Iran and Iraq

[kaur]

http://www.jamestown.org/docs/Jamest...butionIraq.pdf

[tequila]

Iran deeply involved in Iraq, Petraeus says. MilitaryTimes, 23 May.

Iranian government has spent the last few years training elite “secret cells” of renegade Shi’a cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, while funding that group and other Shi’a militias in Iraq to the tune of “hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Army Gen. David Petraeus, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq.

In an exclusive May 18 interview with Military Times, Petraeus said the involvement of the Iranians is “absolutely nefarious. It is hugely damaging to Iraq. It is fuelling the Shi’a militia side of things and causing enormous problems for Iraq.”


The “secret cells” are “Sadr special ops,” Petraeus said. “But they’re different from JAM,” he added, using the acronym for the Mahdi Army’s Arabic name, Jaysh al-Mahdi.


“You really have to distinguish between run-of-the-mill JAM and the secret cells,” who, he said, “have had extra training and selection and all the rest.”
That training is the work of the Quds Force, an Iranian special operations organization that answers directly to Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Petraeus said.


“We have found out an enormous amount about what the Iranians have done, and it is staggering, it really is,” he said. “It is unbelievable. They have trained dozens at a time over there [in Iran] — and dozens doesn’t sound like much, but dozens can just wreak havoc — on the use of explosively formed projectiles, rockets, mortars and IEDs, and how to do operations ...