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U.S. Military Ignored Evidence of
Iraqi-Made EFPs
Analysis by Gareth Porter*
IPS - Inter Press Service
October 25, 2007
WASHINGTON, Oct 25 (IPS) - 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.
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 Vietnam", was published in June
2005.
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