Documents show Iran's work with Iraq militias

NY Times:

They wake before dawn, with time to exercise, eat and pray before the day’s first class in firing Kalashnikov rifles.

Over the next eight hours, they practice using bazookas or laying roadside bombs, with a break for lunch and mandatory religious instruction.

There is free time in the evening to watch television or play Ping-Pong.

Lights out at 11 p.m.

Such is a typical day at a dusty military base outside Tehran, where for the past several years members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force and Lebanese Hezbollah operatives have trained Iraqi Shiites to launch attacks against American forces in Iraq, according to accounts given to American interrogators by captured Iraqi fighters.

American officials have long cited Iranian training and weapons as reasons for the lethality of attacks by Shiite fighters in Iraq. Iranian officials deny that such training takes place.

Now, more than 80 pages of newly declassified intelligence documents for the first time describe in detail an elaborate network used by Iraqis to gain entry into Iran and train under Iranian supervision. They offer the most comprehensive account to date to support American claims about Iranian efforts to build a proxy force in Iraq. Those claims have become highly politicized, with Bush administration critics charging that accounts of Iranian involvement have been exaggerated.

The prisoners’ accounts cannot be independently verified. Yet the detainees gave strikingly similar details about training compounds in Iran, a clandestine network of safe houses in Iran and Iraq they used to reach the camps and intra-Shiite tensions at the camps between the Arab Iraqis and their Persian Iranian trainers.

Although attacks on Americans by Shiite militias have greatly decreased this year, military and intelligence officials said there was evidence that the militias, sometimes referred to as “special groups,” were now returning to Iraq to disrupt coming elections and intimidate residents. Maj. Gen. Jeffery W. Hammond, the commander of American forces in Baghdad, said recently that he believed that some militia fighters had returned to the capital in recent weeks.

The documents, compiled by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, are a collection of interrogation reports based on accounts of more than two dozen Shiite fighters captured in Iraq in 2007 and 2008. (The documents are available online at ctc.usma.edu/Iran_Iraq.asp.) The center is a research organization that compiles and analyzes intelligence documents related to Al Qaeda, Iraq, Iran and other topics.

The documents portray an Iranian strategy to use Iraqi Shiites as surrogates, in part to avoid the risk of Iranians being captured in Iraq. In one of the intelligence reports, a prisoner tells his captors that “Iran does not want to fight a direct war” with American forces in Iraq because Tehran worries that the United States would destroy Iran.

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Iran has been using a proxy war against the US for around 30 years. What we are collecting is the intelligence about that war and how they do seek to avoid their destruction by only nibbling around the edges. They know it is a mistake to tug on Superman's cape, but they will send cockroaches to make as big as mess as possible.

The Iraqis need to wake up to this. Living in denial could be fatal for them.