Syrian Rebels Fight for Control of Border With Turkey As my colleague Tim Arango reports from Baghdad, Iraqi government officials "said Thursday evening that Syrian rebels had wrested control of all four border checkpoints between Iraq and Syria, and that additional Iraqi forces were being sent to the border." Fighters from the rebel Free Syrian Army also claimed to have seized at least one major crossing point into Turkey, after a back-and-forth struggle with government forces. One top Iraqi official told The New York Times that the border crossings, in Anbar and Nineveh Provinces, were closed and that Iraqi border forces had witnessed the executions of several Syrian army soldiers at the hands of the Free Syrian Army rebels and the raising of the rebels' flag. Iraq's acting minister of interior, Adnan al-Assadi, told Agence France-Presse that Iraqi forces had seen the executions of 22 Syrian soldiers. As Reuters reports, the rebels now control "the main border crossing with Iraq on the Baghdad-Damascus highway at Abu Kamal -- one of the most important trade routes in the Middle East." View Larger Map In 2004, when insurgents made frequent cross-border attacks from Syria on American troops, my colleague Neil MacFarquhar reported from near the Abu Kamal crossing that much of the 400-mile border was only lightly defended. "Western diplomats, emphasize the sad sack nature of many of the posts, consisting of little more than a tent or a brick shack with a few soldiers who often lack binoculars, radios or night vision equipment," he wrote. Plus, there are at least five great confederations of mostly Sunni Muslim tribes with branches on both sides who view the border as little more than an inconvenience. There were conflicting reports about who controlled the Bab al-Hawa border crossing between Syria and Turkey on Thursday night. Video posted online during the day appeared to show the rebels in control of the post, but Ivan Watson of CNN reported on Twitter that the rebels had been forced back. A rebel fighter and an opposition spokesman told Reuters that government forces had ultimately withdrawn from the customs and immigration buildings on the Syrian side of the frontier, after control of the post changed hands more than once during fighting on Thursday. "The crossing is under our control; they withdrew their armored vehicles," a rebel fighter who gave his name as Abu Ali told the news agency. Reuters added: "The reported seizure of Bab al-Hawa, opposite the Turkish Cilvegozu gate in Hatay Province, comes after the rebels said they were forced to withdraw earlier on Thursday after they attacked the gate, guarded by some 200 troops, but had to pull back when government helicopters were called in." Several video clips posted on a Syrian activist YouTube channel on Thursday showed rebel fighters celebrating at what they described as the Bab al-Hawa checkpoint. Some of the video of the fighters appeared to show them standing in front of a building that looked like a photograph of the checkpoint posted online in 2007. Other clips, apparently recorded inside a building at the checkpoint, showed the fighters destroying a photograph of President Bashar al-Assad and smashing portraits of the autocrat and his late father, Hafez. Activists, including Rami Jarrah, who blogs from exile in Cairo as @AlexanderPageSY, claimed that another crossing into Turkey at Jarablus was also in rebel hands. Nasser Weddady, Mauritanian activist and blogger in Boston, observed on Twitter that rebel control of the border with Iraq might be less important than taking over entry points from Turkey or Jordan. In Damascus on Thursday, Syrian state television broadcast video of the president swearing in a replacement for the defense minister killed one day earlier in a bomb attack on a meeting of senior security officials. An earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of a Mauritanian activist and blogger in Boston. It is Weddady, not Weddaddy.