NEW YORK, Oct. 23: Scores of documents made public by WikiLeaks provide a ground-level look at the shadow war between the United States and Iraqi militias backed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
On December 22, 2006, the US military officials in Baghdad issued a secret warning: “The Shia militia commander who had orchestrated the kidnapping of officials from Iraq’s ministry of higher education was now hatching plans to take American soldiers hostage.”
What made the warning especially worrying were the intelligence reports saying that the Iraqi militant, Azhar al-Dulaimi, had been trained by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran and Hezbollah, its Lebanese ally.
“Dulaymi reportedly obtained his training from Hizballah operatives near Qum, Iran, who were under the supervision of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force officers in July 2006,” the report noted using alternative spellings of the principals involved.