An eye-opening account in the Washington Post yesterday about the journey of the typical foreign militant into Iraq. The lesson here is that we desperately need to be putting more pressure on the Syrians:

The Islamist militants have their own foot soldiers in this unholy alliance: supporters who have poured across the mostly open borders from neighboring countries. I believe it is these people who are particularly useful to the Baathists, because they provide a supply of willing suicide bombers.
Suicide attacks are not, in all likelihood, Iraqi operations. “Thirty-five years of Saddam’s brutal repression did not produce a single suicide bomber,” says a former military officer who is now working as a driver.
Syria has been an important base and way station for these foreign fighters. Interviews with arrested “jihadis” and transcripts of interrogations obtained from Iraqi security and intelligence show that a typical jihadi’s journey from his city in Syria, Jordan, Sudan, Yemen or any other Arab country until the moment he blows himself up goes something like this: After deciding that he wants to fight the Americans in Iraq, he contacts mosques in Damascus known for recruiting mujaheddin for the holy war in Iraq. Often these recruitment campaigns are funded by senior Syrian officials.
After deciding that a person is fit to conduct a “martyrdom operation,” Syrian intelligence trains him on how to disguise his identity and how to handle explosives and ammunitions. Radical mullahs supplement this with heavy doses of hard-line religious teaching. The volunteer is then taken across the desert in eastern Syria, through the porous borders, into the Sunni triangle in Iraq, where he is housed by members of the former Baathist intelligence and security network. The second leg of the journey is to a safe house in Baghdad, where he is assigned a target to blow up or sent to certain areas to fight the Americans or the new Iraqi army and police forces.