US accuses Iran of training Iraqi militants
The US accused Iran of training Iraqi militants.
The U.S. military accused Iranian leaders today of using guerrillas from Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group to train militiamen fighting American troops in Iraq and to organize attacks, including a January ambush on an Iraqi-U.S. outpost that killed five American soldiers.
The United States has repeatedly accused Iran of aiding Shiite and even Sunni forces opposed to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, charges that Iran’s Shiite government denies. Today’s accusations included the added twist of the alleged Hezbollah connection, which Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a U.S. military spokesman, said became clear with the arrest in March of a man identified as a Lebanese-born Hezbollah operative.
Bergner told a news conference that the man, Ali Musa Daqduq, was carrying false identification and pretended to be deaf when he was detained March 20 in the southern city of Basra. A few weeks later, Bergner said interviews, as well as computer records and other material, confirmed that Daqduq had served in Hezbollah for 24 years, including coordinating the protection of Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah.
Bergner said Daqduq was captured along with Iraqi brothers Qayis Khazali and Layith Khazali, and that all three were working with Iran to develop a Hezbollah-like network of cells in Iraq called the Iraqi Special Groups.
Iran’s secretive Quds Force, a unit of its Revolutionary Guards, was overseeing the training, Bergner said, which cost anywhere from $750,000 to $3 million a month and included training at three camps “not too far” from Tehran.
In February, U.S. officials in Iraq openly accused Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, of having a hand in the smuggling of explosives across the border from Iran, but later backed off that allegation.
A growing number of U.S. troop deaths are being blamed on the lethal explosives that Washington accuses Iran of providing.
latimes
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