On Feb. 20, BBC News reported that, “US’ Iran attack plans revealed: US contingency plans for air strikes on Iran extend beyond nuclear sites and include most of the country's military infrastructure.”“This should be no surprise to anyone. There are two reasons for this action: Iran refuses to stop its nuclear program, and the US accuses Iran’s secretive Quds Force of arming Iraqi militants with deadly bomb-making material, recruiting Iraqis and supporting not only Shiite militias but also Shiites allied with Washington,” reports Fox News.
The Quds Force is an elite unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) that carries out operations outside of Iran, and is is organized into eight different directorates based on geographic location, including Iraq and Lebanon.
“What Quds does is very specialized, the most dangerous work, operating underground,” said Mahan Abedin, an Iran expert and the research director at the London based Center for the Study of Terrorism.
“It would be very incriminating and dangerous for Iran to directly supply weapons to the militias, and it’s not a part of Iranian policy to directly confront the Americans,” he continued.
That is why many experts introduce the Quds force activities as a part of the Iran’s proxy war against america. A proxy war is a war where two powers, use third parties as a supplement or a substitute for fighting each other directly.
“The goal is likely to enable these armed formations to gain an advantage over their Sunni rivals in the battle for power that Iran expects could erupt later. They are looking to beyond when the Americans withdraw. They see the Shiite militias as natural allies,” Added Mr. Abedin.
“Iran likely does not want a direct confrontation with U.S. troops in Iraq but is backing militiamen to ensure Shiites win any civil war with Iraqi Sunnis after the Americans leave,” experts said on Thursday 15 Feb.
Many countries in the world have identified the Quds Force as a terrorist group.
The chief U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Major General William Caldwell, said “Iranian and Iraqi detainees in U.S. custody said in interrogations that the Quds Force provides support to extremist groups here in Iraq both in the forms of money and in weaponry.”
Expectedly, George Bush, the US president, is most concerned about existance of the Quds Force and its curroptions in Iran-Iraq border.
Bush said: “What we do know is that the Quds Force was instrumental in providing these deadly IEDs to networks inside of Iraq. What we don’t know is whether or not the head leaders of Iran ordered the Quds Force to do what they did.”
“There are weapons in Iraq that are harming US troops. But whether Ahmadinejad ordered the Quds Force to do this, I don’t think we know,” he added.
But how deep is the Quds Force involved into Iraq’s issues and what role is it exactly playing in the Iraqi current affairs?
A Shiite political party official told AP that “In addition to supplying weapons to Iraqi militias, the Quds Force has been recruiting Iraqi Shiites, giving them up to $150 a month and sending some to Iran for training.”
The US Vice President, Dick Cheney, said on a trip to Australia last week: “We’ve made it clear we believe they have engaged in providing improvised explosive devices, for example, to insurgents inside Iraq that have been used against coalition forces.”
So it has been proven as a fact that the Iran has been using the Quds Force to secure its interests in any unstable parts of the world, and the Middle East in particular. But who is really in charge of them?
“There are people who believe the Quds Force does not move a muscle without getting explicit orders from the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. There are other people who believe they are rogues. The weight of evidence is somewhere in the middle.” said Kenneth Pollack, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy.
“We do have evidence here and there, circumstantial in many ways, that the Quds Force guys and other people in the Revolutionary Guard like to push the edge of the envelope, But Tehran almost certainly told the Quds Force to go into Iraq,” Pollack added.
“They are the brains behind those who are pulling the trigger; you are never going to see their fingerprints,” said one official.
Commander of the U.S. led forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, said on Thursday that “The bottom line is that we believe that the Quds Force has been involved in training and possibly providing funding and potentially weapons to some groups within Iraq. So we watch that extremely carefully.”
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