Army: Iraqi Police Were in on Jan. Karbala AttackAccording to a U.S. Army investigation, the Iraqi Police assisted a brazen January assault on U.S. troops in the southern city of Karbala — an attack that a U.S. military spokesman tied to Iranian operatives earlier this month.
USA Today obtained a copy of the Army’s February 27 report. The report found that the Karbala policemen exploited “a level of trust” that U.S. commanders placed with them to provide security for a provincial headquarters where a contingent of soldiers were stationed. In the assault, one of the most sophisticated on U.S. troops to date, gunmen passed themselves off as part of a U.S. security team and entered the compound past police checkpoints, eventually killing five soldiers.
USA Today reports that in advance of the attack, Iraqi police abandoned their stations, as did Iraqi civilian employees of the compound’s PX. The gunmen exhibited signs of knowing how U.S. forces would defend themselves under attack, and used that apparent knowledge to pin down and abduct soldiers and officers.
Earlier this month, in a U.S. military briefing for the press, Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, a former White House aide, accused Iranian operatives of the powerful Qods Forces of masterminding the attack and using Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army to pull it off. Nothing in the Army report is dispositive of Bergner’s contention, said to have been gained through interrogation of a Lebanese Hezbollah terrorist in U.S. custody. But at Mother Jones, reporter Laura Rozen notes that Bergner’s briefing “failed to mention” the February Army report ascribing complicity to the Iraqi police. It’s not difficult to see why — considering that the U.S.’s long-term strategy in Iraq is to turn security operations over to uniformed Iraqis like the Karbala police.