Thursday, December 13, 2007
Blast Walls and Biometrics
Catching up on missed blog reading today. I've been out for a few weeks to some of the more remote spots in Iraq and noticed this at Unqualified Offerings from a few days ago:
The blast walls certainly seem omnipresent in Baghdad. I doubt there are as many in the rest of the country. Michael Totten has an interesting embed report from Fallujah that doesn't detail internal controls on movement in the city. He does refer to border controls, but stresses they are in the hands of local police forces.
Well, I'm in Fallujah and I can tell you that while there may not be blast walls separating one neighborhood from another (as is the situation in Baghdad), there is a wall around the entire city with controlled access points staffed by U.S. Marines checking the identification of everyone who attempts to pass through them. The ID's are produced by U.S. forces and are connected to a biometric tracking system that is run by U.S. forces. So Totten is wrong about the border controls being in the hands of local police forces. I find it amazing that he could have gotten that as wrong as he did, but I have no idea what Totten was shown when he was here.
But if you want to know why Fallujah is as calm as it is (and it is quite calm by the standards of this warzone), the walls and the iris scans are a huge part of it.
Labels: Iraq
