IRANIAN ARMS UPDATE….Gareth Porter reports on the findings of Task Force Troy, which was set up earlier this year to look for evidence of Iranian-made weapons in Iraq:
According to the data compiled by the task force, and made available to an academic research project last July, only 70 weapons believed to have been manufactured in Iran had been found in post-invasion weapons caches between mid-February and the second week in April. And those weapons represented only 17 percent of the weapons found in caches that had any Iranian weapons in them during that period.
….The caches that included Iranian weapons [] represented just 2 percent of all caches found. That means Iranian-made weapons were a fraction of one percent of the total weapons found in Shi’a militia caches during that period.
To be exact, Iranian weapons accounted for 0.36% of all weapons found during the six-week period examined by the task force. What’s more, the task force also looked at large caches of supposedly Iranian weapons uncovered in Basra and Karbala during April and May and concluded that they weren’t Iranian after all. Cernig provides more:
Left out of the list of Iranian-made weaponry were 350 armour-piercing explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) found in Iraqi weapons caches. Despite the lurid claims of US officials, the task group couldn’t ascribe an Iranian origin to a single one. Which along with press reports about finding EFP manufactories inside Iraq explains why, since mid-Summer, we’ve heard nothing about Iranian-made EFPs whereas before official reports and statements were full of them.
….Iranian equipment is less reliable and more expensive than Eastern Block materiel that flooded the region after the 2003 invasion — something which a certain imprisoned international arms dealer, ex-CIA and ex-US military contractor and supplier to despots and terrorists, Viktor Bout, may well know a fair bit about. It’s a buyer’s market and the Iranians are seeing market forces exclude their produce, with the exception of simple artillery rockets. They’re more expensive than the Pakistani arms bazaar’s copies coming down the old Silk Road routes and far less effective than easily available and comparitively-priced black market US weapons too.
There’s no question that Iran has substantial interests, both political and military, in Iraq, and has been assisting various armed groups there over the past few years (some of them allied with Maliki and the U.S. government). But evidence is evidence, and the evidence that they’ve been providing anything more than token amounts of weaponry to Iraqi fighters is very thin indeed. It’s time to move on to some other bugaboo.
