Iraq is building wall along Syria border to keep out IS fighters, military source reveals
- Iraq, which shares a 600km-long border with Syria, seeks to ‘put a stop to the infiltration of Islamic State members’ into its territory, the source said
- The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor, said the wall’s construction was carried out in an area in the south of Syria’s Hasakeh province
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Iraq is building a concrete wall along part of its border with Syria to stop Islamic State group jihadists from infiltrating, an Iraqi military source said on Sunday.
In the “first stage” of construction, a wall around “a dozen kilometres (seven miles) long and 3.5 metres (11ft) high was built in Nineveh province”, in the Sinjar area of northwest Iraq, a senior officer told Agence France-Presse, requesting anonymity.
Iraq, which shares a more than 600km-long border with Syria, seeks to “put a stop to the infiltration of Islamic State members” into its territory, the source added, without specifying how long the wall would eventually run.
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Iraq in 2018 said it had begun building a fence along the Syrian border for the same reason.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said the wall’s construction was carried out in an area facing the town of Al-Shaddadi, in the south of Syria’s Hasakeh province.
In January in the Kurdish-controlled province, IS fighters attacked a prison to free fellow jihadists, sparking days of clashes that left hundreds dead.
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Many prisoners are thought to have escaped, with some crossing to neighbouring Turkey or Turkish-held territory in Syria’s north, the Observatory said.
IS overran large swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014, declaring a “caliphate” before Baghdad proclaimed victory in late 2017 after a grinding campaign.
But a low-level jihadist insurgency has persisted, flaring up particularly in rural and mountainous areas between Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region and northern outskirts of the capital.
