Was the Karbala Kidnapping a Cover to Steal a Military Laptop?

[SteveMetz]

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A top special operations officer from Lebanon's Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah has been captured in Iraq, where U.S. officials say he played a key role in a January attack that killed five Americans...

This could get interesting. The U.S. has, to a large extent, left Hezbollah alone. Are we seeing the emergence of a violent, trans-ethnic Shiite axis? If so, does that undercut our policy of supporting the existing government of Iraq?

[Maximus]

Poole's Tactics of the Crescent Moon and Terrorist Trail have made similar claims for a while now. Not sure if the claims are true. I operated in Karbala for quite some time. Lots of Mahdi Army influence and propaganda a few years ago. Nothing on Hezbollah, at least nothing on the surface. I'm very interested to see how this all plays out.

[Abu Buckwheat]

Poole's Tactics of the Crescent Moon and Terrorist Trail have made similar claims for a while now. Not sure if the claims are true. I operated in Karbala for quite some time. Lots of Mahdi Army influence and propaganda a few years ago. Nothing on Hezbollah, at least nothing on the surface. I'm very interested to see how this all plays out.

Ugh, Poole ... how would he know? IMHO his books are horrible. Just personal political screeds with no basis of knowledge in real enemy TTPs (hate the art work too!). There has been a group calling itself Hezbollah Iraq since late 2003. I have one of their first poster calling people to join seen on a street in Karbala near the Shrine. Hezbollah Lebanon in 1983 was modeled on the Iranian group with the same name (Hizballah) - they create political and charitable support structures and then buff up into a covert paramilitary force. I believe that the Mahdi Militia is angling to remake itself into the Iraqi version of Hezbollah, a separate military and political entity versus the central government, and a cooperative effort with its senior Lebanese brothers is not unbelievable. Thats all we would need a new Jihad thats is professionalizing the terrible skills of the MM.

There is presently no way that the US Army can take on the Mahdi Militia and the Sunni insurgency again ... it will be March 2004 all over again and the local politicians would stop he fighting if it entered Najaf and Karbala again ... the Mahdi has to be defeated by the Iraqi Army and the (Badr Brigade run) Police. This is coming down to a Sistani versus al-Sadr-war-for-the-future and the Iranians appear to have selected Al-Sadr.

[Culpeper]

"Our intelligence reveals that the senior leadership in Iran is aware of this activity," Bergner told a Baghdad news conference. He said it would be "hard to imagine" that Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did not know about the activity.

U.S. Implicates Iran in January Attack, 02Jul07, Lee Keath, Baghdad (AP)

So, will Iran back out or will they gamble with their future. Surely, Iranian leaders are taking into consideration that the U.S. has shown how they can topple leadership and send an entire nation into chaos. Or maybe not. I don't know. Somebody tell me what you think about this situation. I think it seems very serious.

[SWJED]

3 July Washington Post - Iran's Elite Force Is Said to Use Hezbollah as 'Proxy' in Iraq by Joshua Partlow.

An American general said on Monday that Iraqi Shiite militiamen are being trained by Iranian security forces in cooperation with Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite movement, offering the most specific accusations to date of Iranian involvement in specific attacks against U.S. forces.

Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, a U.S. military spokesman, asserted that Iran's elite al-Quds Force, a wing of the Revolutionary Guard, was providing armor-piercing weapons to extremist groups in Iraq, funneling them up to $3 million a month and training Iraqi militiamen at three camps near Tehran...

[SWJED]

3 July NY Times - U.S. Says Iran Helped Iraqis Kill Five G.I.’s by John Burns and Michael Gordon.

Agents of Iran helped plan a January raid in Shiite holy city of Karbala in Iraq in which five American soldiers were killed by Islamic militants, an American military spokesman said Monday. The charge was the most specific allegation of Iranian involvement in an attack that killed American troops, at a time of rising tensions with Iran over its role in Iraq and its nuclear program.

Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, the military spokesman here, said an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, a force under the control of Iran’s most powerful religious leaders, had used veterans of the Lebanese Islamic militia group Hezbollah as a “proxy” to train, arm and plan attacks by an array of Shiite militant cells in Iraq.

One high-ranking Hezbollah commander from Lebanon was captured in Basra in March, and after weeks of pretending that he could not hear or speak, he gave American interrogators details of the Iranian role, the general said...

[davidbfpo]

Started reading this article and a good chunk is about this incident, so thread re-opened.

The lawyer is pursuing HSBC, a UK bank with US subsidiaries, for its involvement in the funding of Iranian activity in Iraq.
Link:https://taskandpurpose.com/after-ira...ed-them-do-it/