Women play key role on an Israeli front

ON THE ISRAELI-EGYPTIAN BORDER -- Sergeant Tzipora Schindler , a 2004 graduate of Newton South High School, is on the front lines of Israel's other border war, on the lookout for terrorists and smugglers along the country's southern frontier.

From her base camp atop Mount Uzia, she can see through binoculars where Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia intersect at the Gulf of Aqaba below, gleaming like an oasis in the desert landscape.

Schindler, 20, left her parents in Newton and moved to Israel two years ago, seeking spiritual rebirth after spending part of her childhood in Jerusalem. She quickly volunteered for the only infantry battalion in the Israel Defense Forces that includes women.

Now, while much of the world focuses on Israel's tense northern border with Lebanon, Schindler and her comrades in the Karkal, or ``Lynx," battalion -- about 70 percent of whom are female -- are attempting to choke off a sophisticated criminal and terrorist smuggling network that poses a growing threat to the Jewish state.

They are on the hunt not only for Palestinian terrorists from the Gaza Strip and other Islamic militants. The soldiers are also seeking to capture thousands of would-be illegal workers and a growing number of women from such countries as Turkey, Georgia, Russia, China, Sudan, and Colombia who are being smuggled into the country to meet the demands of a burgeoning sex industry.

Stopping the flow poses enormous challenges for Israel, which has relatively few troops to patrol this vast and dangerous mountainous terrain, where borders exist only on maps and remain largely unrecognized by local tribes. But it is also a new opportunity for Israeli women like Schindler, who are breaking their own barrier by serving on the front lines with men.

The Karkal battalion is part of an experiment that began as a single company in 2000 and has grown to a full battalion. In a first, one of its companies served a tour of duty last year in the volatile West Bank.

``All our borders must be protected," Schindler said in an interview last week, sipping soda with her fellow soldiers. ``But part of the mission is also to show that women can also be involved in combat and conflict."

Schindler's battalion is part the Edom Division, 1,500 soldiers responsible for border security in about one-third of the country, including the entire southern region of Israel.

The area runs 125 miles along Egypt's desolate and sparsely inhabited Sinai peninsula from the Gaza Strip to the Israeli port and tourist destination of Eilat. It then runs north nearly the same distance along the border with Jordan to the Dead Sea, framing a triangular swath of territory that marks the land bridge between Africa and Asia.

Many mountain passes are known only by the nomadic Bedouin tribes and their camels that are often hired as guides by smugglers. The landscape is also dotted with ancient caves and tunnels where weapons and other supplies -- explosives from Gaza, heroin from Jordan, or marijuana and hashish from Egypt -- can be hidden.

``It's like the border with Mexico," a lieutenant colonel named Shaul, a top officer in the B'nai Or brigade, which means Children of Light, said at his mountain headquarters between Gaza and Eilat. (According to government security guidelines, top field officers could provide only their first names.)

More than 5,000 people were intercepted on the border here in 2005, according to defense officials, who believe that figure is only a small percentage of the people who actually get through, but still significant in a country with a population of 6.2 million.

``We have a small country and a lot of problems," Brigadier General Imad Faris , an Israeli Druze who commands the Edom Division, said in an interview in the defense force's Southern Command headquarters near Be'er Sheva. ``It's a huge territory for one division."

That helps explain why Israel is increasingly turning to women to serve on the front line.

Lieutenant Moran, 21, the deputy commander of Uzia Company, says she always ``wanted to be a combat soldier."

Her troops patrol along a snaking, 30-mile corridor -- from Natafim to Taba in Egypt -- where the Israeli government hopes to build a modern border fence with high-tech cameras to defend Eilat.

Each female volunteer signs up for at least three years of service, a year longer than other women drafted into the Israeli Army but the same term of service required of male soldiers.

``I think this is the best place to contribute," Moran said.

Aided by spy drones and surveillance blimps overhead, her troops staff border checkpoints and conduct round-the-clock foot and vehicle patrols. They come across signs of intrusion, such as tire tracks or abandoned campsites, multiple times each day.

One of the unit's growing priorities is stopping human smuggling, including a worrisome scourge of sex trafficking.

Israel was recently added to a United Nations list of problem nations where girls -- some as young as 12 -- are smuggled from Eastern Europe and Asia and often sold into prostitution rings in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and other cities.

Officials said that 3,000 Sudanese women have been intercepted on the border in the past several years. Because Israel has no diplomatic relations with Sudan, it cannot send them home and has tried to assimilate them into Israeli society, placing them in Arab villages or in women's centers.

``They can be sold, maimed, killed," Faris, the division commander, said of trafficked women. ``Nobody knows who they are." He added: ``We are just at the beginning of this phenomenon."

The problem is expected to worsen with the arrival in Lebanon of 15,000 UN peacekeeping troops. An Israeli government task force recently warned Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that this ``mass of solitary men" will likely take weekend leave in the north of Israel, an influx that ``will increase tenfold the demand for prostitutes."

``Past experiences prove that when aircraft carriers arrive to the shores of Haifa, for example, and thousands of foreign soldiers go to the city, it triggers the increase in the exploitation of women, violence, and it amplifies the trafficking of women," the task force warned in a report.

But Schindler, the former Newton resident, believes that the Karkal battalion is especially suited to deal with the problem. ``We have a special interest to see that these women are having the best future they can have," she said .

Schindler said not everyone in Israel's military culture accepts the female infantry soldiers yet, but they are steadily being treated as equals.

Most Israelis are required to serve military duty, but until now women served only in non combat roles and were never mixed in with men in fighting units.

``It's still something new in Israel," Schindler said. ``People stop at the roadblocks and ask us questions. Not all the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] accepts us. But many have said they are thankful that the border was being secured while the war was going on in Lebanon."

Their mission, many here fear, will only get more dangerous.

From a desolate bluff bristling with long-range radio transmitters, Nitsan, a lieutenant colonel in the Edom Division, pointed to the southeast toward Mount Karkum.

On the desert floor below, he said, two Egyptians this year walked 25 miles from Egypt across Israel in 24 hours, cooking pita bread from flour they brought along and drinking ground water. They also carried with them 22 assault rifles, grenades, and other weapons destined for Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank.

Since Israeli forces pulled out and cordoned off the Gaza Strip last year, Israel has caught almost 100 suspected Palestinian terrorists seeking to smuggle weapons and other supplies into the West Bank from the Sinai, according to Israeli intelligence officials. Many of them were guided with the help of local Bedouins equipped with cellphones, night vision equipment, and other modern technology.

There are also fears that Islamic militants who have battled US forces in neighboring Iraq are lurking across the eastern border in Jordan, lying in wait for other opportunities to strike Western targets.

According to Israeli and Egyptian intelligence officials, less than 30 miles to the west in Egypt lies the ``infrastructure of Al Qaeda" suspected of orchestrating a series of recent suicide bombings in the Sinai, including Sharm el-Sheik, Taba, and Dahab, south of the Israeli port city of Eilat.

Last week, Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Al-Zawahiri warned in a videotape of new attacks against Israeli targets. Nitsan said intelligence officials have warned of further attacks in the Sinai and possible plans to kidnap Israeli soldiers or hikers along the border to trade for militants held in Israeli jails.

``The feeling is hanging in the air that the bubble will burst," Nitsan said.

In addition to the strategic importance of their mission, the women in Karkal battalion believe they are also making a difference in bringing equality to the profession of combat arms.

``I think we are proving ourselves," said Corporal Tali Yogev, 19, an M-16 assault rifle slung over one shoulder. ``I am sure that one day we will be more than just one battalion."

Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.