A shadowy Iranian paramilitary unit smaller than some U.S. Army battalions is at the center of a standoff between Washington and Tehran over the war in Iraq.
President Bush voiced growing concern about the secretive Quds Force at a press conference Wednesday. The capture of a senior Quds operative during a raid last month in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil underscores the U.S. charge that Iranian leaders are funding and arming Iraqi Shi'ite militias that kill American troops.
"Let me put it this way: There's not a whole lot of freelancing in the Iranian government, especially when it comes to something like that," White House spokesman Tony Snow said last week.
But Iranian scholars and military specialists say the case in not so clear-cut. The Islamic Republic of Iran, they say, was designed to create multiple, often competing power centers, with blurry, shifting lines of authority reaching eventually to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei...
Bookmarks