When the U.S. military command accused the Iranian Quds Force last January of providing the armour-piercing EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) that were killing U.S. troops, it knew that Iraqi machine shops had been producing their own EFPs for years, a review of the historical record of evidence on EFPs in Iraq shows.
The record also shows that the U.S. command had considerable evidence that the Mahdi army had gotten the technology and the training on how to use it from Hezbollah rather than Iran. The command, operating under close White House supervision, chose to deny these facts in making the dramatic accusation that became the main rationale for the present aggressive U.S. stance toward Iran. Although the George W. Bush administration initially limited the accusation to the Quds Force, it has recently begun to assert that top officials of the Iranian regime are responsible for arms that are killing U.S. troops.
British and U.S. officials observed from the beginning that the EFPs being used in Iraq closely resembled the ones used by Hezbollah against Israeli forces in Southern Lebanon, both in their design and the techniques for using them.
Hezbollah was known as the world’s most knowledgeable specialists in EFP manufacture and use, having perfected them during the 1990s in the military struggle against Israeli forces in Lebanon. It was widely recognised that it wasn Hezbollah that had passed on the expertise to Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups after the second Intifada began in 2000. U.S. intelligence also knew that Hezbollah was conducting the training of Mahdi army militants on EFPs. In August 2005, Newsday published a report from correspondent Mohammed Bazzi that Shiite fighters had begun in early 2005 to copy Hezbollah techniques for building the bombs, as well as for carrying out roadside ambushes, citing both Iraqi and Lebanese officials. In late November 2006, a senior intelligence official told both CNN and the New York Times that Hezbollah troops had trained as many as 2,000 Mahdi army fighters in Lebanon. The fact that the Mahdi army’s major military connection has always been with Hezbollah rather than Iran would also explain the presence in Iraq of the PRG-29, a shoulder-fired anti-armour weapon....In addition, the U.S. military also had its own forensic evidence by fall 2006 that EFPs used against its vehicles had been manufactured in Iraq, according to Knights. He cites photographic evidence of EFP strikes on U.S. armoured vehicles that “typically shows a mixture of clean penetrations from fully-formed EFP and spattering…” That pattern reflected the fact that the locally made EFPs were imperfect, some of them forming the required shape to penetrate but some of them failing to do so.
Then U.S. troops began finding EFP factories. Journalist Andrew Cockburn reported in the Los Angeles Times in mid-February that U.S. troops had raided a Baghdad machine shop in November 2006 and discovered “a pile of copper discs, 5 inches in diameter, stamped out as part of what was clearly an ongoing order”.
In a report on Feb. 23, NBC Baghdad correspondent Jane Arraf quoted “senior military officials” as saying that U.S. forces had “have been finding an increasing number of the advanced roadside bombs being not just assembled but manufactured in machine shops here.”
Nevertheless, the Bush administration decided to put the blame for the EFPs squarely on the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, after Bush agreed in fall 2006 to target the Quds Force within Iran in order to make Iranian leaders feel vulnerable to U.S. power. The allegedly exclusive Iranian manufacture of EFPs was the administration’s only argument for holding the Quds Force responsible for their use against U.S. forces.
Of course, Cheney's war-bots are going to claim that Hezbollah is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, but supplying weapons and aid does not translate into complete Iranian control. Clients can act independently of their patrons, even at the expense of their patron's interests, as US experience both with Saddam's Baath regime and with the Mujahedin of the Afghan jihad clearly demonstrates.
