Even now that the Explosively Formed Penetrators have been laid on the table in Baghdad, several questions remain unanswered. For instance: Why now, given that officials up to and including Donald Rumsfeld, have laid this particular charge at Iran’s doorstep for years; and whether the influx of Iranian EFPs represents a deliberate attack by the Iranian government on U.S. forces.
On the second question, let me pass on something I heard in Iraqi Kurdistan last year from a knowledgeable source I’ll call M. M has numerous contacts all throughout Kurdish and Arab Iraq and isn’t beholden to any political faction. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the claim below, but for a year I’ve found it intriguing if elusive — and, at the very least, not implausible. Take what follows with those caveats in mind: in the intelligence world, this is what’s known as RUMINT, or “rumor intelligence.”
I asked M about Iranian support for Sunni insurgent groups, which was the state of the accusation at the time. He nodded his head enthusiastically. It’s happening, he said. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Shiite Iran helping the Sunni Iraqis that this particular regime has fought since its inception?” M said it’s not a straight-line connection. There are two significant factors at play. First is the Iranian desire to cover its bets among the Iraqi Shiite factions to ensure their survival, dominance and good will. The Badr Corps and the Mahdi Army may fight each other from time to time, but both receive support from Iran — and Iran wants to ensure that it maintains a strong position from whoever ultimately triumphs.
“OK,” I said, “but that doesn’t get us to the Sunni insurgency and its attacks on U.S. forces.” Ah, M said, now we get to the second factor. Iraq is awash in weapons. For many reasons, this is unfortunate, but in particular there’s one unforeseen consequence: a stable balance of terror between sectarian groups and within sectarian factions. In other words, everyone has more or less the same weaponry, and so what determines who wins any particular engagement is often intelligence, tactics, discipline and the sympathy of a particular population.
That creates a powerful demand for newer, better and more lethal weaponry to break the deadlock. And the recipients of Iranian weaponry aren’t exactly scrupulous about to whom they’d sell whatever surplus ordnance they consider themselves having at a particular moment. Through an elaborate and informal network of middlemen, Shiite militias get weapons from Iran that they use on Sunni insurgents — and also sell weapons to people who sell them to Sunni insurgents, who use them on Shiites and Americans. In a desperate situation like Iraq, sectarian loyalties can very often take a back seat to cutthroat advantage, M reminded me.
Again, I can’t vouch for this. Really, nothing but on-the-ground reporting can, and I’m not on the ground; I don’t speak Arabic; and the chaos in Iraq is hardly conducive to getting to the bottom of this.
It makes sense, for instance, that some of the weaponry shown on the table yesterday was discovered at a Baghdad compound belonging to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a Shiite faction that the U.S. is allied with. But does that mean that SCIRI is actually attacking U.S. troops? Unclear.
Perhaps the best clue of who is actually carrying out the EFP attacks on U.S. forces would be where the attacks are happening (Shiite or Sunni areas?). I’ll try to get you that information.