WASHINGTON - When the U.S. military command accused the Iranian Quds Force last January of providing the armour-piercing EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) that were killing U.S. troops, it knew that Iraqi machine shops had been producing their own EFPs for years, a review of the historical record of evidence on EFPs in Iraq shows.
British and U.S. officials observed from the beginning that the EFPs being used in Iraq closely resembled the ones used by Hezbollah against Israeli forces in Southern Lebanon, both in their design and the techniques for using them.
U.S. intelligence also knew that Hezbollah was conducting the training of Mahdi army militants on EFPs. In August 2005, Newsday published a report from correspondent Mohammed Bazzi that Shiite fighters had begun in early 2005 to copy Hezbollah techniques for building the bombs, as well as for carrying out roadside ambushes, citing both Iraqi and Lebanese officials.
The earliest EFPs appearing in Iraq in 2004 were so professionally made that they were probably constructed by Hezbollah specialists, according to a detailed account by British expert Michael Knights in Jane’s Intelligence Review last year.
By late 2005, however, the British command had already found clear evidence that the Iraqi Shiites themselves were manufacturing their own EFPs. British Army Major General J. B. Dutton told reporters in November 2005 that the bombs were of varying degrees of sophistication.
After British convoys in Maysan province were attacked by a series of EFP bombings in late May 2006, Knights recounts, British forces discovered a factory making them in Majar al-Kabir north of Basra in June.
Then U.S. troops began finding EFP factories. Journalist Andrew Cockburn reported in the Los Angeles Times in mid-February that U.S. troops had raided a Baghdad machine shop in November 2006 and discovered “a pile of copper discs, 5 inches in diameter, stamped out as part of what was clearly an ongoing order”.
In a report on Feb. 23, NBC Baghdad correspondent Jane Arraf quoted “senior military officials” as saying that U.S. forces had “have been finding an increasing number of the advanced roadside bombs being not just assembled but manufactured in machine shops here.”
On Feb. 23, NBC’s Arraf confronted Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, who had been out in front in January promoting the new Iranian EFP line, with the information she had obtained from other senior military officials that an increasing number of machine stops manufacturing EFPs had been discovered by U.S. troops.
Odierno began to walk the Iranian EFP story back. He said the EFPs had “started to come from Iran”, but he admitted “some of the technologies” were “probably being constructed here”.
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