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Great News!

NYT reports that Hezbollah is training Iraqis militias at a secret site near Tehran. You know what this means, right?

BAGHDAD — Militants from the Lebanese group Hezbollah have been training Iraqi militia fighters at a camp near Tehran, according to American interrogation reports that the United States has supplied to the Iraqi government.

An American official said the account of Hezbollah’s role was provided by four Shiite militia members who were captured in Iraq late last year and questioned separately.

The United States has long charged that the Iranians were training Iraqi militia fighters in Iran, which Iran has consistently denied, and there have been previous reports about Hezbollah operatives in Iraq.

But the Americans say the reports of Hezbollah’s role at the Iranian camp offer important details about Iranian assistance to the militias, including efforts Iran appears to be making to train the fighters in unobtrusive ways.

Thi is great news! It means when they whack that site, they’ll be taking out a lot of Hezbollah scum along with the al-Quds scum and the future Shiite death squads of Iraq scum. If they ever stop the blah blah blah, that is.

Material from the interrogations was given to the Iraqi government, along with other data about captured Iranian arms, before it sent a delegation to Tehran last week to discuss allegations of Iranian aid to militia groups.

It is not known if the delegation confronted its Iranian hosts with the information, or how the Iranians responded.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government announced Sunday that it would conduct its own inquiry into accusations of Iranian intervention in Iraq and document any interference.

“We have experienced in the past that Iran interfered and has special groups in Iraq, but Iran also had evidence that they were participating in positive ways in security,” Ali al-Dabbagh, a senior Iraqi government spokesman, said in an interview.

“We would like the Iranians to keep their commitment, the commitments they made in meetings with the prime minister and with other groups that have visited them,” he said. “They had made the promise that Iran would be playing a supportive role.”

There has been debate among experts about the extent to which Iran is responsible for instability in Iraq. But President Bush and other American officials, in public castigations of Iran, have said that Iran has been consistently meddlesome in Iraq and that the Iranians have long sought to arm and train Iraqi militias, which the American military has called “special groups.”

That last bit is interesting. I seem to have missed the debate among the experts. I’ve heard some debate among pols. I suppose there could be some dickering over the number of arms shipments or fine points like, whether its al Quds or Hezbollah doing the training. The Iranian-operatives-on-the-ground issue I guess has gone back and forth a little over the past year, and there has been the appearance of turning on/turning off the spigot from time to time. The key word is “extent.” What degree of murderous Iranian meddling is permissible?

Here are some training details: 

In a possible effort to be less obtrusive, it appears that Iran is now bringing small groups of Iraqi Shiite militants to camps in Iran, where they are taught how to do their own training, American officials say.

The militants then return to Iraq to teach comrades how to fire rockets and mortars, fight as snipers or assemble explosively formed penetrators, a particularly lethal type of roadside bomb made of Iranian components, according to American officials. The officials describe this approach as “training the trainers.”

The training, the Americans say, is carried out at several camps near Tehran that are overseen by the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Command, and the instruction is carried out by militants from Hezbollah, which has long been supported by the Quds Force. American officials say the Hezbollah militants perform several important roles for the Iranians.

First, they say, the Iranians believe it is useful to have Arabs train fellow Arabs. Second, Hezbollah has considerable experience in planning operations and using weapons and explosives in Lebanon.

According to American officials, the four Shiite militants who provided the information on Hezbollah’s role were captured between last September and December after they had returned from training in Iran. They were questioned individually and provided similar accounts, the American officials said.

The captured men described themselves in the accounts as part of a class of 16 militants who crossed into Iran from southern Iraq and were taken to a camp near Tehran, where they studied in a classroom and in the field. Some had been in Iran several times as part of a program that American officials said was aimed at turning them into “master trainers” and which could last several years.

According to their interrogation reports, the militiamen believed that militants from other countries were also being trained at the camp, an impression based on hearing snippets of conversations in other dialects and languages. But the group was kept separate and was not allowed to mingle with others.

… 

The reports of Iran’s training program and the discovered weapons caches are politically very significant. When Mr. Maliki visited Iran in August, the Iranians sought to reassure the Iraqis that they were not intervening in Iraq’s internal affairs.

The Bush administration, which has sought to draw attention to Iran’s support for militias, has cited the interrogation reports and evidence of recently made Iranian arms as an indication that the Iranian officials were not keeping their word.

“We don’t want to be at war with Iran, and we will not allow anyone to settle their scores with Iran on Iraqi soil,” Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser to Mr. Maliki, said Saturday in an interview. “But at the same time, we don’t want Iran to settle their scores with the United States on Iraqi soil.”

Bad news, Mr. al-Rubaie. Humiliating the Great Satan and driving the infidels out of Iraq is only Job One for Tehran. If you don’t care to be a province of Iran, then you do want to be at war with Iran, especially now when you have the United States around to do the heavy lifting.

Michael Yon at the NY Daily News explains why there has been an increase in U.S. casualties as he describes phase two of counterinsurgency operations. With AQ on the run, it’s time to deal with the Shiite militias.  He notes that they had a neighborhood watch role, but says all insurgencies degenerate into criminality eventually. He only touches on the other aspect of their genesis, as private political armies serving partisan leaders, and not at all on what may be most significiant at this point, their role in Iran’s grander scheme of regional domination.

Topics: Iran, Iraq

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 7:49 am on Monday, May 5, 2008

5 Responses to “Great News!”

1. Fatty Bolger Says:
   May 5th, 2008 at 9:27 am

   “Training the trainers” can be a highly effective technique, so Iraq really needs to take action to nip this in the bud while they still can.

   I could be wrong, but I don’t see how al-Maliki can allow this to go on much longer. It’s a huge threat that could undermine his and his government’s authority. The fact that they are bringing this out into the open rather than trying to hide it signals to me that they are preparing for future action if Iran refuses to stop these activities. What form that action will take, I don’t know. However, if they had chosen to ignore it or deal with it “internally” then I don’t think they would be talking about this in public.

2. RebeccaH Says:
   May 5th, 2008 at 5:46 pm

   When Iran finally forces us to flatten them, it would be nice if we dropped a little gift on Damascus at the same time.

3. Vanguard of the Commentariat Says:
   May 5th, 2008 at 5:58 pm

   A twofer, I like it RebeccaH. Run the airstrike up the middle of Iraq and split it at the last minute, half to Tehran and half to Damascus,just to kind of mix up the air defenders. Get rid of about half the world’s problems in one fell swoop.

   I think we’d be amazed at how quick lil Kim became an avid Friedman reader too.

4. MikeH Says:
   May 6th, 2008 at 1:36 pm

   The original reason we went into Iraq was it was so convenient in geographic location to the main bad guys while at the same time eliminating a pissant.

5. Michael Lonie Says:
   May 8th, 2008 at 12:53 am

   I thought that too Mike. It’s called the “Strategy of the Central Position” in military affairs. We now have an army place between the three most important supporters of terrorism in th eworld, Iran, Syria, and the Wahhabist Entity. Unfortunately we don’t seem to have done anything with this geographic advantage since 2003.

   I thought the snippet about the prisoners hearing other dialects and languages was significant. It looks like Iran, in the tradition of the old USSR, is training terrorists from far afield to strike at their mutal enemy, us. If distinct languages there may be Pakistanis and Turks, and maybe others being trained. Distinct dialects implies Arabs from different parts of the Arab world, such as Egypt and the Maghrib. Iran is worse than we thought.

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