[Peace-discuss] here we go (Iran this time)

[Ricky Baldwin]

he's a drugstore truck drivin man
he's the head of the ku klux klan
when summer time rolls around
we'll be lucky if he's not in town ...


U.S. implicates Iran in January attack

By LEE KEATH, Associated Press Writer 7/2/07

The U.S. military accused Iran on Monday of a direct
role in a sophisticated militant attack that killed
five American troops in Iraq, portraying Tehran as
waging a proxy war through Shiite extremists.

The claims over the January attack marked a sharp
escalation in U.S. accusations that Iran has been
arming and financing Iraqi militants, and for the
first time linked the Iranian effort to its ally,
Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah militia. The allegations
could endanger Iraqi efforts to hold a new round of
talks between the U.S. and Iran.

U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner
said the Quds Force, part of Iran's elite Republican
Guards, was seeking to build an Iraqi version of
Hezbollah to fight U.S. and Iraqi forces — and had
brought in Hezbollah operatives to help train and
organize militants.

"Our intelligence reveals that the senior leadership
in Iran is aware of this activity," Bergner told a
Baghdad news conference. He said it would be "hard to
imagine" that Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei did not know about the activity.

Iran has denied past claims that it was backing Iraqi
militants — including accusations that it was
providing them with a particularly deadly type of
roadside bomb, the explosively formed penetrator. Its
ally Hezbollah has denied having any role in Iraq,
saying it operates only in Lebanon.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali
Hosseini rejected the allegations Monday, saying
"American leaders have gotten into the habit of
issuing ridiculous and false statements without
providing evidence, with political and psychological
aims."

But Bergner said an extensive Quds Force program was
revealed through interrogations of an alleged Lebanese
Hezbollah operative, Ali Mussa Dakdouk, and an Iraqi
militant, Qais al-Khazaali, along with documents
seized with them. Both men were captured in March in
the southern city of Basra.

The Quds Force is providing up to $3 million a month
to Iraqi militants and bringing them to three training
camps outside Tehran to learn how to carry out
bombings, raids and kidnappings, Bergner said. Most of
those who trained in Iran were extremists who broke
away from Iraqi Shiite militias, including the Mahdi
Army loyal to anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, he
said.

Dakdouk, a 24-year veteran of Hezbollah, was sent to
Iraq "as a surrogate for the Iranian Quds Force" to
finance and arm militant cells known as "special
groups," the general said.

The goal was to organize militants "in ways that
mirrored how Hezbollah was organized in Lebanon."
Hezbollah is one of the region's most disciplined and
powerful militant groups, able to fight Israel's
military to a near standstill in a war last summer.

Dakdouk told his interrogators that the militants
behind the Jan. 20 surprise attack in the southern
city of Karbala "could not have conducted this complex
operation without the support and direction of the
Quds Force," Bergner said.

The Karbala attack was one of the most sophisticated
against U.S. forces in the 4-year-old Iraqi war.

Carrying false IDs, up to a dozen fighters disguised
themselves as an American security team. They got past
checkpoints to reach a provincial government building,
where they opened fire with machine guns and
explosives. One U.S. soldier was killed in the initial
attack, and four others were abducted and found shot
to death soon after.

Al-Khazaali was in charge of special groups around
Iraq and confessed to ordering the Karbala attack,
Bergner said. A 22-page document seized with him
detailed the operation, showing that the Quds Force
had developed detailed information on U.S. soldiers'
"shift changes and defenses" at the government
building, "and this information was shared with the
attackers," Bergner said.

A total of 18 "higher-level operatives" from the
Iranian-backed special groups have been arrested and
three others killed since February, Bergner said.

The Shiite-led Iraqi government of Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki is backed by the U.S. but is also
closely tied to Iran, and it has hoped that talks
between the two rivals could ease the tensions between
them and reduce Iraq's violence.

An initial Baghdad session in February between
ambassadors from the two countries, however, made
little progress, overshadowed by accusations by each
side that the other was fueling Iraq's turmoil. Iraq
is trying to organize a second meeting, but no date
has been set.

Sami al-Askari, al-Maliki adviser, said, "We don't
rule out that there is Iranian interference by
financing armed groups, whether Shiite or Sunni, or
even that there might be some Hezbollah elements
training the groups."

But he insisted the U.S. accusations "will not affect
the Iranian-American meeting."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean
McCormack echoed Bergner's charges, saying they were
"another data point in what is a troubling picture of
Iranian negative involvement in Iraq."

"We have found that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard
has essentially subcontracted out to some elements of
Hezbollah, using them as a pass through for material,
technology and other material assistance," McCormack
said. "It is of deep concern to us."

Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, said the allegations about Hezbollah were
not surprising.

"Iran has always worked through Hezbollah, and it
makes sense because Hezbollah is well-versed in this
kind of terrain ... in this kind of ambiguous
situation where there is sectarian violence and an
outside occupation," said Takeyh.

An American soldier was killed Monday by an explosion
in Salahuddin province, a center for Sunni insurgents
northwest of Baghdad. The U.S. military also reported
the deaths of five U.S. service members killed in
fighting a day earlier, in attacks in Baghdad and
western Anbar province.

But violence appeared sharply down in Baghdad and
other parts of the country, amid an intensified U.S.
security sweep aimed at uprooting Sunni insurgents and
Shiite militias in the capital and areas to the
northeast and south.

Iraqi police reported four civilians killed in
separate attacks in Baghdad. And car bomb hit the
Baghdad district of Binouk in the evening, killing
seven people and wounding 33, hospital officials said.

U.S. warplanes struck buildings in the mostly Shiite
city of Diwaniyah with 500-pound bombs early Monday,
targeting sites suspected as the source of mortar
fire, the U.S. Air Force said. Iraqi police in the
city said the raid killed 10 civilians, including
women and children, wounded 25 others and damaged six
homes. The police spoke on condition of anonymity
because they were not authorized to release the
information.

AP Television News footage from the area showed houses
with large holes, as residents dug through rubble,
pulling out at least one person on a stretcher.
Following the raid, residents protested in the
streets, and Iraqi police fired in the air to disperse
them, killing one person. Some protesters fired back,
wounding two policemen, a police officer said,
speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not
authorized to talk to the press.

Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press. All rights
reserved. The information contained in the AP News
report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or
redistributed without the prior written authority of
The Associated Press. 


       
____________________________________________________________________________________
Moody friends. Drama queens. Your life? Nope! - their life, your story. Play Sims Stories at Yahoo! Games.
http://sims.yahoo.com/