[Dialogue] US Military Ignored Evidence of Iraqi-Made EFPs

Harry Wainwright h-wainwright at charter.net
Fri Oct 26 18:08:46 EDT 2007



Published on Friday, October 26, 2007 by Inter Press Service
<http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39810>  

US Military Ignored Evidence of Iraqi-Made EFPs

by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - When the U.S. military command accused the Iranian Quds Force
last January of providing the armour-piercing EFPs (explosively formed
penetrators) that were killing U.S. troops, it knew that Iraqi machine shops
had been producing their own EFPs for years, a review of the historical
record of evidence on EFPs in Iraq shows.
<http://www.commondreams.org/archive/wp-content/photos/1026_05.jpg> 

The record also shows that the U.S. command had considerable evidence that
the Mahdi army had gotten the technology and the training on how to use it
from Hezbollah rather than Iran.

The command, operating under close White House supervision, chose to deny
these facts in making the dramatic accusation that became the main rationale
for the present aggressive U.S. stance toward Iran. Although the George W.
Bush administration initially limited the accusation to the Quds Force, it
has recently begun to assert that top officials of the Iranian regime are
responsible for arms that are killing U.S. troops.

British and U.S. officials observed from the beginning that the EFPs being
used in Iraq closely resembled the ones used by Hezbollah against Israeli
forces in Southern Lebanon, both in their design and the techniques for
using them.

Hezbollah was known as the world's most knowledgeable specialists in EFP
manufacture and use, having perfected them during the 1990s in the military
struggle against Israeli forces in Lebanon. It was widely recognised that it
was Hezbollah that had passed on the expertise to Hamas and other
Palestinian militant groups after the second Intifada began in 2000.

U.S. intelligence also knew that Hezbollah was conducting the training of
Mahdi army militants on EFPs. In August 2005, Newsday published a report
from correspondent Mohammed Bazzi that Shiite fighters had begun in early
2005 to copy Hezbollah techniques for building the bombs, as well as for
carrying out roadside ambushes, citing both Iraqi and Lebanese officials.

In late November 2006, a senior intelligence official told both CNN and the
New York Times that Hezbollah troops had trained as many as 2,000 Mahdi army
fighters in Lebanon.

The fact that the Mahdi army's major military connection has always been
with Hezbollah rather than Iran would also explain the presence in Iraq of
the PRG-29, a shoulder-fired anti-armour weapon. Although U.S. military
briefers identified it last February as being Iranian-made, the RPG-29 is
not manufactured by Iran but by the Russian Federation.

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, RPG-29s were imported from
Russia by Syria, then passed on to Hezbollah, which used them with
devastating effectiveness against Israeli forces in the 2006 war. According
to a June 2004 report on the well-informed military website
Strategypage.com, RPG-29s were already turning up in Iraq, "apparently
smuggled across the Syrian border".

The earliest EFPs appearing in Iraq in 2004 were so professionally made that
they were probably constructed by Hezbollah specialists, according to a
detailed account by British expert Michael Knights in Jane's Intelligence
Review last year.

By late 2005, however, the British command had already found clear evidence
that the Iraqi Shiites themselves were manufacturing their own EFPs. British
Army Major General J. B. Dutton told reporters in November 2005 that the
bombs were of varying degrees of sophistication.

Some of the EFPs required a "reasonably sophisticated factory", he said,
while others required only a simple workshop, which he observed, could only
mean that some of them were being made inside Iraq.

After British convoys in Maysan province were attacked by a series of EFP
bombings in late May 2006, Knights recounts, British forces discovered a
factory making them in Majar al-Kabir north of Basra in June.

In addition, the U.S. military also had its own forensic evidence by fall
2006 that EFPs used against its vehicles had been manufactured in Iraq,
according to Knights. He cites photographic evidence of EFP strikes on U.S.
armoured vehicles that "typically shows a mixture of clean penetrations from
fully-formed EFP and spattering." That pattern reflected the fact that the
locally made EFPs were imperfect, some of them forming the required shape to
penetrate but some of them failing to do so.

Then U.S. troops began finding EFP factories. Journalist Andrew Cockburn
reported in the Los Angeles Times in mid-February that U.S. troops had
raided a Baghdad machine shop in November 2006 and discovered "a pile of
copper discs, 5 inches in diameter, stamped out as part of what was clearly
an ongoing order".

In a report on Feb. 23, NBC Baghdad correspondent Jane Arraf quoted "senior
military officials" as saying that U.S. forces had "have been finding an
increasing number of the advanced roadside bombs being not just assembled
but manufactured in machine shops here."

Nevertheless, the Bush administration decided to put the blame for the EFPs
squarely on the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,
after Bush agreed in fall 2006 to target the Quds Force within Iran in order
to make Iranian leaders feel vulnerable to U.S. power. The allegedly
exclusive Iranian manufacture of EFPs was the administration's only argument
for holding the Quds Force responsible for their use against U.S. forces.

At the Feb. 11 military briefing presenting the case for this claim, one of
the U.S. military officials declared, "The explosive charges used by Iranian
agents in Iraq need a special manufacturing process, which is available only
in Iran." The briefer insisted that there was no evidence that they were
being made in Iraq.

That lynchpin of the administration's EFP narrative began to break down
almost immediately, however. On Feb. 23, NBC's Arraf confronted Lt. Gen. Ray
Odierno, who had been out in front in January promoting the new Iranian EFP
line, with the information she had obtained from other senior military
officials that an increasing number of machine stops manufacturing EFPs had
been discovered by U.S. troops.

Odierno began to walk the Iranian EFP story back. He said the EFPs had
"started to come from Iran", but he admitted "some of the technologies" were
"probably being constructed here".

The following day, U.S. troops found yet another EFP factory near Baqubah,
with copper discs that appeared to be made with a high degree of precision,
but which could not be said with any certainty to have originated in Iran.

The explosive expert who claimed at the February briefing that EFPs could
only be made in Iran was then made available to the New York Times to
explain away the new find. Maj. Marty Weber now backed down from his earlier
statement and admitted that there were "copy cat" EFPs being machined in
Iraq that looked identical to those allegedly made in Iran to the untrained
eye.

Weber insisted that such Iraqi-made EFPs had slight imperfections which made
them "much less likely to pierce armour". But NBC's Arraf had reported the
previous week that a senor military official had confirmed to her that the
EFPs made in Iraqi shops were indeed quite able to penetrate U.S. armour.
The impact of those weapons "isn't as clean", the official said, but they
are "almost as effective" as the best-made EFPs.

The idea that only Iranian EFPs penetrate armour would be a surpise to
Israeli intelligence, which has reported that EFPs manufactured by Hamas
guerrillas in their own machine shops during 2006 had penetrated eight
inches of Israeli steel armour in four separate incidents in September and
November, according to the Intelligence and Terrorism Center in Tel Aviv.

The Arraf story was ignored by the news media, and the Bush administration
has continued to assert the Iranian EFP charge as though it had never been
questioned.

It soon became such an accepted part of the media narrative on Iran and Iraq
that the only issue about which reporters bothered to ask questions is
whether the top leaders of the Iranian government have approved the alleged
Quds Force operation.

Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His
latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520250044?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&l
inkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0520250044&adid=10957AD0SMT0WXQ4FY5Q&>  Vietnam",
was published in June 2005. 

C 2007 Inter Press Service

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/26/4835/

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20071026/1e61d6db/attachment-0001.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 6731 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20071026/1e61d6db/attachment-0001.gif 


More information about the Dialogue mailing list