Iran has recruited its own network of Iraqi Shia extremists to use armor-piercing weapons against US and coalition forces rather than against Sunni rivals, US intelligence officials claimed today.
The secretive Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guards has circumvented Shia organizations like the Mehdi Army to enlist individual militants and train them in the use of explosively formed penetrators, the officials said.
The weapons, known as EFPs, have killed 170 US-led coalition troops, according to the Pentagon.
US officials have said these weapons have come into greater use over the past year. "The purpose appears not to be to shore up Iran's political partners in Iraq against the Sunnis, but to cause problems for American troops," said a former intelligence official who closely monitors events in the Middle East.
Tehran denies supplying the arms, and President George W. Bush has said the United States cannot prove complicity by Iran's leaders. US intelligence chief Mike McConnell told the Senate this week that the EFPs were made in Iran and taken into Iraq by Quds Force members.
The Pentagon said Iran is training Iraqi Shi'ites in both Iran and Lebanon to use the weapons. Iran may have set up its own network in order to control distribution of the weaponry, said an intelligence official, who asked not to be identified because the subject involves classified information.
"It would have to be a controlled network," he said. Why Iran has deployed the EFP's and to what degree Tehran has been involved in attacks on US troops is still being debated in the Bush administration.