Iraq finds major caches of 'made in Iran' rockets
Tuesday, September 15, 2009 E-Mail this story Free Headline Alerts
BAGHDAD — The Iraqi military has found large shipments of Iranian weapons in the south.
Officials said the Iraq Army had captured Iranian-origin rockets, ammunition and a range of explosives. They said the army has also captured radios and gas masks believed supplied by Iran.
"Some of the rockets have 'made in Iran' on those rockets," U.S. Army Gen. Richard Nash, head of Multinational Division-South, said.
In a Sept. 8 briefing, Nash said large amounts of Iranian and other weapons were found in the provinces of Dhi Qar and Maysan. He said the Iraq Army's 10th Division captured dozens of explosively-formed penetrator plates, magnetic car sticky bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, hundreds of machine guns, assault rifles, and thousands of small-arms rounds.
The weapons caches, found in northern Maysan, also included more than 100 rockets, artillery rounds and mortar shells. Officials said the area in Maysan, dubbed the Southern Triangle, was raided by Iraqi troops in August 2009 in an effort to prevent the flow of weapons to Iranian-supported Shi'ite militias.
"This effort is still ongoing," Nash said. "They're deliberately going through the arid area, as I mentioned, the swamp area; very difficult operations obviously during the hottest part of the year here in Iraq, late August, early September."
Officials said Iran has continued the flow of weapons to Shi'ite militias in Iraq. They said some of the weapons were produced as late as 2007.
"Some of them are rather new," Nash said. "So needless to say, the bulk of what we see would have a stamp on a particular munition that would say 'Iran.'"
Nash said Iraq and the United States have developed an effective intelligence network to track weapons shipments from Iran. He said the Iraqi military has received tips of weapons caches from local tribes.