The US military said on Tuesday that it had credible evidence linking Iranians and Iraqi militiamen, detained here in raids last week, to criminal activities, including attacks against US forces. Evidence also emerged that some of the detainees were involved in shipments of weapons to illegal armed groups in Iraq.
In its first official confirmation of last week's raids, the military said it had confiscated maps, videos, photographs and documents in one of the raids on a site in Baghdad. The military confirmed the arrests of five Iranians, and said that three of them had since been released.
The Bush administration has described the two Iranians still being held late on Tuesday night as senior military officials.
PHOTO: AP
Major General William Caldwell, the chief spokesman for the US command, said that the military, in the raid, had "gathered specific intelligence from highly credible sources that linked individuals and locations with criminal activities against Iraqi civilians, security forces and coalition force personnel."
Caldwell made his remarks by e-mail in response to a query about the raids, first reported on Monday in the New York Times.
"Some of that specific intelligence dealt explicitly with force-protection issues, including attacks on MNF-I [Multinational Force-Iraq] forces," he said via e-mail.
US officials have long said that the Iranian government interferes in Iraq, but the arrests, in the compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, one of Iraq's most powerful Shiite political leaders, were the first in which officials were offering evidence of the link.
The raids threaten to upset the delicate balance of the three-way relationship between the US, Iran and Iraq. The Iraqi government has made extensive efforts to engage Iran in security matters in recent months and the arrests of the Iranians could scuttle those efforts.
The Iraqi government has kept silent on the arrests, but on Tuesday night officials spoke of intense behind-the-scenes negotiations by Iraq's government and its fractured political elite over how to handle the situation.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani had invited the two Iranians during his visit to Tehran, his spokesman said on Sunday, but by Tuesday, some Iraqi officials began to question if Talabani had in fact made the invitation.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS