The Challenges Of Terrorism - Part 21 - Iraq & The US-Iran Regional Issue.

In the Middle East, regional and US domestic issues have become inter-dependent. This is because the US, which controls Iraq, is entering a presidential race where the Democrats are telling Republican President George W. Bush he should get his forces out of Iraq and concentrate on going after the Neo-Salafis of Sunnism, while the conservative wing of the Republicans insists that terrorism on the Ja'fari Shi'ite side of Islam is no less threatening than that of the Sunni radicals.

On the Ja'fari Shi'ite side, however, stands a community of moderates who believe the type of Islamic terrorism which threatens the US is no less serious than the one they face. Mostly influenced by their Arab co-religionists, they think even some of the Ja'fari militants are defensive and far less fanatic than their counterparts in Sunni Islam. They say they depend on a successful US project for Iraq, as Neo-Salafis are spreading from Iraq and through North Africa.

Yet both the Neo-Salafis and Ja'fari radicals have proved to be suicidal in their fight against the US. Both have shown their powers of "martyrdom" since the early 1980s - the Ja'faris of Lebanon's Hizbullah in 1982-83 who forced the US to leave Lebanon, and the Neo-Salafis of Afghanistan in 1982-89 who forced the Soviet Union to leave the Central Asian country. But the suicide bombers in the Afghan case were motivated by US-backed Arabs who were less afraid of Imam Khomeini's Shi'ite theocracy of Iran than of the Soviet empire, while their Ja'fari counterparts in Lebanon were more motivated by the geo-political ambitions of both the theocracy and Syria's Alawite/Ba'thist dictatorship than by any other consideration.

The only difference in the latter case is that Syria's Ba'thists are basically secular, whereas the Shi'ite theocracy of Iran is sectarian and believes Khomeini's "Islamic Revolution" cannot survive unless it spread to other parts of the Muslim World - though the Neo-Salafis now active in Iraq are determined to spread throughout the world including the world of Shi'ites whom they call heretics.

The leading Neo-Salafi group in Iraq is al-Qaeda. This and six close affiliates, together with 71 other Sunni groups, see determined to defeat the US in Iraq. Their horrific daily suicide bombings, together with the concerns of Sunni Arab regimes over Tehran's atomic and regional ambitions, have worried the more pragmatic Shi'ites of Iraq so much that they insist on US protection(see news19-IraqShi'itesNeedUSmay7-07).

US and Iraqi forces on May 6 raided and demolished four houses of Shi'ites suspected of having smuggled from Iran armour-piercing bombs and other weapons supplied by Iran's elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the main power base of supremacists who believe they belong to a nation superior to all others and want to control the world (see below). The raid took place in Sadr City, a huge Shi'ite slum of Baghdad. US soldiers on May 4 detained an alleged cell of smugglers who had procured armour-piercing bombs and other weapons from Iran. The operation came in a raid, one in a series aimed at stopping the flow of explosively formed projectiles (EFPs), into Iraq, said US military spokesman Lt Col Christopher Garver, with 16 detained in Sadr City.

Garver said: "We're dismantling the networks link by link, and one link leads us to another". But he acknowledged there was a steady stream of insurgents able to smuggle and place the bombs. The US military's hope is to arrest the most experienced of the smugglers and assemblers to reduce the number of successful attacks. Garver said: "It's important to get key guys. These guys have demonstrated success. We continue to chisel away at the organisation, chisel at the guys with the most knowledge, the most contacts, and we continue to whittle that down". Earlier on May 4, Iraqi police officers were attacked by a powerful EFP which killed five policemen and wounded two others.

In April, the US military counted 69 attacks with EFPs, the most it has seen in any month so far. Garver said he did not know when the EFPs, imported in parts, were smuggled into Iraq and assembled, adding: "For every EFP that goes off, it's hard to tell when they came into the country. Did it come in during 2006 or 2007? When did each component start moving from Iran versus when did they actually get assembled? They have a long way to come. We have not found a chain that leads all the way up to the Iranian government... We were never trying to indict a specific member of the [Iranian] government, but we know that the [IRGC) Quds force was involved in this".

The US military says it has intelligence that the people assembling and placing the EFPs have been trained in Iran. Tehran denies it is sponsoring or training of Iraqis in armed attacks or that it has provided weapons to them. The EFPs are of particular concern to the American military because when properly assembled and placed, they hurl a copper disc at high speeds which can penetrate even the heavy armour of a tank. The US military said its forces had discovered and destroyed several caches of weapons over the last few months south of Baghdad, including Iran-made rockets and mortars. Roadside bombs have long been the No. 1 killer of US and Iraqi forces, but the use of EFPs has been rising lately and can be a far more lethal weapon. A US armoured carrier equipped with a V-shaped hull which deflects blasts outward and away from passengers - the Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected vehicle - has reduced US roadside bomb casualties in Iraq by as much as two-thirds. But they are not effective against EFPs, which hurl a fist-sized lump of molten copper capable of piercing armoured vehicles.