Giving the Ayatollah a hand

MANDALI, IRAQ - The Iraq-Iran border feels like something between the edge of the Earth and Medieval Europe. The lonely north-south highway in Diyala Province winds through low-slung barren mountains and yawning stretches of flat desert populated only by thousands of minefields left over from the Iran-Iraq War.

Every once in a while you run into a small castle sitting atop a brown hillside. When I say castle I mean high fortified brick walls with a turrett on each corner and a courtyard in the middle. The minefields are kind of like a moat. Every Iraqi and Iranian border post is like that although no one was able to explain why. It looks, to say the least, out of place.

All kinds of stuff comes over the border illegally: drugs, cigarettes, fuel, sheep and, the reason I was there, weapons and fighters. It's a long frontier and there aren't a lot of people to patrol it.

At the one legal border crossing in the area I got to walk right up to the border, where hundreds of Iranians were lined up, or sort of mobbed up, to get through the gate (many Iranian pilgrims visit Shiite holy site in Iraq in addition to the commerce that flows back and forth). At one point while leaning over a jersey barrier to get a picture with a billboard of Ayatollah Khomeini in the background I had one foot in Iraq and one hand in Iran, no visa required.