U.S. shows weapons it says tie Iran to Iraq
Shipments to Iraqis cleared at 'highest level,' officials say
BAGHDAD: After weeks of internal debate, senior American military officials on Sunday literally put on the table their first public evidence for the contentious assertion that Iran is supplying Shiite extremist groups in Iraq with deadly weaponry, including a terrifying variety of a roadside bomb that easily pierces American armor.
By far the most potent item on display was a squat canister designed to explode and spit out a molten ball of copper that cuts through armor and is perhaps the most feared weapon faced by American and Iraqi troops here.
Never before shown in public, the canister, which the U.S. military calls "an explosively formed penetrator," or EFP, arrives in Iraq in what the officials described as a "kit" containing high- grade metals and highly machined parts, like a strangely shaped, concave lid that folds into the ball while hurtling toward its target.
Because the weapon can be fired from roadsides and is favored by Shiite militias, it has become a serious threat in Baghdad. Only a small fraction of the roadside bombs used in Iraq are EFPs. But the device produces more casualties per attack than other types of roadside bombs.
The military officials revealed for the first time that since June 2004, when the first member of the American coalition here was killed by an EFP, the toll has been staggering: more than 170 dead and 620 wounded.
The pace of the attacks with those weapons nearly doubled in 2006 compared with the previous year and a half, the officials said.
At least one shipment of EFPs was captured as it was being smuggled across the border from Iran into southern Iraq in 2005, the officials said. The precise machining, the officials said, is another feature that links the weapons to Iran.
"We have no evidence that this has ever been done in Iraq," a senior U.S. military official said of that machining.
The officials also gave details on recent American raids in Baghdad and the northern city of Erbil in which members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, or Al Qods force, were picked up and accused of working with extremist groups to plan attacks on American and Iraqi forces.
Because the elite Al Qods force is involved, a senior defense analyst said, the American intelligence community is confident that the weapons shipments have been approved at "the highest levels of the Iranian government." Still, no direct evidence was presented of how the intelligence community has made that link.
There was also new information on the routes through which the smuggling is believed to take place and where coalition forces in Iraq have been finding caches of weapons thought to originate in Iran.
During the briefing, the officials were repeatedly pressed on why they insisted on anonymity in such an important matter affecting the security of American and Iraqi troops. The senior military official said that without anonymity, for example, the analyst could not have contributed to the briefing.
"The reason we're talking about this right now is the vast increase in the number of EFPs being found," the official said. Coalition military forces, the official said, "are not trying to hype this up to be more than it is."
The official did make it clear that declassifying the material took place only after several weeks of analysis on what information could be useful to the enemy — information that has mostly been kept out of the public eye since the EFPs began turning up in Iraq.
"We publicly have not acknowledged EFPs for the past two years," the senior military official said.
