Click
photo to play
Length: 4:40
LOU DOBBS: Iran is also
challenging U.S. policy in Iraq. Iran's supreme
leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, today met with the Iraqi
president in Tehran. Ayatollah Khamenei asserted that
the United States is the main cause of the escalating
violence in Iraq.
Michael Ware joins us now from Baghdad.
Michael, how large a role is Iran playing in Iraq, to
the degree we can determine that? And to what accent
is Iran driving the insurgency?
MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, certainly the
insurgency has many different faces, Lou. And what
we're talking about here is the Shia insurgency.
Essentially, the Shia militias and paramilitary
forces, an alignment of which essentially make up the
government.
Now, according to U.S. and British military
intelligence, most of these groups, political
factions and military factions, receive financial
aid, military aid, weapons training, and liaison from
Iran, particularly from Iran's Iranian Revolutionary
Guard Quds Force, or it's equivalent to the Green
Berets.
Now, we've heard about them supplying the key
components for the most devastating roadside bombs
here in Iraq. I've spoken to British troops in the
south who say their bases have been mortared by bombs
that carry Iranian markings.
We have the chief of U.S. military intelligence
talking about C-4 explosives that can be traced back
to Iranian batches. And now we have what U.S.
intelligence says is Iranian backing of Shia death
squads.
Here, for example, Lou, is the tail fin of an
81-millimeter mortar round. This landed just days ago
in a Sunni neighborhood here in Baghdad. It was fired
from a Shia area.
What's most interesting about this is that we don't
know exactly where it came from, but what we can tell
you is that it's date-stamped this year, 2006. It
clearly, from its condition, has not been buried in
the desert.
So at some point this has crossed Iraq's border.
They're not making them here. So it's crossed the
border and come into the hands of a Shia militia --
Lou.
DOBBS: Let me ask you, Michael, among the field
commanders there with whom you've talked, how much
frustration is there that the United States has not
been able to, first, successfully interdict those
kinds of shipments of materiel in support of the
insurgency, as well as the personnel who are also
being used, according to many reports; and to what
degree is the fact that the militias remain armed --
is that within the control of the forces should the
Iraqi government and the United States decide to
disarm the militias?
WARE: Well, the United States and the Iraqi
government -- for what it is, and beyond the prime
minister's office and the office of the national
security adviser, one wonders what there is of this
government, because beyond that, it's essentially
this alliance of militias, as we said, intelligence
claiming that many of them are backed by Iran anyway.
The U.S. and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as has
been said many times in the past, have not only
called upon the militias to disband and disarm, but
are now insisting upon it. Yet, we've seen no
movement.
DOBBS: Right.
WARE: There is no incentive, Lou, for the militias to
disarm and there's nothing to force them. Not even
140,000-plus American troops.
DOBBS: And the frustration among the field
commanders, has there been any expressed by those
field commanders about the inability to control
either the borders or to interdict those supplies?
WARE: Absolutely. I mean, Iraq's borders on both the
eastern and western fronts remain porous. Fighters
and materiel keep pouring in from the west to support
al Qaeda and the Sunni insurgents. The exact same can
be said of the eastern border with Iran.
I've spent a lot of time on both borders. With the
troop numbers here in the country now, it's simply
impossible to seal these borders off.
I've had British intelligence officers tell me that
when it comes to combating Iran, it's as though we
are sleepwalking, one of them said. And essentially,
the Sunnis claim that the Brits maintain an
appearance of stability in the south by trading off,
accommodating with these Iranian-backed militias so
that attacks are few, yet the influence of Iran and
its surrogates is great.
DOBBS: Michael, thank you very much. Very revealing,
as always. Thank you.
Michael Ware from Baghdad.