US accuses Iran of attacks in Iraq
telegraph uk
By staff and agencies
Senior Iranian officials knew about militant attacks in Iraq and have been using Hezbollah militiamen to train Iraqi extremists, US commanders have said.
The charge that senior Iranian officials had prior knowledge of attacks including one that killed five US soldiers in Karbala, is the most serious levelled at Teheran yet.
The US has previously accused Teheran of financing and arming the militants accused of carrying out the killings, but this was the first time they have accused Iranian officers of instigating the attack.
Military intelligence has suggested that Iranians planned an attack and have been using Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militiamen to sponsor violence in Iraq.Brigadier General Kevin Bergner told reporters that US-led forces had captured a senior Hezbollah militant who confessed to training Iraqi extremists to carry out attacks.
Bergner said Ali Musa Daqduq, a Lebanese man whose real name is Hamid Mohammed Jabur al-Lami, is a senior figure in Hezbollah and was captured in Iraq's southern city of Basra on March 20.
"In 2005 he was directed by senior Lebanese Hezbollah leadership to go to Iran and work with the Qods force to train Iraqi extremists," he said.
The Qods force, a unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and Hezbollah were jointly operating camps near Tehran in which they trained Iraqi fighters before sending them back to Iraq to wage attacks.
In the Karbala assault, militants disguised in US-style uniforms driving trucks swept past security at a local Iraqi security base and attacked a visiting group of American soldiers.
One US soldier was killed at the scene and four more dragged into the trucks, driven away, and later shot dead.
Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday dismissed the US allegations as "unfounded."
"There is no doubt about the Iranian government's and people's hatred towards the US administration but America's problem stems from elsewhere," he said.
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