Iraq is led by pro-Iranian officials, while Damascus is led by former members of Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni group that opposed Iran’s role in Syria. Both Iraq and Syria have Kurdish regions that enjoy forms of regional rule.

According to the North Press Agency, the Iraqis have “explained that approximately 350km. of the concrete security wall have been completed, while efforts continue to seal all remaining gaps to prevent infiltration and smuggling.”

Per this same report, the concrete wall is “reinforced by a multilayered security system, which includes a three-meter-wide, three-meter-deep trench, an earthen berm rising three meters high, a four-layer inflatable barrier, and observation towers positioned at one-km. intervals, each equipped with advanced thermal cameras linked to a centralized monitoring system.”

The wall is also supposed to have “an integrated defense network made up of trenches, barbed wire barriers, and early warning systems, supported by high-precision thermal imaging and 24/7 day-and-night surveillance devices.”

Other reports in the region have closely followed the construction. Levant24 in Syria has been monitoring this.

A website named Sarif noted that “with the completion of this wall, four of Syria’s six neighboring countries have now begun to build security barriers on their borders.” These include Turkey’s 911km. wall on the Syrian border, Israel’s fence system on the Golan, which this report said is 92km long.

Sarif also mentioned that Jordan has a “multilayered barbed wire system [with] trenches and guard towers being completed with US funding.”

A previous report in the North Press Agency also noted that Iraq had recently invested in a 40km. section of a wall stretching between the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Syria. It reportedly runs from Peshkhabur in the Duhok Governorate to Rabia. What is unclear is whether this is an anti-Kurdish policy designed to divide Iraq’s and Syria’s Kurdish regions.