In his testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees last month, General David Petraeus claimed that Iran is using a special unit of its Revolutionary Guards, the Quds Force, to turn Shia militias into a "Hezbollah-like force" to "fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq".

But at the same hearing, Petraeus embarrassed himself by stating that the Quds Force has left Iraq!

"The Quds Force itself, we believe, by and large those individuals have been pulled out of the country, as have the Lebanese Hezbollah trainers that were being used to augment that activity,” he said.

Petraeus' contradictory statements on the Quds Force are in line with the Bush administration propaganda against the Islamic Republic that’s starting to fall apart because it obviously contradicts reality, according to an article on Asia Times.

Although administration officials have long claimed that Iranian agents are operating in Iraq, they have never produced any evidence that the Quds Force are assisting fighters resisting U.S. occupation forces.

Moreover, the evidence that has emerged over the past months about Shia fighters and their alleged connection to Iran suggests that the Quds Force personnel do not operate in Iraq, as claimed by the Bush administration.

Megan Greenwell of the Washington Post recently reported that “some military intelligence analysts have concluded there is no concrete evidence" linking the Quds Force in Iraq with Shia militias.

In a military briefing presented in Baghdad on February 11, an unidentified American official alleged that weapons were being smuggled into Iraq by the Quds Force, but he failed to present any evidence to support his claims. 

And on July 6, Major-General Rick Lynch, commander of U.S. operations south of Baghdad, told reporters that his troops hadn’t captured "anybody that we can tie to Iran".

Further shattering the "proxy war" claim, Lynch's spokeswoman, Alayne Conway, said on August 19 that they hadn’t caught anyone supplying weapons from Iran to Iraq. 

Also in August, another spokesman for Lynch told Inter Press Service that Lynch had not made any allegation about Iranians training Shias in Iraq.

Some media outlets and U.S. officials also alleged that the Lebanese resistance group, Hezbollah, is operating in Iraq and training Shia fighters as a "proxy" for Iran. But this claim was also dismissed when Petraeus noted that Hezbollah trainers have also left Iraq.

According to the Asia Times article, the Bush administration’s claim that Iran is using the Quds Force to fight a proxy war in Iraq is aimed at raising tensions with Iran and creating a justification for attacking the Islamic Republic.

Similarly, the growing pressure for targeting members of the Quds Force allegedly operating in Iraq late last year came from top administration officials who strongly want to attack Iran, according to an in-depth account of the origins of the plan by the Washington Post's Dafna Linzer published on February 26.

That plan was met with "skepticism" by the intelligence community, the State Department and the Defense Department when it was proposed, Linzer wrote, because of the fear it would contribute to an escalation of conflict with Iran.

"This has little to do with Iraq," a senior intelligence officer told Linzer. "It's all about pushing Iran's buttons. It's purely political."

Source: Al Jazeera

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