BREAKING NEWS ALERT!BAGHDAD — The Iranian government has spent the last few years training elite “secret cells” of renegade Shi’a cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, while funding that group and other Shi’a militias in Iraq to the tune of “hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Army Gen. David Petraeus, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq.
In an exclusive May 18 interview with Military Times, Petraeus said the involvement of the Iranians is “absolutely nefarious. It is hugely damaging to Iraq. It is fuelling the Shi’a militia side of things and causing enormous problems for Iraq.”
The “secret cells” are “Sadr special ops,” Petraeus said. “But they’re different from JAM,” he added, using the acronym for the Mahdi Army’s Arabic name, Jaysh al-Mahdi. “You really have to distinguish between run-of-the-mill JAM and the secret cells,” who, he said, “have had extra training and selection and all the rest.”
That training is the work of the Quds Force, an Iranian special operations organization that answers directly to Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Petraeus said. “We have found out an enormous amount about what the Iranians have done, and it is staggering, it really is,” he said. “It is unbelievable. They have trained dozens at a time over there [in Iran] — and dozens doesn’t sound like much, but dozens can just wreak havoc — on the use of explosively formed projectiles, rockets, mortars and IEDs, and how to do operations.
“They have been funding, over the last several years, certainly hundreds of millions of dollars of assistance to different Shi’a militia groups, and we have found evidence very recently of assistance being provided to Sunni Arab groups as well. One of the Sunni insurgent leaders was just over in Tehran.”
However, Petraeus added, the support the Iranian government is providing to Sunni insurgents in Iraq is “nowhere near the level of what they’ve given to the Shi’as.”
U.S. and other coalition forces have scored some victories against the Iranians and their Shi’a proxies, Petraeus said. “We had some surprising early success against the secret cells of Jaysh al-Mahdi,” he said, pointing to the March capture of Qais Khazali, his brother Laith Khazali and several other members of their network in Basra and Hillah. The Khazali brothers were the secret cell leaders who “orchestrated” the Jan. 20 attack on the provincial joint coordination center in Karbala that led to the deaths of five U.S. soldiers. “We found a 22-page document that actually lays it all out on a computer we captured,” Petraeus said. “The guys that did the Karbala attack are part of this network. It is a Sadr special operations attack.”
However, he said, “I don’t think we have anything that shows that Sadr approved it [or] was involved in it.”
U.S. forces have “also captured a number of others of that network,” Petraeus said. “We’ve got lots of these secret cell guys, quite a number of them. In fact, we got the emergent head, the guy we thought was going to replace Khazali.
“More recently we got a guy named Sheibani, who was the Iraq head of the Sheibani [explosively formed projectile] network, and then three nights ago got Abu Musa, who was one of the big logisticians for the secret cells. Unfortunately he had already distributed the rockets and mortars, some of which have been coming in here.”
The detailed documentation captured during the hunt for the Karbala killers is a hallmark of “secret cell” operations, Petraeus said. It appeared the militiamen “had to show proof, or records, at least” to the Quds Force “that showed what they’d done,” he said. “And they had it — very, very detailed records.”
Petraeus said he showed some of the documentation to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki after the capture of the Khazali brothers, “to demonstrate how widespread their activities had been, how lethal they had been, how murderous they had been, because they had a whole matrix that just tracked their daily attacks.”
But despite the Quds Force’s extensive support of Shi’a militias, Petraeus said the training was occurring in Iran and that while there were “perhaps ... some Quds Force running around” in Iraq, he doubted that many of its operators had crossed the border. Five to seven Quds Force members are “in our detention facilities,” he said. “They’re not about to go running around in Iraq with a heck of a lot at this point in time.”
However, Petraeus said, Iran’s civilian intelligence agency, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, was active in Iraq. “I wouldn’t doubt that there are Iranian intel running around,” he said. “Who do you think populates these [Iranian] consulates and embassies?”
Petraeus said he is “mystified” that there is a debate in the U.S. over whether Khamenei knows about the Quds Force’s activities fomenting violence in Iraq. “He can’t not know,” Petraeus said, noting that Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force, reports directly to Khamenei, not to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. “It’s a massive operation. ... There are all kinds of different elements of the Quds Force that are engaged in it. If he doesn’t know about it, it’s the most out-of-control operation in the world. And if he does know about it, of course, it’s horrific.”
As to the IraniansÂ’ strategic goal in Iraq, Petraeus said he isnÂ’t sure whether the Iranians themselves know for certain.
“They have to be a tiny bit conflicted,” he said. “They can’t want a failed state. This is a Shi’a democracy [and] the first Arab Shi’a-run state. They can’t want it to fail, even though they are Persian. They certainly suffered greatly at the hands of Iraq. But with the kinship and the relationships they have with so many of the Iraqi leaders, they can’t want it to completely fail.”
On the other hand, the establishment of a viable democracy in Iraq would represent a success for the U.S., which Iran would like to avoid, Petraeus said. “They don’t want us to succeed, certainly,” he said. The Iranians would prefer that the U.S. be “seized” with the war in Iraq, perhaps to divert American attention from Iran’s nuclear ambitions or its activities in the northern Arabian Gulf, he added.
Tehran’s influence over Sadr has raised his profile in the Middle East, according to Lt. Col. (P) Rick Welch, an advisor on political, tribal, religious and cultural issues to Multinational Division-Baghdad commander Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil. “I thought Sadr at one point was just fighting a defensive fight: ‘I’m here, we’re not going to let the Sunni power elite who were in the former regime dominate us again,’ and he was the defender of Iraq,” Welch said. “But then Iran started really meddling here, and he now has become a bigger symbol, beyond just nationalism here. It has a purpose to extend the influence from Iran here, in the same way Hezbollah does it in Lebanon” through its leader Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.
Indeed, Sadr, who has modeled his organization on Hezbollah, another Shi’a group that is part political party, part social services organization and part guerrilla army, is strengthening his ties to the Lebanese group, officials here say. “It looks like folks in his organization are connecting to other, similar Shi’a kind of groups around the Middle East, and they’re coalescing together,” Welch said.
But there are signs that Sadr fears his links to Tehran might be costing him popular support at home. “There may be some sense that he’s thinking he went a little bit too far, and now he’s trying to ... clean himself up a little bit, but maybe at some point he will say he’s lost his national identity and is now seen as a pawn of Iran, and he doesn’t like that,” Welch said. “Maybe he’s trying to get back a sense of nationalism here so he doesn’t lose influence over people.
“He has started trying to spread influence through tribal networks and tribal councils, and that’s not having a real potent effect yet. He’s trying to encourage them to join him and to follow him. He’s not calling on them for violent resistance, openly. He’s saying ‘peaceful’ opposition to the coalition presence, so he’s trying to build a bridge, again trying to paint himself as a nationalist working for Iraq, as opposed to a pawn of Persia.”
This instinct accounts for the sudden appearance of Iraqi flags flying throughout Baghdad’s Shi’a neighborhoods in recent weeks, according to Welch. “My religious contacts told me that back [in early] May when Sadr called for the national demonstration, he also put out the order that everyone should be flying an Iraqi flag,” he said. “And the word was that they put out that if you weren’t flying it, you were going to get a visit from a militia member and disciplined or punished for it. ... Again, that’s in line with Sadr trying to promote himself as the Nasrallah of Iraq, so that he could say, ‘I can call the people to nationalism any time I want.’”
But these moves may be too little, too late for Sadr, who is said to be currently taking refuge in Tehran. Welch said SadrÂ’s ties to Iran are already so tight that they guarantee he will be seen as beholden to Tehran.