The military intelligence reports on Iran's role, released by WikiLeaks and posted by The New York Times and the Guardian, provide details of a dangerous contest for influence in Iraq between Washington and Tehran.

But US allegations of Iran arming and training Shiite militants in Iraq are nothing new, and American officials and military commanders have long accused Tehran of trying to sow violence to undermine US influence and weaken its allies in Baghdad.

One field report describes a tense border incident on September 7, 2006, when an Iranian soldier aimed a rocket-propelled grenade launcher at a US unit patrolling near the border with Iraqi troops.

US troops shot and killed the Iranian with a .50 caliber machine gun, the report said.

The US unit was in the area "in order to identify key infiltration routes into Iraq" used by Iran to funnel weapons into Iraq, the document said.

The American unit had instructions to stay one kilometer from the Iranian border at all times, due to "special sensitivities around the border due to UN sanctions and Iranian concern that US was attempting to mount an invasion," it said.

The documents describe Iran arming and training Iraqi hit squads to carry out attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi government officials, with the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps suspected of playing a crucial role, the newspapers reported, citing the files.

Attacks backed by Iran persisted after President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, with no sign that the new leader's more conciliatory tone led to any change in Tehran's support for the militias, the New York Times wrote, quoting the documents.

The documents describe accounts from detainees, the diary of a captured militant and the discovery of numerous weapons caches as proof of Iran's designs.

According to one document, the Iranians plotted to attack the Green Zone in Baghdad -- where key Iraqi government buildings and Western embassies were located -- using rockets and an armored vehicle loaded with chemical gas, the Guardian reported.

Another report alleges plans to use Iranian-supplied rockets with "neuroparalytic" agents designed to incapacitate their victims, the Guardian wrote.

An account from November 2005 describes Iraqi border police in Basra finding "bombing-making equipment" that included "explosively formed projectiles," a lethal roadside explosive that US officials say is supplied by Iran.

earlier related report
Leaked Iraq war files detail torture, civilian killings
London (AFP) Oct 23, 2010 - Graphic accounts of torture, civilian killings and Iran's hand in the Iraq war are detailed in hundreds of thousands of US military documents made public Friday on the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

Across nearly 400,000 pages of secret military field reports spanning five years, the largest military leak in history, a grisly picture emerges of years of blood and suffering following the 2003 US invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.

Many of the classified documents, which span from 2004 to 2009, chronicle claims of abuse by Iraqi security forces, while others appear to show that American troops did nothing to stop state-sanctioned torture.

The documents comprise the second such release from the controversial website, which accused the United States of "war crimes" and earlier released some 92,000 similar secret military files detailing operations in Afghanistan.

Website founder Julian Assange said the files reveal a "bloodbath" in previously unseen detail.

"These documents reveal six years of the Iraq war at a ground level detail -- the troops on the ground, their reports, what they were seeing, what they were saying and what they were doing," he told CNN.

"We're talking about a five times greater kill rate in Iraq, really a comparative bloodbath compared to Afghanistan."

WikiLeaks made the files available to the Guardian newspaper, the New York Times, Le Monde and Der Spiegel weeks ago, then just before their publication sent a Twitter message to select journalists, in a secretive invite that turned out to be a three-hour lock-in preview of the documents.

In one report, US military personnel describe detainee abuse by Iraqis at a facility in Baghdad that is holding 95 detainees in a single room where they are "sitting cross-legged with blindfolds, all facing the same direction."

It says "many of them bear marks of abuse to include cigarette burns, bruising consistent with beatings and open sores... according to one of the detainees questioned on site, 12 detainees have died of disease in recent weeks."

Other reports describe Iraqis beating prisoners and civilian women being killed at US military checkpoints.

The Guardian newspaper said the leak showed "US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished."

It added that "more than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents," going on to say that "US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities."

And the Guardian said the "numerous" reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, "describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks." It added: "Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death."

The Guardian said WikiLeaks is thought to have obtained the electronic archive from the "same dissident US army intelligence analyst" who leaked 90,000 logs about the war in Afghanistan this year. WikiLeaks has not revealed its source.

Al-Jazeera concluded that major findings of the leaked papers, dating from January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2009, included a US military cover-up of Iraqi state-sanctioned torture and "hundreds" of civilians deaths at manned American checkpoints after the US-led invasion of 2003.

On Iran's role in the conflict, the secret US files show Tehran waging a shadow war with US troops in Iraq, with a firefight erupting on the border and Tehran allegedly using militias to kill and kidnap American soldiers.

The documents describe Iran arming and training Iraqi hit squads to carry out attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi government officials, with the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps suspected of playing a crucial role, the Times and the Guardian reported, citing the files.

Attacks backed by Iran persisted after US President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, with no sign that the new leader's more conciliatory tone led to any change in Tehran's support for the militias, the New York Times wrote.

The documents describe accounts from detainees, the diary of a captured militant and the discovery of numerous weapons caches as proof of Iran's designs.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned "in the most clear terms" the leaks of any documents putting Americans at risk, while the Pentagon warned that releasing secret military documents could endanger US troops and Iraqi civilians.

"By disclosing such sensitive information, WikiLeaks continues to put at risk the lives of our troops, their coalition partners and those Iraqis and Afghans working with us," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said.

He said the documents were "essentially snapshots of events, both tragic and mundane, and do not tell the whole story."

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit
YahooMyWeb	Google	Facebook

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News