This is probably no great revelation to JTFers about the Middle East, but it is serious nonetheless both to Israelis and American forces stationed over there. Both militaries better shape up
fast or Iran will rule the entire western half of Asia with an iron fist, annihilating Israel and surrounding and destroying Allied forces in Iraq.
Hezbollah Actively Being Trained In Iraq, By Iran
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080701/ap_on_re_mi_ea/hezbollah_in_iraqHezbollah said to train Shiite militiamen in Iraq
By HAMZA HENDAWI and QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, Associated Press Writers
58 minutes ago
BAGHDAD - Hezbollah instructors trained Shiite militiamen at remote camps in southern Iraq until three months ago when they slipped across the border to Iran — presumably to continue instruction on Iranian soil, according to two Shiite lawmakers and a top army officer.
The three Iraqis claim the Lebanese Shiites were also involved in planning some of the most brazen attacks against U.S.-led forces, including the January 2007 raid on a provincial government compound in Karbala in which five Americans died.
The allegations, made in separate interviews with The Associated Press, point not only to an Iranian hand in the Iraq war, but also to Hezbollah's willingness to expand beyond its Lebanese base and assume a broader role in the struggle against U.S. influence in the Middle East.
All this suggests that Shiite-dominated Iran is waging a proxy war against the United States to secure a dominant role in majority-Shiite Iraq, which has supplanted Lebanon as Tehran's top priority in the Middle East.
"The stakes are much higher in Iraq, where there is a Shiite majority, oil, the shrine cities and borders with Saudi Arabia," said analyst Farid al-Khazen, a Christian Lebanese lawmaker whose party is allied with Hezbollah.
"The big story is Iraq, and the Americans unwittingly opened it up for the Iranians" by their invasion in 2003, al-Khazen said.
The allegations come as the United States and Iran are engaged in a showdown over Tehran's nuclear program and each country's role in Iraq.
Iran, Hezbollah's mentor, denies giving any support to Shiite extremists in Iraq.
But the three Iraqis who spoke to the AP said the Iranians prefer to use Hezbollah instructors because as Arabs, they can communicate better with the Iraqi Shiites and maintain a lower profile than Farsi-speakers from Iran.
For Hezbollah, a high-risk role in Iraq could give the Lebanese movement leverage with the United States and broaden its appeal within the Arab world where anti-American sentiment remains strong.
Iraqi officials have said little about a Hezbollah role in this country. However, President Jalal Talabani told U.S.-funded Alhurra television this week that "there have been several occasions" when Hezbollah members or those who "claim to belong to Hezbollah" have been detained in Iraq.
He gave no further details.
But the two Iraqi lawmakers and the military officer said Hezbollah instructors work only with members of the Iraqi Shiite "special groups," the U.S. military's name for splinter factions of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia. The U.S. believes that Iran's elite Quds Force, a branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, supports the special groups.
All three Iraqis spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not supposed to release the information.
The lawmakers belong to al-Sadr's movement and were involved in the creation of the Mahdi Army in 2003. The military officer's job gives him access to highly classified intelligence information.
They said Hezbollah began training Shiite militiamen in the second half of 2006 at two camps — Deir and Kutaiban — east of Basra near the Iranian border. They fled across the border in late March or early April this year after U.S.-backed Iraqi forces launched a crackdown against militias in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city.
In Iran, training resumed in camps once used by Iraqi exiles who fought with Iranian forces during the 1980s war between the two countries, the lawmakers said. Instruction includes explosives, ambushes and use of rockets and mortars.
Citing testimony from special groups members in custody, the officer said the Hezbollah instructors never numbered more than 10 at any one time, kept a low profile and moved back and forth over the Iranian border.
Indications that Hezbollah was playing a role in Iraq first surfaced last July when the U.S. military announced the arrest of Ali Musa Daqduq, a Lebanese-born Hezbollah operative allegedly training Iraqi Shiite militiamen.
At least one other Hezbollah operative, identified only as Faris, was detained in Basra during fighting there in April and was handed over to the Americans, the Iraqi military officer said.
The U.S. military has said little publicly about Hezbollah's involvement here since announcing Daqduq's arrest, though it has frequently alleged an Iranian role in arming, equipping and training Shiite extremists.
"At this point in time, we do not have any new, releasable information regarding Hezbollah's involvement with special groups in Iran and Iraq," a military spokesman, Capt. Charles Calio, said in an e-mail to the AP.
A Hezbollah spokesman in Beirut, Lebanon, refused to comment on any role for his organization.
However, Ibrahim al-Ameen, a Lebanese newspaper editor close to Hezbollah, said in a recent interview in Beirut that Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, spends several hours daily dealing with "the situation in Iraq."
Nasrallah, who studied Shiite theology in Iraq, spoke at length about Iraqi "resistance" during a speech last May that analysts believed was aimed at bolstering his image as a godfather of Arab opposition to the United States and Israel throughout the Middle East.
Beside its alleged role in Iraq, Hezbollah is known to have ties to the Palestinian militant Hamas group. The charismatic Nasrallah has become a sort of folk hero in the mostly Sunni Arab world after his guerrillas fought Israeli forces to a standstill in a 34-day war in 2006.
