Friday, March 23, 2007
Iranians paying Iraqis to attack coalition
Security, Iran
(AFP) - Iranian agents are paying local Iraqis around the southern city of Basra as much as 500 dollars a month to carry out attacks on coalition forces, a senior British Army officer said Friday. Lieutenant Colonel Justin Maciejewski said contact with locals suggested that the "vast majority" of violence against British troops stationed in the city came from outside Iraq.
"We haven't found any 'smoking gun' but certainly all the circumstantial evidence points to Iranian involvement in the bombings here in Basra, which is disrupting the city to a great extent," he added. Maciejewski, who is the commanding officer at the British base at Basra Palace, went on: "Local sheikhs and tribal leaders here in Basra -- who are desperate to prevent this violence escalating -- are telling us that Iranian agents are paying up to 500 dollars a month for young Basrawi men to attack us.
"We have a lot of very modern and quite sophisticated weaponry being used against us -- weaponry that could only really have been procured from a state," said Maciejewski. "These are not old munitions from the Iran-Iraq war. They are much more modern, some of them produced in 2006 and the locals are telling us that these are coming in from Iran."
"We haven't found any 'smoking gun' but certainly all the circumstantial evidence points to Iranian involvement in the bombings here in Basra, which is disrupting the city to a great extent," he added. Maciejewski, who is the commanding officer at the British base at Basra Palace, went on: "Local sheikhs and tribal leaders here in Basra -- who are desperate to prevent this violence escalating -- are telling us that Iranian agents are paying up to 500 dollars a month for young Basrawi men to attack us.
"We have a lot of very modern and quite sophisticated weaponry being used against us -- weaponry that could only really have been procured from a state," said Maciejewski. "These are not old munitions from the Iran-Iraq war. They are much more modern, some of them produced in 2006 and the locals are telling us that these are coming in from Iran."
Labels: Basrah, Iran, tribal sheiks
