U.S. Task Force Found Few Iranian Arms in Iraq

[babylonsister]

U.S. Task Force Found Few Iranian Arms in Iraq
Submitted by Chip on Sun, 2008-11-16 07:14.

U.S. Task Force Found Few Iranian Arms in Iraq
By Gareth Porter | IPSNEWS.net



Last April, top George W. Bush administration officials, desperate to exploit any possible crack in the close relationship between the Nouri al-Maliki government and Iran, launched a new round of charges that Iran had stepped up covert arms assistance to Shi'a militias.

Secretary of Defence Robert M. Gates suggested that there was "some sense of an increased level of {Iranian} supply of weapons and support to these groups." And Washington Post reporter Karen DeYoung was told by military officials that the "plentiful, high quality weaponry" the militia was then using in Basra was "recently manufactured in Iran".

But a U.S. military task force had been passing on data to the Multi-National Force Iraq (MNFI) command that told a very different story. The data collected by the task force in the previous six weeks showed that relatively few of the weapons found in Shi'a militia caches were manufactured in Iran.

According to the data compiled by the task force, and made available to an academic research project last July, only 70 weapons believed to have been manufactured in Iran had been found in post-invasion weapons caches between mid-February and the second week in April. And those weapons represented only 17 percent of the weapons found in caches that had any Iranian weapons in them during that period.

The actual proportion of Iranian-made weapons to total weapons found, however, was significantly lower than that, because the task force was finding many more weapons caches in Shi'a areas that did not have any Iranian weapons in them.

more...

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/37714

[mike_c]

1. what's missing from that article is what proportion were from the U.S....

...or it's allies. I'd be willing to bet that most were.

[Ichingcarpenter]

2. How many were really from Blackwater and their illegal arms trade?

I find these stories testing as far as who was the real dealer vs point of origin of the weapons.

[acmavm]

3. They were lying? So far, that makes it a perfect score. They've lied about

everything, big and small. Goes to show you how big a treason Shock and Awe really was/is.

[jpak]

4. K&R

n/t