US launches fresh accusations at Iran

The US military accused Iranian intelligence services yesterday of providing weapons to militants in Iraq and said gunmen were being trained in Iran in the use of lethal roadside bombs.

US military spokesman Major-General William Caldwell showed journalists in Baghdad weapons that he said were made in Iran. They included mortar rounds and rocket-propelled grenades, which he said were found in Baghdad this week.

Iran tried to step up pressure on Baghdad's government to secure the release of five Iranians being held by US forces. It threatened to pull out of an international conference on Iraq next month, an Iranian newspaper reported.

Tehran says the five, detained in a raid in northern Iraq in January, are diplomats, but Washington accuses them of having links to Iranian Revolutionary Guard networks that it says are training Iraqi militants.

The US accuses Tehran of trying to destabilise Iraq and says Iranian-made weapons are increasingly being used in attacks in Iraq. Iran denies the accusations.

US-led forces have launched an operation in Baghdad to curb sectarian violence that threatens to erupt into civil war. Major-General Caldwell said that for the third month in a row, civilian casualties had declined in Baghdad but that in the same period there had been an increase in casualties across Iraq.

"Iranian intelligence services are active here in Iraq in terms of both providing funding and weapons and ammunition," he said, appearing to refer to help given to Shi'ite militias.

He said some aid from Iranian intelligence services was also being given to Sunni insurgents.

Iranian officials were not immediately available for comment but have dismissed similar charges made by Washington in the past. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said Washington is trying to hide its own failure in Iraq by blaming others.

Washington has hardened its rhetoric over Shi'ite Iran's alleged role in the war in Iraq and tension has been growing between the two arch-foes over Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Major-General Caldwell said training was taking place in Iran on how to use explosively formed projectiles (EFPs), a particularly lethal roadside bomb that has killed more than 170 US soldiers and has been used against US troops in Baghdad in the last week.

Iraq's Shi'ite-led government has often had to tread a delicate path in trying to maintain good relations with both fellow Shi'ite Iran and the US. It says it is working hard to secure the release of the five Iranians.

Iran, which refused to allow Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's plane to fly through its airspace on his way to Japan at the weekend, has said it is not satisfied and warned Baghdad that bilateral relations could be hurt.

World powers and Iraq's neighbours are due to attend the conference on Iraq in Cairo in the first week of May.

"We have reminded Iraqi officials that as long as the Iranian diplomats are not freed, Iran's participation at any conference about Iraq with the presence of America will face a serious problem and obstacle," Abbas Araghchi, a senior Foreign Ministry official, told Iran's hardline Kayhan daily.

The meeting is regarded as crucial to stabilising Iraq, which the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in a new report was undergoing a worsening humanitarian crisis.

It said unemployment and hardship levels were rising, thousands of Iraqis continued to be forced out of their homes, hospitals were stretched to the limit, doctors and nurses were fleeing the country and malnutrition was on the rise.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died in a rising spiral of violence between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunnis.

In the worst eruption of violence since the start of the two-month-old operation to pacify Baghdad, US and Iraqi troops fought a fierce, day-long battle with gunmen in a Sunni insurgent stronghold in central Baghdad on Tuesday.