U.S. military officials charged on Sunday that the highest levels of the Iranian leadership ordered Shiite militants in Iraq to be armed with sophisticated armor-piercing roadside bombs that have killed more than 170 American forces.
The military command in Baghdad denied, however, that any newly-smuggled Iranian weapons were behind the five U.S. military helicopter crashes since Jan. 20 — four that were shot out of the sky by insurgent gunfire.
A fifth chopper crash has tentatively been blamed on mechanical failure. In the same period, two private security company helicopters also have crashed but the cause was unclear.
The deadly and highly sophisticated weapons the U.S. military said were coming into Iraq from Iran are known as “explosively formed penetrators,” or EFPs.
U.S. intelligence says the weapons are going to Shiite militias that include rogue elements of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi army militia and a breakaway faction of the Badr Corps, the armed wing of a powerful Shiite party, reports CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan.
The Iraqi government not only knows but has asked the Iranian government to stop.
. . . . Iraq also didn’t have any WMD (material) and wasn’t a threat, right . . . FYI:
WASHINGTON (AFP) – At Iraq’s request, the US military recently transferred hundreds of metric tons of yellowcake uranium from Iraq to Canada in a secret, weeks-long operation, a Pentagon spokesman said Monday.
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The 550 metric tons of uranium, which was sold to a Canadian company, was moved by truck convoy to Baghdad’s “Green Zone,” then flown by military aircraft to a third country where it was put on a ship for Canada, said Bryan Whitman, the spokesman.
“The operation was completed over the weekend, on Saturday,” Whitman said.
The yellow cake was discovered by US troops after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq at the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Facility south of Baghdad, and was placed under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Yellowcake is a form of processed uranium ore that can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors, or if further enriched as fuel for nuclear weapons.
