US alleges Iran has been engaged in a proxy war against US, British and Iraqi forces in an effort to shore up Iran's Shiite militant allies in Ir

US accuses Iran of holy city attack

John Burns and Michael Gordon in Baghdad
July 4, 2007
AGENTS of Iran helped plan a January raid in Iraq's Shiite holy city of Karbala in which five American soldiers were killed by Islamic militants, a US general has alleged.

The charge was the most specific allegation of Iranian involvement in the attack and came at a time of rising tensions with Iran over its role in Iraq and its nuclear program.

Brigadier-General Kevin Bergner, the US military spokesman in Baghdad, said an elite unit of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, a force under the control of Iran's most powerful religious leaders, had used veterans of the Lebanese Islamic militia group Hezbollah as a "proxy" to train, arm and plan attacks by an array of Shiite militant cells in Iraq.

A Hezbollah commander from Lebanon, who was captured in Basra in March, gave US interrogators details of Iran's role after weeks of pretending to be a deaf mute, the general said. Iran has denied the charges.

Earlier briefings by the US command on accusations of an Iranian role focused on technical analyses of arms said to have been supplied by Iran to Shiite militias in Iraq, including explosively formed penetrators, which have been responsible for killing at least 170 Americans.

But some critics alleged the evidence was circumstantial and that the Americans appeared to be offering a new rationale for maintaining or increasing the military commitment in Iraq.

At the briefings on Monday General Bergner described a network of secret militant cells armed, financed and directed by the Iranians. General Bergner said the information was drawn from interrogations of three men captured in a raid in Basra on May 20, and from documents found with them.

He did not present transcripts of the interrogations or the seized documents for inspection.

In effect, the US alleges Iran has been engaged in a proxy war against US, British and Iraqi forces in an effort to shore up Iran's Shiite militant allies in Iraq and to raise the cost of the US military presence.

Iran's Foreign Ministry rejected the claims as "fabricated and ridiculous".
[link to www.smh.com.au]