-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: January 13, 2007 9:57:17 AM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: No Evidence Supporting Bush's Claim of Iranian "Support"
in Iraq, British Say
BRITISH FIND NO EVIDENCE OF ARMS TRAFFIC FROM IRAN
TROOPS IN SOUTHEAST IRAQ TEST U.S. CLAIM OF AID FOR MILITIAS
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post, October 4, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/03/
AR2006100301577_pf.html
ON THE IRAQ-IRAN BORDER -- Since late August, British commandos in
the deserts of far southeastern Iraq have been testing one of the
most serious charges leveled by the United States against Iran:
that Iran is secretly supplying weapons, parts, funding and
training for attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq.
A few hundred British troops living out of nothing more than their
cut-down Land Rovers and light armored vehicles have taken to the
desert in the start of what British officers said would be months
of patrols aimed at finding the illicit weapons trafficking from
Iran, or any sign of it.
There's just one thing.
"I suspect there's nothing out there," the commander, Lt. Col.
David Labouchere, said last month, speaking at an overnight camp
near the border. "And I intend to prove it."
Other senior British military leaders spoke as explicitly in
interviews over the previous two months. Britain, whose forces have
had responsibility for security in southeastern Iraq since the war
began, has found nothing to support the Americans' contention that
Iran is providing weapons and training in Iraq, several senior
military officials said.
"I have not myself seen any evidence -- and I don't think any
evidence exists -- of government-supported or instigated" armed
support on Iran's part in Iraq, British Defense Secretary Des
Browne said in an interview in Baghdad in late August.
"It's a question of 'intelligence' versus evidence," Labouchere's
commander, Brig. James Everard of Britain's 20th Armored Brigade,
said last month at his base in the southern region's capital,
Basra. "One hears word of mouth, but one has to see it with one's
own eyes. These are serious consequences, aren't they?"
They are. Allegations that Iran or its agents are providing
military support for Iraqi Shiite Muslim militias and other armed
groups is one of the most contentious issues raising tensions
between Washington and Tehran. Most gravely, U.S. generals and
diplomats accuse Iran of providing infrared triggers for special
explosives that are capable of piercing heavy armor.
Evidence of Iranian armed intervention in Iraq is "irrefutable,"
one U.S. commander in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Michael Barbero, told
Pentagon reporters in August. The lead U.S. military spokesman in
Iraq renews the allegation almost weekly in Baghdad.
Iraq's remote Maysan province is "a funnel for Iranian munitions,"
said Wayne White, who led the State Department's Iraq intelligence
team during the war and now is an adjunct scholar at the Washington-
based Middle East Institute. White said that in the first year of
the occupation a well-placed friend had seen "considerable physical
evidence of it, and just about everyone in al-Amarah knew about
it." Al-Amarah is the commonly used name of Maysan province.
Here in Maysan, Jasim Alawa Salum, an Iraqi father of 10 whose home
is in a warren of thatched farmhouses near the border, agreed. "All
troubles come from Iran," he said, bending his head to show a wound
from the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.
But Maj. Dominic Roberts of the Queen's Dragoons said: "We have
found no credible evidence to suggest there is weapons smuggling
across the border."
Asked why he could declare himself so confident that no arms were
coming through, Labouchere mildly cited his confidence in Iraq's
border force.
Guards at one of the 27 border forts now used to guard Maysan were
dismissive of talk of military support from Iran. "It's just
fabrication," insisted one, Haidar Hassan.
At one crossroads checkpoint, two border guards grinned awkwardly
when a British desert patrol stopped in. No smugglers had come by,
no untoward travelers, no problems, the guards said. The guards,
however, come from tribes with a history of smuggling, and since
the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi border workers have redoubled
their reputation for taking bribes.
To determine the truth of the charges, British commanders say, the
British troops did something no other large-scale conventional unit
in the U.S.-led coalition here has tried. They gave up their base.
Almost every night for months, rockets and mortar rounds had
pounded Abu Naji, the outpost where British forces made their home
outside Amarah, Maysan's provincial capital. In the base's last
five months of use, 281 rockets or mortar rounds hit Abu Naji,
Labouchere said.
Young soldiers would slip out of base at night to try to find the
attackers. They would return in the morning as frustrated as when
they left, he said. "The boys felt they were powerless," Labouchere
said.
So the British forces packed up. The night before they left,
mortars gave Abu Naji a farewell pounding.
About 5,000 townspeople gathered at the gates of Abu Naji on Aug.
24. When British troops pulled out that afternoon, the mobs moved
in. Iraqi forces briefly tried to hold back the crowds, then gave
way, said Maj. Charlie Burbridge, a British military spokesman at
Basra. The mobs looted the base down to the bricks.
"This is the first Iraqi city that has kicked out the occupier!"
loudspeakers at the local offices of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr
trumpeted.
In their new mission, the British spread out over a desert carpeted
with shrapnel, the legacy of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war that
claimed the bulk of its 1 million dead here in the deserts of
Maysan. Pressing all hands into duty, a former tank crewman became
a medic; the regiment chaplain took the wheel as a fuel tanker driver.
If trouble in most of Iraq had inevitably followed foreign
soldiers, the soldiers in Maysan didn't seem to hear anything
coming. Attackers had lobbed a rocket or mortar round at them
during their first week in the desert, but there had been nothing
since, they said.
At the least, Labouchere said, "I am satisfied our presence will
reduce" the dangers for the rest of Iraq.
Ultimately, however, the British can do little more than
demonstrate that the borders are closed, Labouchere said. Save for
that, he said, they find themselves trying "to prove a negative."
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