Where are those Iranian arms in Iraq?
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The United States military command in Iraq continues to talk about
an alleged pipeline of Iranian weapons to Iraqi Shi'ites opposing the US
occupation, implying that they have become dependent on Iran for indirect-fire
weapons and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs).
But US officials have failed thus far to provide evidence that would support
that claim, and a long-delayed US military report on Iranian arms is unlikely
to offer any data on what proportion of the weapons in the hands of Shi'ite
fighters are from Iran and what proportion comes from purchases on the open
market.
When Major General Kevin Bergner was asked that question at a
briefing on May 8, he did not answer it directly. Instead, Bergner reverted to
a standard US military line that these groups "could not do what they're doing
without the support of foreign support [sic]". Then he defined "foreign
support" to include training and funding as well as weapons, implicitly
conceding that he did not have much of a case based on weapons alone.
Bergner's refusal to address that question reflects a fundamental problem with
the US claims about Iranian weapons in Iraq: if there are indeed any Iranian
rockets and mortars and RPGs in the arsenal of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army's
stand-off weapons, they represent an insignificant part of it.
Reports by the US command in Iraq over the past 15 months cited only a handful
of Iranian weapons out of hundreds counted in caches found in Shi'ite areas.
Nearly 700 mortars and rockets were reported by specific caliber size, along
with a handful of RPGs, in nearly two dozen caches. Of that total, only four
rockets were reported as being of Iranian origin, and another 15 were listed as
possibly being Iranian.
Although those reports do not represent all the Mahdi Army caches found, they
provide further evidence of the relative unimportance of Iranian rockets,
mortars and RPGs in the Mahdi Army arsenal. That is because US military
officials are so eager to publicize any discovery of an Iranian-made weapon
system that they would exploit any opportunity available to do so.
The US command has gone so far as to claim that it had found "four Iranian hand
grenades" - but they were in a cache of weapons found in an al-Qaeda area.
Based on weapons caches discovered over the past 15 months, the Mahdi Army has
relied overwhelmingly on four types of heavy weapons: 60mm and 120mm mortars,
107mm rockets and 57mm anti-tank missiles.
Those are essentially the same mortars and rockets that have turned up in
al-Qaeda and Sunni insurgent weapons caches, suggesting that both groups have
obtained their heavier weapons from the international arms market. In fact,
60mm and 120mm mortars were used by Sunni guerrillas in the very early months
of the war against US. occupation troops.
A US explosives expert, Major Marty Weber, confirmed in April 2007 that most
107mm rockets found in Iraq were Chinese-made. He claimed that Iran had
repainted Chinese 60mm and 107mm rockets them and sold them on the "open
market".
However, Chinese, Yugoslav and Pakistani 107mm rockets have also been the
weapon of choice of Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan, according to US military
officers there.
The US military has refrained from making any charges against Iran over the
107mm rockets found in Iraq, perhaps because it would support the conclusion
that the Mahdi Army was buying weapons on the international market rather than
obtaining them from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.
US officials tried to capitalize on the increased mortar and rocket attacks on
the Green Zone and US military headquarters last year to argue that they were
the result of a rising tide of Iranian supply of such stand-off weapons -
particularly 240mm rockets - to what the US command calls "special groups" of
Shi'ite militiamen.
One US official, who insisted on being identified only as a "senior official",
told this writer in mid-September 2007 that rockets and mortars provided by
Iran since the beginning of that year - and especially 240mm rockets - were
doing much greater damage because of their greater accuracy and power compared
with the older Katyusha rockets - mostly from Iraqi stocks - that had been
employed in attacking US bases and the Green Zone in previous years.
But evidence from the US command itself contradicts that dramatic narrative of
a bold, new Iranian intervention in the war. A Multi-National Force - Iraq
press release dated June 1, 2007, reported that a cache of weapons had been
found in an area from which Mahdi Army troops had fired rockets at the Green
Zone. It did not claim any Iranian rockets or mortars in the cache but only 20
107mm rocket warheads, three fully assembled 107mm rockets and one 60mm mortar.
No 240mm rocket has been reported found in a Mahdi Army weapons cache over the
past year, but a single warhead for a 240mm rocket was reported to have been
found in Basra on April 19. No official claim has been made that it was
manufactured in Iran, however.
After a rocket fired at Camp Victory on September 11, 2007, killed one and
wounded 11 others, US officials told the news media that the command spokesman,
General Bergner, would display fragments of a 240mm rocket - complete with
Iranian markings - at his next press briefing to "show the link between the
Iranian weapons and the damage they are doing".
But Bergner admitted to the media that there were no discernible Iranian
markings on the fragment, and that a number of countries manufacture 240mm
rockets. He was able to assert only that ordnance experts "assess it is of
[sic] consistent with the rockets of Iranian origin we have seen used in other
attacks".
That was a very weak claim, because Bergner had not provided any evidence to
the media that previous attacks had involved Iranian 240mm rockets either.
When the military headquarters at Camp Victory was hit by rocket fire last Oct.
12, officials admitted that it was 107mm rockets, not 240mm rockets that had
been used.
Top US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus. insisted last October that
there is "absolutely no question" that Iran is providing RPG-29
rocket-propelled grenade launchers to Iraqi Shi'ite groups. But RPG-29s are
manufactured by Russia, not Iran. Syria was known to have purchased large
quantities of the RPG-29 in 1999-2000. Both the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz and
the Beirut-based defense monthly Defense 21 have confirmed that the RPG-29s
used by Hezbollah in 2006 were Russian-made weapons obtained via Syria.
In weapons caches reported from Shi'ite locations, not a single RPG-29 has been
identified. Of the 160 RPG launchers reported in Mahdi Army caches, along with
800 RPG missiles, none were identified as Iranian, although some were
identified as being Soviet-made. Only 11 were reported to be RPG-7s - a type of
launcher that is made by Russia and China as well as Iran and used by 40
countries around the world.
Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. The
paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of
Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.
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