Click
photo to play
Length: 3:31
LOU DOBBS: American
troops in Iraq are being killed by sophisticated
weapons made in Iran, and the U.S. military says the
Iranian government is behind it. Iran denies those
accusations and instead accuses the United States of
fabricating evidence.
House Democrats are trying to stop President Bush
from sending more troops to Iraq. Can they force the
president's hand? The powerful chairman of the House
Armed Services Committee, Ike Skelton, will be here
tonight.
And Michael Ware is reporting from Baghdad tonight on
what the U.S. is calling a growing body of evidence
that Iran is killing our troops in Iraq.
Suzanne Malveaux reporting from the White House...
We begin with Michael Ware in Baghdad.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): In a
background briefing in Baghdad that could not be
taped, by three officials who cannot be named, the
U.S. escalated its campaign of accusation against
Tehran. The U.S. officials laid out what they call a
growing body of evidence that a largely covert
Iranian special forces unit, arms, trains and advises
Shia insurgents attacking coalition soldiers.
That unit is an element of the Revolutionary Guard
Corps: its elite Quds Force which, the U.S. officials
claim, takes its orders directly from Iranian supreme
leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself.
Insisting the Qods Force is systematically funneling
insurgents a range of arms from mortars to sniper
rifles, grenades to machine guns, the American
officials highlighted one weapon in particular they
blame the Qods Force for supplying: a roadside bomb
pioneered by Lebanese Hezbollah, so powerful it
punches through the heaviest American armor with
ease. Called an explosively formed penetrator, or
EFP, the officials say the device has killed at least
170 soldiers since it first emerged on the Iraqi
battlefield in 2004.
But, like much of the declassified information
released during the briefing, it's a claim U.S.
officials have made many times before, insisting one
of the bombs' key components needs fine
machine-tooling that could be traced back to Iran, as
can markings on mortars and explosives found inside
Iraq which show they were manufactured by Tehran.
While admitting there is no smoking gun of Iranian
complicity, a Defense Department intelligence analyst
says this is a sophisticated Iranian campaign being
fought through a host of surrogate groups maximizing
Iran's deniability. If so, it's precisely the same
kind of proxy war techniques America's CIA used so
successfully with Islamic allies against the Soviet
Union's occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WARE: And it's armaments like these that the U.S.
military is hoping to stop. These are the tailfins of
Iranian-supplied mortars that CNN has obtained. The
U.S. military used several of these as examples of
the kind of munitions that the Revolutionary Guard
Quds Force is supplying across the border to Shia
militias -- Lou.
DOBBS: Michael Ware reporting from
Baghdad.