A senior Western diplomat based in the Middle East said his government has information suggesting a growing Hezbollah interest in events in Iraq. However, the diplomat would say no more and insisted on anonymity because the subject is so sensitive.
Hezbollah's possible role in direct attacks against U.S.-led forces is murkier and more explosive.
The two Iraqi lawmakers said Hezbollah operatives planned and supervised both the Karbala attack and the brazen daylight kidnapping of five British nationals from a Finance Ministry compound in Baghdad in May 2007. The Britons are still being held.
In the Karbala attack, English-speaking militants wearing American uniforms and carrying American weapons stormed the compound, killing one U.S. soldier and abducting four. The four were later found dead.
A senior Mahdi Army commander in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, said Hezbollah's operations in Iraq had been supervised by Imad Mughniyeh, a top commander of the guerrilla group killed in a car bomb in Syria last February.
The shadowy figure was suspected of a role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and the 1992 attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
A few lessons to learn from the above:
1: This is going to sound like propaganda for Muslim Nazi Amalekites, but we need to face it and deal accordingly:
the ragtag militia Hezbollah is a superior military force--in training, skill, and most of all toughness--to the regular forces of both the United States and Israel. With its fighters trained in killing Jews since nearly infancy and having grown up having had a lot less under much worse circumstances (I guarantee you the average Lebanese Muslim Nazi terrorist gets a lot less to eat in his mess hall than IDF troops, has nonexistent medical care either for regular illnesses or injuries sustained in training or combat, and faces a far more brutal, unforgiving training regimen in the desert), Hezbollah simply outclasses the politically-correct, brainwashed, feminized excuse that passes for the front-line military of the the IDF and the United States alike. Hezbollah suffered no losses in its spectacular daylight raid in January 2007 in Karbala; its infamous nighttime kidnapping operation in northern Israel two years ago claimed the lives of eight Jewish soldiers in exchange for the loss of one Hezbollah murderer. In the subsequent disastrous "counteroffensive" that Olmert launched, more Israeli soldiers died than frontline Hezbollah guerrilas.
Obviously Western/Israeli militaries still have a numerical and heavy-weaponry edge over Hezbollah, rendering their man-for-man foot-soldier advantage somewhat moot, but that fact is made moot by America and Israel's refusal to harm Islamic "civilians". If the IAF was not willing to destroy Hezbollah's infrastructure even as hundreds of missiles were falling on the northern half of Israel each day, don't count on the USAF ever getting the moxie to properly punish those murdering our own soldiers--certainly not under Barack Osama, who outright sympathizes with the Iraqi Nazis, or "Hanoi John" McCain, the piece of garbage who called our soldiers "torturers" during Abu Ghraib and stood with his friend Hanoi John Fairy when he was calling Vietnam vets baby-killers during his nauseating Sodomite rallies with Jane Fonda in the early '70s.
Why is Hezbollah man-for-man a better, tougher force than the Israelis or Americans? There are many factors, such as the deplorable program that rolled back military readiness in Israel that was started under the Labor pig Ehud Barak, but primarily it is spiritual and psychological. Hezbollah terrorists know what they are fighting for, are 100% convinced of the righteousness of their Nazi cause, and are always willing to die not only for fellow soldiers, but for their mission itself. For example, a Hezbollah fighter "foolishly" runs right in front of a Merkava tank so that he can get his shoulder-fired missile off at point-blank range; he is killed by flank fire in the process, but not before taking out the lives of four Israeli soldiers. Those kinds of "suicidal" combat moves not only turn out to be enormously successful, but drive an enormous psychological knife through the heart of the enemy. Such "craziness" completely unglues the vast majority of sanitized, modern Western infantrymen and tank crews.
Secularized, brainwashed ("Muslims are our friends, they are not terrorists, we need to respect them and their holy book"), materialistic, morally/spiritually empty conscripts are no match for a military that is filled with fanatical zeal and conviction. Most Israeli soldiers have no clue why they are protecting their country; most are totally secular, and some are far from sure that they are even the "good guys". That wishy-washiness out on the battlefield will always spell doom.
2: "Christian" Arabs are every bit as committed to our extermination as their Islamic brothers and sisters. It does not matter how persecuted they are by their Muslim countrymen in their own lands; when push comes to shove they are always Arabs. Lebanese Maronites sustained a brutal civil war and genocide at the hands of Lebanese Muslims and its surrogates in the PLO; still, to this day, they are fanatically pro-Hezbollah and want to see Israel wiped off the map. Lisa is correct when she states that we must not hold back against any anti-Semites, regardless of what religion they claim. 99% of "Christian" Arabs are pure Amalek and are Muslims in everything but name. If anyone doubts me, and thinks they have to be pro-Hezbollah because of fear for their lives, why do most Christian Arabs in America (a small minority like Joseph Farah notwithstanding) continue to preach against Jews and defend Islam--where they have no reason to be in fear and have total freedom of speech?
Chaimfan.
Topic: Hezbollah, Iran Actively Fighting U.S. Forces in Iraq (Read 1300 times)