Iranian embassy employees shot in Baghdad—-PROVOCATION:
Iranian Embassy employees and their driver were shot Thursday in a Baghdad incident that some reports said involved Iraqi troops.An Iraqi Interior Ministry official said five employees of the Iranian Embassy were shot and wounded about 9 p.m. in Baghdad. The official said there had been conflicting reports about the shooting.
An Interior Ministry report said unidentified gunmen in northern Baghdad fired on two SUVs carrying the five employees and driver, who were transported to an Iraqi hospital.
The Baghdad Operations Command, however, reported that an Iraqi army patrol was shot at and returned fire at the SUVs — injuring the embassy workers and their driver, according to the official.
Meanwhile, Iran’s semi-official FARS news agency was reporting that three Iranians and one Iraqi employee of the embassy were injured when shot by “unidentified terrorists.”
The agency quoted an Iranian Embassy official as saying the group was traveling to visit the graves of two religious leaders when 16 bullets were fired at their vehicle from another vehicle.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/05/15/iranians.attacked/index.html
And this after al-Maliki government debunks US claims of Iran arming Iraqi insurgents. US military cancels Petraeus’ photo op.
US plot to nail Iran backfires
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON – The George W Bush administration’s plan to create a new crescendo of accusations against Iran for allegedly smuggling arms to Shi’ite militias in Iraq has encountered not just one but two setbacks.
The government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki refused to endorse US charges of Iranian involvement in arms smuggling to Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, and a plan to show off a huge collection of Iranian arms captured in and around the central city of Karbala had to be called off after it was discovered that none of the arms was of Iranian origin.
The news media’s failure to report that the arms captured from
Shi’ite militiamen in Karbala did not include a single Iranian weapon shielded the US military from a big blow to its anti-Iran strategy.
The Bush administration and top Iraq commander General David Petraeus had plotted a sequence of events that would build domestic US political support for a possible strike against Iran over its “meddling” in Iraq, and especially its alleged export of arms to Shi’ite militias.The plan was keyed to a briefing document to be prepared by Petraeus on the alleged Iranian role in arming and training Shi’ite militias that would be revealed to the public after the Maliki government had endorsed it, and that would be used to accuse Iran publicly.
snip
The government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki refused to endorse US charges of Iranian involvement in arms smuggling to Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, and a plan to show off a huge collection of Iranian arms captured in and around the central city of Karbala had to be called off after it was discovered that none of the arms was of Iranian origin.
snip
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen told reporters on April 25 that Petraeus was preparing a briefing to be given “in the next couple of weeks” that would provide detailed evidence of “just how far Iran is reaching into Iraq to foment instability”. The centerpiece of the Petraeus document, completed in late April, was the claim that arms captured in the southern city of Basra bore 2008 manufacture dates on them.
US officials also planned to display to reporters Iranian weapons captured in both Basra and Karbala. That sequence of media events would fill the airwaves for several days with spectacular news framing Iran as the culprit in Iraq, aimed at breaking down US congressional and public resistance to the idea that Iranian bases supporting the meddling would have to be attacked.
But events in Iraq did not follow the script. On May 4, after an Iraqi delegation had returned from meetings in Iran, Maliki’s spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said in a news conference that Maliki was forming his own cabinet committee to investigate the US claims. “We want to find tangible information and not information based on speculation,” he said.
Dabbagh made it clear the government considered the US evidence of Iranian government arms smuggling to be insufficient. “The proof we want is weapons which are shown to have been made in Iran,” Dabbagh said in a separate interview with Reuters. “We want to trace back how they reached [Iraq], who is using them, where are they getting it.”
Senior US military officials were clearly furious with Maliki for backtracking on the issue. “We were blindsided by this,” one of them told Zavis.Then the Bush administration’s plot encountered another serious problem.
The Iraqi commander in Karbala had announced on May 3 that he had captured a large quantity of Iranian arms in and around the city. Earlier, the US military had said that it was up to the Iraqi government to display captured Iranian weapons, and now an Iraqi commander was eager to do just that. Petraeus’ staff alerted US media to a major news event in which the captured Iranian arms in Karbala would be displayed and then destroyed.
But when US munitions experts went to Karbala to see the alleged cache of Iranian weapons, they found nothing they could credibly link to Iran.
The US command had to inform reporters that the event had been canceled, explaining that it had all been a “misunderstanding”.
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The cancelation of the planned display was a significant story, in light of the well-known intention of the US command to convict Iran on the arms smuggling charge. Nevertheless, it went unreported in the world’s news media.
