WASHINGTON, 7 August 2005 — Many of the new roadside bombs used to attack American and government forces in Iraq have been designed in Iran and shipped in from there, The New York Times reported yesterday.
Citing unnamed military and intelligence officials, the newspaper said the deadlier bombs could become more common as insurgent bomb makers learn the techniques to make the weapons themselves in Iraq.
The new weapons seem to suggest a new and unusual area of cooperation between Iranian Shiites and Iraqi Sunnis to drive American forces out — a possibility that US commanders said they could make little sense of given the increasing violence between the sects in Iraq, the report said.
The paper said that unlike the improvised explosive devices devised from Iraq’s vast stockpiles of missiles, artillery shells and other arms, the new weapons are specially designed to destroy armored vehicles.
The bombs feature shaped charges, which penetrate armor by focusing explosive power in a single direction and by firing a metal projectile embedded in the device into the target at high speed.
Since they first began appearing about two months ago, some of these devices have been seized, including one large shipment that was captured last week in northeast Iraq coming from Iran, The Times said.
But one senior military officer said “tens” of the devices had been smuggled in and used against allied forces, killing or wounding several Americans throughout Iraq in the past several weeks, according to the report.
Pentagon and intelligence officials say that some shipments of the new explosives have contained both components and fully manufactured devices, and may have been spirited into Iraq along the porous Iranian border by the Iranian-backed, anti-Israeli group Hezbollah, or by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the paper noted.
It quoted American commanders as saying these bombs closely matched those that Hezbollah has used against Israel.
