Delegation to Iran seeks to cut arms pipeline to militias, Iraq says
Senior Shiite Muslims will meet with Iran's supreme leader and other officials to offer evidence of shipments to 'illegal militias,' says an aide to Iraq's prime minister.
BAGHDAD -- Iraq has sent senior Shiite Muslim leaders to Tehran to discuss new evidence that Iranian security services are providing weapons and training to militiamen locked in a deadly showdown with U.S. and Iraqi forces, officials said today.
A delegation from Iraq's governing Shiite alliance traveled to Iran on Wednesday to meet with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other ranking Iranian officials, said a senior advisor and two other politicians with close ties to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.
"The point is to press home the importance of Iran . . . cooperating with the Iraqi government and not dealing with any other illegal militias or factions outside the government," said Maliki's aide, Haider Abadi. "We are looking for good, neighborly relations with Iran, but it cannot go on like this."
U.S. officials have been charging for months that Iran is arming, funding, training and directing "special group" cells they blame for some of the most lethal attacks against American troops in Iraq.
Neither U.S. nor Iraqi officials have shared the evidence with the media. But they say it includes large caches of Iranian weapons with markings from 2008, found during a recent crackdown against Shiite militias in the southern oil hub of Basra.
Iran denies it is helping Iraqi militants and has expressed support for the crackdown. An Iranian official today confirmed the arrival of the Iraqi delegation.
"The Islamic Republic of Iran, in order to settle the disputes between the factions in Iraq, receives this delegation and wants to stop the violence in Iraq," Mohammad Ali Hosseini, spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry, told The Times in a telephone interview.
Shiites dominate both countries, and Iran's Islamic government has ties with Shiite factions on both sides of the current fighting in Iraq.
The crackdown, which began in Basra on March 25, triggered a fierce backlash from militiamen loyal to hard-line Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, who also is now in Iran.
Fighting in the southern city dropped significantly when Sadr ordered his followers off the streets five days later, after senior Shiite leaders visited him in Iran. But fierce clashes continue in and around the cleric's Baghdad stronghold, the vast Shiite district known as Sadr City.
