EAST OF BAQUBA, Iraq, 8 October 2007 — The US military commander in Iraq has stepped up accusations that Iran is stoking violence in Iraq and said Tehran’s ambassador to Baghdad was a member of the Revolutionary Guards Qods force.
Washington accuses the force, the elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, of inciting bloodshed in Iraq and of training and equipping militias who have attacked US troops.
Gen. David Petraeus, speaking at a US military base about 30 km from the Iranian border on Saturday, said Iran was giving advanced weaponry to militias in Iraq. “They are responsible for providing the weapons, the training, the funding and in some cases the direction for operations that have indeed killed US soldiers,” Petraeus told a small group of reporters when asked if the Iranian government was responsible for killing US troops. “There is no question about the connection between Iran and these components, (the) attacks that have killed our soldiers.”
In August President George W. Bush, already at odds with Iran over its nuclear program, said attacks on US troops with Iranian-supplied weapons were increasing and he had told commanders in Iraq to “confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”
Since then, US military officers have repeatedly presented what they say is evidence of Iranian-produced arms, including the particularly deadly explosively formed projectile (EFP) bombs, being used against US soldiers.
“The ambassador is a Qods force member,” Petraeus said of Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, Iran’s envoy to Baghdad.
He did not say how he knew this but appeared to suggest that Kazemi-Qomi was not under the US military spotlight because he was a diplomat.
In another development, Iraq’s Kurdish regional government yesterday defended its adoption of an energy law and the clinching of global deals, saying the moves were aimed at making oil “work for the people of Iraq.”
“This is not an attempt to usurp the nation’s oil resources, but rather our best effort to move the process forward,” said Kurdish President Massud Barzani in an opinion piece written for the Wall Street Journal and posted on the regional government’s website. He said the Kurdistan Regional Government had signed eight production-sharing contracts with international oil and gas companies since it passed an oil law in August, and another two were in the pipeline.
Iraqi officials have criticized the deals, saying the Kurds should have waited for the passage through Parliament of a national hydrocarbons law.
Barzani said his government was “deeply disappointed by the negative reaction.” “In the last several months it has become clear to us that many in the Iraqi Oil Ministry are locked in a time warp dating back to the regime of Saddam Hussein,” he said.
