Delegation to Iran seeks to cut arms pipeline to militias, Iraq says

BAGHDAD – Iraq has sent senior Shiite Muslim leaders to Tehran to discuss new evidence that Iranian security services are providing weapons and training to militiamen locked in a deadly showdown with U.S. and Iraqi forces, officials said today.

A delegation from Iraq’s governing Shiite alliance traveled to Iran on Wednesday to meet with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other ranking Iranian officials, said a senior advisor and two other politicians with close ties to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.

“The point is to press home the importance of Iran … cooperating with the Iraqi government and not dealing with any other illegal militias or factions outside the government,” said Maliki’s aide, Haider Abadi. “We are looking for good, neighborly relations with Iran, but it cannot go on like this.”

U.S. officials have been charging for months that Iran is arming, funding, training and directing “special group” cells they blame for some of the most lethal attacks against American troops in Iraq.

Neither U.S. nor Iraqi officials have shared the evidence with the media. But they say it includes large caches of Iranian weapons with markings from 2008, found during a recent crackdown against Shiite militias in the southern oil hub of Basra.

Iran denies it is helping Iraqi militants and has expressed support for the crackdown. An Iranian official today confirmed the arrival of the Iraqi delegation.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran, in order to settle the disputes between the factions in Iraq, receives this delegation and wants to stop the violence in Iraq,” Mohammad Ali Hosseini, spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, told The Times in a telephone interview.

Shiites dominate both countries, and Iran’s Islamic government has ties with Shiite factions on both sides of the current fighting in Iraq.

The crackdown, which began in Basra on March 25, triggered a fierce backlash from militiamen loyal to hard-line Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, who also is now in Iran.

Fighting in the southern city dropped significantly when Sadr ordered his followers off the streets five days later, after senior Shiite leaders visited him in Iran. But fierce clashes continue in and around the cleric’s Baghdad stronghold, the vast Shiite district known as Sadr City.

Sadr’s spokesman in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, Sheik Salah Obeidi, said the cleric would not meet this time with the delegation from Iraq. Sadr has instructed his representatives to deal only with a mediation effort spearheaded by Iraq’s Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, and parliament representatives, Obeidi said.

Members of the Shiite alliance said the delegation is led by the deputy parliament speaker, Khalid Attiya. Also on the team are Tariq Abdullah, Maliki’s office manager; Ali Adeeb, a senior member of the prime minister’s Islamic Dawa Party; and Hadi Ameri, from the largest party in Maliki’s coalition, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council.

The delegation plans to meet with Iranian foreign affairs officials, as well as Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, head of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, which U.S. officials accuse of providing direction and support to Iraqi militiamen. They also want to make their case to Khamenei.

“There is a huge doubt in our mind as to whether the supreme leader is aware of the money and the equipment and the training that is coming into Iraq and the extent of it,” said Abadi, Maliki’s advisor.

alexandra.zavis@latimes.com

Special correspondents Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf and Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran, contributed to this report.