Iran, Hezbollah training Iraqi militias, interrogators find

Declassified pages detail accounts made by prisoners

WASHINGTON - They wake before dawn, with time to exercise, eat, and pray before the day's first class in firing Kalashnikov rifles.

Over the next eight hours, they practice using bazookas or laying roadside bombs, with a break for lunch and mandatory religious instruction.

There is free time in the evening to watch television or play ping-pong. Lights are out at 11 p.m.

Such is a typical day at a dusty military base outside Tehran, where for the past several years members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force and Lebanese Hezbollah operatives have trained Iraqi Shi'ites to launch attacks against American forces in Iraq, according to accounts given to American interrogators by captured Iraqi fighters.

American officials have long cited Iranian training and weapons as reasons for the lethality of attacks by Shi'ite fighters in Iraq. Iranian officials deny that such training takes place.

Now, more than 80 pages of newly declassified intelligence documents for the first time describe in detail an elaborate network used by Iraqis to gain entry into Iran and train under Iranian supervision.

They offer the most comprehensive account to date to support American assertions about Iranian efforts to build a proxy force in Iraq. Those assertions have become highly politicized, with Bush administration critics alleging that accounts of Iranian involvement have been exaggerated.

The prisoners' accounts cannot be independently verified. Yet the detainees gave strikingly similar details about training compounds in Iran, a clandestine network of safe houses in Iran and Iraq they used to reach the camps, and intra-Shi'ite tensions at the camps between the Arab Iraqis and their Persian Iranian trainers.

Although attacks on Americans by Shi'ite militias have greatly decreased this year, military and intelligence officials said there was evidence that the militias, sometimes referred to as "special groups," were returning to Iraq to disrupt coming elections and intimidate residents. Major General Jeffery W. Hammond, the commander of American forces in Baghdad, said recently that he believed some militia fighters had returned to the capital in recent weeks.

The documents, compiled by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, are a collection of interrogation reports based on accounts of more than two dozen Shi'ite fighters captured in Iraq in 2007 and 2008. The center is a research organization that compiles and analyzes intelligence documents related to Al Qaeda, Iraq, Iran, and other topics.

The documents portray an Iranian strategy to use Iraqi Shi'ites as surrogates, in part to avoid the risk of Iranians being captured in Iraq. In one of the intelligence reports, a prisoner tells his captors that "Iran does not want to fight a direct war" with American forces in Iraq because Tehran worries that the United States would destroy Iran.

American intelligence officials say they believe that since a handful of Iranian Revolutionary Guard operatives were captured in Baghdad in 2006, Iran shifted its strategy to bringing small groups of Iraqis into Iran. The Iraqis are then sent back to their country to train larger cadres of Shi'ite militants.

One senior American intelligence official said there were indications that the training programs in Iran might have significantly expanded this year to accommodate the scores of Iraqi militia fighters who fled Iraq during the Iraqi military's campaigns in Basra and Baghdad.

Brian Fishman, director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center and a coauthor of a new study about Iran's political and military influence in Iraq, said that even though Iran was not in direct command of militia groups in Iraq, the training was one of the means at Iran's disposal to increase or decrease its influence in Iraq at will.

"Having the militia allies is a hedge," he said. "If things turn against Iran politically, it gives them a lever to pull."

American officials say it is still murky just how much of a direct role senior Iranian officials take in the training, although they say they believe that it takes place with at least the tacit approval of elements of Iran's government. The documents do not provide any direct evidence of senior Iranian government officials overseeing the training.

The new Iran study, written by Fishman and Colonel Joseph H. Felter, concludes that Iran aims to attack American troops in Iraq in part to show off its own abilities and to "demonstrate a credible deterrent against a US strike on Iran's nuclear facilities."

The captives gave detailed descriptions of daily routines in the Iranian camps, from the intensity of weapons training to the more mundane complaints of military life.

The documents also reveal deep ethnic fissures between Iranian and Iraqi Shi'ites. The Iraqis complained that their Iranian trainers made disparaging remarks about Moqtada al-Sadr, the Iraqi Shi'ite cleric.