<http://www.theage.com.au/news/Iraq/Iraqi-passport-racket-highlights-security-lapses/2005/02/07/1107625135924.html?oneclick=true#> Welcome to The Age Online. Passport racket highlights lapses in security By Paul McGeough Baghdad February 8, 2005 The passport details the bearer's Arab background but has Paul McGeough's picture. For a few hundred dollars, anyone can buy their way through most checkpoints and across borders. While officials in Baghdad and Washington berate Iraq's neighbours for failing to block insurgency movements across their borders, one of the most dangerous security lapses thrives in Baghdad's heart - a trade in illicit Iraqi passports. In a secretive exchange at a suburban gambling den, across the road from a heavily fortified government ministry that is an insurgency target, it costs only $US200 ($A250) for a pass through most of the security checkpoints in a city at war. The ease with which this deal was conducted is a chilling window on the easy movement of terrorists in and out of the country. The security blanket in the capital can be numbing - some wait for hours in snail's-pace queues for access to military, government, political and private establishments. Passing through the maze of blast walls and razor wire that isolates the Green Zone, within which top US and Iraqi officials are bunkered on the banks of the Tigris River, requires checks at four heavily armed posts only 150 metres apart. All bags are searched and visitors are frisked, physically and electronically, at two of them. At a ministry as mundane as Displacement and Migration there is a twist: personal IDs are held at the first check; and a special pale blue pass is issued that must be swapped for a darker blue tag at a second checkpoint closer to the building. Journalists reporting on the January 30 election had to carry three separately issued passes, each of which took half a day or more to be issued: one from the US-run Combined Press Information Centre; another from the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior; and the third from the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. But the starting point for any pass is a valid passport. And in the absence of most of the fancy laminated picture passes, a passport, or any other picture ID, say a driver's licence, are likely to get the bearer through most checkpoints. But take the Iraqi passport pictured above. It gives the name of the bearer's Arab mother and it describes him as a Baghdad businessman - but it has a picture of me. It was acquired through a former Iraqi policeman who replied cryptically when asked what his business was: "I'm retired." This is not a backstreet counterfeit, it is said to be real. It was to cost $US100 and could have been turned around in a couple of hours, but it was ordered during the weekend and had to be delivered 48 hours later. In the best opportunist tradition, the price suddenly doubled at the point of collection. The passport racket emerged last week in interviews with insurgency and criminal elements in Baghdad. They said Sabah al-Baldawi, one of the insurgency's top financiers and the man they say is behind most of the kidnapping in the city, moves freely between Baghdad and Damascus using up to 20 false passports. One said false Iraqi documents were used to spirit Saad al-Kharki, an insurgency leader in Baghdad, out of Iraq when he needed to hide in Cairo after a televised alert that authorities were hunting him. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'