Troops do the dirty work to maintain berm in Mosul

[unhappycamper]

Troops do the dirty work to maintain berm in Mosul
By James Warden, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Wednesday, May 28, 2008

MOSUL, Iraq — As the sun rose Sunday, it found the 43rd Engineer Company’s bulldozers already at work scraping dirt into ever larger piles. East of the engineers, the sun lit up the buildings of Mosul — at about 2 million people, Iraq’s second biggest city. To the west, it shone on the vast emptiness of the desert outside the city.

Mosul has just three main roads going into it, but that desert offers an alternative for anyone who wants to circumvent the checkpoints on the official routes. So Army engineers have built a massive dirt berm around the city to funnel any insurgents through checkpoints, where they have a better chance of being discovered during routine searches.

"There are basically an infinite number of routes if you’re coming in from the desert," said 1st Lt. Ben Weaver, a platoon leader in the company.

Leaders have named this massive berm the "Riyadh Line," after the senior Iraqi commander in the area. The berm is a wall of dirt at least four feet high — but twice that in many places — that almost completely encircles Mosul. The 43rd Engineer Company maintains about 15 kilometers of the berm, essentially the western half of the Riyadh Line.

Similar berms have been built around other Iraqi cities in the past, most notably in nearby Tal Afar. And long concrete blast walls have divided many parts of Baghdad in recent months.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=55139



uhc comment: Nice armored bulldozer.