More than 80 pages of newly declassified intelligence documents for the first time describe in detail an elaborate network used by Iraqis to gain entry into neighboring Iran and train under Iranian supervision.
They offer the most comprehensive account to date to support US claims about Iranian efforts to build a proxy force in Iraq. Those claims have become highly politicized, with critics of the administration of US President George W. Bush charging that accounts of Iranian involvement have been exaggerated.
The prisoners’ accounts cannot be independently verified. Yet the detainees gave strikingly similar details about training compounds in Iran, a clandestine network of safe houses in Iran and Iraq they used to reach the camps and intra-Shiite tensions at the camps between the Arab Iraqis and their Persian Iranian trainers.
The documents, compiled by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, are a collection of interrogation reports based on accounts of more than two dozen Shiite fighters captured in Iraq this year and last year.
The center is a research organization that compiles and analyzes intelligence documents related to al-Qaeda, Iraq, Iran and other topics.
The documents portray an Iranian strategy to use Iraqi Shiites as surrogates, in part to avoid the risk of Iranians being captured in Iraq.
In one of the intelligence reports, a prisoner tells his captors that “Iran does not want to fight a direct war” with US forces in Iraq because Tehran worries that the US would destroy Iran.
Brian Fishman, director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center and a co-author of a new study about Iran’s political and military influence in Iraq, said that even though Iran was not in direct command of militia groups in Iraq, the training was one of the means at Iran’s disposal to increase or decrease its influence in Iraq at will.
“Having the militia allies is a hedge,” he said. “If things turn against Iran politically, it gives them a lever to pull.”
US officials say it is still murky just how much of a direct role senior Iranian officials take in the training, although they say they believe that it takes place with at least the tacit approval of elements of Iran’s government.
The documents do not provide any direct evidence of senior Iranian government officials overseeing the training.
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