The Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2008 (excerpts) — A new U.S. military report accused Iran of continuing to funnel weapons and money to Shiite militants across Iraq and described Iran as the ’greatest long-term threat to Iraqi security.’
The report offered a generally upbeat assessment of Iraq’s security and political situation, noting that violence there has fallen to the lowest levels in more than four years.
’Iraq is in a much better place than it was a year ago, across the board,’ Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a gathering of military and civilian officials shortly before the report’s release. ’We’re not at the sustainable point yet. We’re not at the irreversible point yet.’
The report reserved its harshest words for Iran, accusing Tehran of breaking its promise to curtail the flow of Iranian armaments into Iraq. It said U.S. and Iraqi forces operating in Basra found large caches of Iranian-made weapons that had been manufactured earlier this year, after Iranian officials told their Iraqi counterparts that they would take measures to curb such shipments.
The report also noted that the number of attacks featuring a particularly lethal form of roadside bomb that the U.S. has linked to Iran reached a high in April, while the number of attacks involving Iranian-supplied rockets rose sharply over the same period.
Iran has been facilitating the ’large-scale trafficking of arms, ammunition, and explosives,’ and helping to ’fund, train, arm and guide numerous networks that conduct wide-scale insurgency operations,’ according to the report.
Iran has denied knowingly funneling weapons into Iraq or training the country’s Shiite militants. Its government derides the U.S. accusations as propaganda designed to cover American failings in Iraq and provide a pretext for a military strike on Iran.