'US forces seize gang smuggling arms from Iran'

4 Iraqis Held on Suspicion of Smuggling Iranian Arms : By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, April 27 — The American military said Friday that it had detained four Iraqi men suspected of helping smuggle deadly homemade bombs from Iran to Iraq and taking guerrillas from Iraq to Iran for training. The men were detained in the morning during an operation in Sadr City, a vast Shiite neighborhood in eastern Baghdad whose residents are mostly loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. The district is the base of a powerful militia, the Mahdi Army, that Mr. Sadr founded and that rebelled twice against the Americans in 2004. The four men are suspected of helping shuttle into Iraq a deadly type of homemade bomb called an explosively formed penetrator, the military said. The men are also suspected of having ties to a kidnapping ring. The military did not provide any evidence against the men. American military officials have been saying for months that groups in Iran have supplied Shiite militias in Iraq with the bombs, which are responsible for a growing percentage of American fatalities. But American officials have not presented any evidence that ties the deadly bombs or other weapons to Iranian government officials, and Iranian diplomats have denied that Shiite-dominated Iran is playing any role in fueling the violence here. Military analysts say that most of the foreign influence in the violence is coming from Sunni Arab nations, noting that many foreign fighters from Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt have been captured in Iraq. The American military announced the capture of the four suspects in a tersely worded news release. Individuals coming into Iraq from other countries for the purpose of endangering Iraqi civilians and disrupting security won’t be tolerated,” Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman, said in the statement. “We will continue to work diligently to rid Iraq of foreign terrorists trying to thwart the development of a stable and peaceful Iraq.” The colonel later said in a telephone interview that the men were Iraqis and not foreigners. He said his written statement had been intended to address foreign influence in general, and was not meant to imply that the four detainees were foreigners. The American military is holding five Iranians whom it detained in a raid in the Kurdish capital of Erbil in January. The Americans have accused them of being intelligence officers, but the Iranian government has contended that the men are diplomats, and demanded that they be released. Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, has said that the five Iranians were working in an office that was known to the Kurdish regional government and that had applied for diplomatic status. When Iranian and American officials met in March at a regional conference held in Baghdad, Iranian diplomats demanded that the Americans free the five Iranian prisoners. The military did not say whether the four men detained Friday are linked to the Mahdi Army. Military officials have said the Mahdi Army might be splintering, with some militiamen taking orders from Iran. The American military also said Friday that three marines were killed in western Iraq in combat operations on Thursday. A detainee in Camp Bucca, an American detention center in southern Iraq, was killed Thursday in an assault by other prisoners, the military said. At least 10 people were killed or discovered dead across Iraq on Thursday and Friday, the police and hospital officials said. In an article published Friday in Armed Forces Journal, an American Army officer took the unusual step of criticizing his superiors’ handling of the Iraq war. Lt. Col. Paul Yingling wrote, “For reasons that are not yet clear, America’s general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq’s government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq.”