Senior Iranian leaders know about the operations of Iran's Qods Force in fomenting violence in Iraq, the US military said today.
The US military has long accused the Qods Force of arming and training Iraqi Shia militants who attack US and Iraqi soldiers. Iran has repeatedly denied involvement in violence in Iraq and blames the US-led invasion in 2003 for the bloodshed.
"Our intelligence reveals that senior leadership in Iran is aware of this activity," military spokesman Brig-Gen Kevin Bergner said in Baghdad in some of the most direct accusations yet against Tehran over the chaos in Iraq.
"We also understand that senior Iraqi leaders have expressed their concerns to the Iranian government about the activities."
Iran does not officially acknowledge the existence of the Qods Force. Military experts and some exiled Iranians say it is a wing of Iran's ideologically driven Revolutionary Guards that operates abroad. They say it reports directly to Iran's top authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The Revolutionary Guards have a separate command structure to Iran's regular military.
Asked if it was possible that Qods Force support was being provided without the knowledge of Khamenei, Brig Gen Bergner said: "That would be hard to imagine."
He said the Qods Force was working with the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shia militia group Hizbullah to carry out acts of violence in Iraq.
He said the United States had discovered the existence of three relatively small camps located close to Tehran where Iraqi Shia militants were being trained. Between 20-60 militants were receiving training at any given time, he said.
Iran's Defence Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar dismissed as a "sheer lie" US accusations that Iran was militarily intervening in Iraq and supported Iraqi militants, the official IRNA news agency reported.
He said such charges were part of a US-led psychological war.
The latest US accusations come at a sensitive time. On Sunday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said he was pressing the United States and Iran to hold a second round of talks in Baghdad to follow up a landmark meeting on May 28th, but that no date has been set.