Iran smuggling missiles into Iraq: US military

IRAQ: Iran is smuggling advanced weapons, including surface-to-air missiles, into Iraq to be used by extremists against American troops, the US military charged on Sunday.

US military spokesman Rear Admiral Mark Fox told reporters in Baghdad that Iran was shifting sophisticated arms such as "RPG-29s, explosively-formed penetrators (EFPs), 240 mm rockets and Misagh-1 surface-to-air missiles" across its borders into Iraq.

An EFP is a feared roadside bomb which when it explodes emits a white-hot slug of molten copper that can cut through the armoured skins of US military vehicles.

Fox reiterated that Iranian national Mahmudi Farhadi, detained on Thursday in the northern province of Sulaimaniyah, is one of the kingpins in the bomb smuggling operations.

"He is a member of the Ramazan Corps, the Quds Force department responsible for all operations in Iraq," Fox said. "We are fulfilling our professional responsibility to detain those individuals who are smuggling these illegal weapons into Iraq," he added.

Iran insists that Farhadi is a civilian official on a visit to Iraq as part of a trade delegation.

On Saturday, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who says Farhadi is a known businessman and not a bomb smuggler, wrote a stern letter to top US officials in Iraq to demand that he be released.

US military spokesman Major Winfield Danielson told AFP on Sunday that Farhadi was still being interrogated.

"We are questioning the individual regarding his knowledge of, and involvement in, the transportation of improvised explosive devices and EFPs from Iran into Iraq, and his role in facilitating travel and training in Iran for Iraqi insurgents," he said.

"We have not yet determined if charges will be filed."

Meanwhile for the second time this month, Iran has come under scrutiny after Afghan security forces recovered a shipment of weapons destined for Taliban insurgents that came from across the border.

The latest discovery occurred on Saturday when Afghan authorities said they found about 40 Iranian- and Chinese-made mines and rocket-propelled-grenades in a vehicle abandoned by Taliban rebels in Herat province near the border.

Some of the rockets shown to reporters carried Iran's coat of arms.

Two weeks earlier, NATO soldiers deployed in Afghanistan seized in Farah province, also on the border, a significant convoy of explosives that came from the Islamic republic and also was apparently destined for the hardliners.

"We do not have problems with Turkmenistan - all the trouble comes through Iran," the deputy chief of border police for western Afghanistan, Samowal Hamidullah, told AFP in the western city of Herat.

"There are many illegal crossings between the two sides," said Hamidullah, who monitors about 20 border posts between Afghanistan and the two countries.

US officials allege that Tehran is supporting the Taliban in their bloody rebellion against the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai and the 50,000 foreign soldiers backing him, most of whom are American.

Iran denies the charge and many Afghan officials also say there is no proof Tehran is directly involved, with Washington irked by Karzai's insistence that Iran is a good neighbour.

The 928-kilometre border between Iran and Afghanistan is porous and difficult to patrol.

It is relatively easy for traffickers moving through the semi-desert of plains and hills to avoid detection.

Baghdad Herat, Monday, AFP