US Task Force Found Few Iranian Arms in Iraq
http://www.truthout.org/111608C
Washington - Last April, top George W. Bush administration officials,
desperate to exploit any possible crack in the close relationship
between the Nouri al-Maliki government and Iran, launched a new round
of charges that Iran had stepped up covert arms assistance to Shi'a
militias.
Secretary of Defence Robert M. Gates suggested that there was
"some sense of an increased level of [Iranian] supply of weapons and
support to these groups." And Washington Post reporter Karen DeYoung
was told by military officials that the "plentiful, high quality
weaponry" the militia was then using in Basra was "recently
manufactured in Iran".
But a U.S. military task force had been passing on data to the
Multi-National Force Iraq (MNFI) command that told a very different
story. The data collected by the task force in the previous six weeks
showed that relatively few of the weapons found in Shi'a militia
caches were manufactured in Iran.
According to the data compiled by the task force, and made
available to an academic research project last July, only 70 weapons
believed to have been manufactured in Iran had been found in post-
invasion weapons caches between mid-February and the second week in
April. And those weapons represented only 17 percent of the weapons
found in caches that had any Iranian weapons in them during that
period.
The actual proportion of Iranian-made weapons to total weapons
found, however, was significantly lower than that, because the task
force was finding many more weapons caches in Shi'a areas that did
not
have any Iranian weapons in them.
The task force database identified 98 caches over the five-month
period with at least one Iranian weapon, excluding caches believed to
have been hidden prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion.
But according to an e-mail from the MNFI press desk this week,
the
task force found and analysed a total of roughly 4,600 weapons caches
during that same period.
The caches that included Iranian weapons thus represented just 2
percent of all caches found. That means Iranian-made weapons were a
fraction of one percent of the total weapons found in Shi'a militia
caches during that period.
The extremely small proportion of Iranian arms in Shi'a militia
weapons caches further suggests that Shi'a militia fighters in Iraq
had been getting weapons from local and international arms markets
rather than from an official Iranian-sponsored smuggling network.
The database was compiled by MNFI's Task Force Troy, which was
directed to examine all weapons caches found in Iraq beginning in
early January 2008 to identify Iranian-made weapons. The database was
released by MNFI last July to the Empirical Studies of Conflict
project, co-sponsored by the U.S. Military Academy and Princeton
University, and was published for the first time by West Point's
Counter-Terrorism Centre last month as an appendix to a paper on
Iranian strategy in Iraq by Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman.
In late April, the U.S. presented the Maliki government with a
document that apparently listed various Iranian arms found in Iraq
and
highlighted alleged Iranian arms found in Basra. But the U.S.
campaign
to convince Iraqi officials collapsed when Task Force Troy analysed a
series of large weapons caches uncovered in Basra and Karbala in
April
and May.
Caches of arms found in Karbala late last April and May totaled
more than 2,500 weapons, and caches in Basra included at least 3,700
weapons, according to official MNFI statements. That brought the
total
number of weapons found in those former Mahdi Army strongholds to
more
than 6,200 weapons.
But the task force found that none of those weapons were Iranian-
made. The database lists three caches found Apr. 19, but provides no
data on any of them. It lists no other caches for the region
coinciding with that period, confirming that no weapons had been
found
to be of Iranian origin.
In announcing the weapons totals discovered in Basra to reporters
on May 7, Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner said nothing about the provenance
of
the weapons, implicitly admitting that they were not Iranian-made.
Only two months before the new high-level propaganda push on
alleged Iranian weapons supply to Shi'a militias, the U.S. command
had
put out a story suggesting that large numbers of Iranian-supplied
arms
had been buried all over the country. On Feb. 17, 2008, U.S. military
spokesman Rear Admiral Gregory Smith told reporters that Iraqi and
coalition forces had captured 212 weapons caches across Iraq over the
previous week "with growing links to the Iranian-backed special
groups".
The Task Force Troy data for the week of Feb. 9-16 show, however,
that the U.S. command had information on Iranian arms contradicting
that propaganda line. According to the task force database, only five
of those 212 caches contained any Iranian weapons that analysts
believed might have been buried after the U.S. invasion. And the
total
number of confirmed Iranian-made weapons found in those five caches,
according to the data, was eight, not including four Iranian-made
hand
grenades.
The task force database includes 350 armour-piercing explosively
formed penetrators (EFPs) found in Iraqi weapons caches. However, the
database does not identify any of the EFPs as Iranian weapons.
That treatment of EFPs in the caches appears to contradict claims
by U.S. officials throughout 2007 and much of 2008 that EFPs were
being smuggled into Iraq by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The
allegedly Iranian-manufactured EFPs had been the centrepiece of the
U.S. military's February 2007 briefing charging Iran with arming
Shi'a
militiamen in Iraq.
Press reports of a series of discoveries of shops for
manufacturing EFPs in Iraq in 2007 forced the U.S. command to admit
that the capacity to manufacture EFPs was not limited to Iran. By the
second half of 2008, U.S. officials had stopped referring to Iranian
supply of EFPs altogether.
Felter and Fishman do not analyse the task force data in their
paper, but they criticise official U.S. statements on Iranian weapons
in Iraq. "Some reports erroneously attribute munitions similar to
those produced in Iran as Iranian," they write, "while other Iranian
munitions found in Iraq were likely purchased on the open market."
The co-authors note that Iranian arms can be purchased directly
from the website of the Defence Industries of Iran with a credit
card.
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