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by Staff Writers Najaf, Iraq (AFP) April 16, 2012 A delegation from radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's movement on Monday visited a suspected militant of Lebanon's Hezbollah movement being held in a Baghdad jail, the movement said. "A delegation made up of three of Moqtada al-Sadr's advisers met today in a Baghdad prison with Ali Musa Daqduq," an official of the Sadr movement told AFP in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. He said the aim was to check on the health of the Lebanese prisoner, to "let him know that Moqtada al-Sadr is praying for his release, and to inform him the Sadr bloc (with 40 MPs in parliament) is working for him to be freed." Last December, as US troops completed their pullout from Iraq, the White House said its last prisoner, Daqduq, suspected of involvement in a January 2007 attack that killed five US soldiers, was being handed over to Iraqi authorities. The United States at the time accused Iranian special forces of using the Shiite militant group Hezbollah to train Iraqi extremists and of planning the January attack. The US military said the Quds Force, a unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and Hezbollah were jointly operating camps near Tehran in which they trained Iraqi fighters before sending them back to carry out attacks in Iraq. It said Daqduq, captured in Iraq's southern city of Basra in March 2007, had confessed to training Iraqi extremists in Iran. According to the US military, many of the extremists being trained in camps on the outskirts of Tehran were from "groups who have broken away from the Jaish al-Mahdi militia" of Moqtada al-Sadr. Iran dismissed the US accusations as "ridiculous."
Iraq: The first technology war of the 21st century
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