British see no evidence of arms traffic from Iran

ON THE IRAQ-IRAN BORDER — Since late August, British commandos in the desert of far southeastern Iraq have been testing one of the most serious charges leveled by the United States against Iran: that Iran is secretly supplying weapons, parts, money and training for attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq.

A few hundred British troops living out of their Land Rovers and light armored vehicles have taken to the desert in what their officers said would be months of patrols aimed at finding any illicit weapons trafficking from Iran.

There's just one thing.

"I suspect there's nothing out there," the commander, Lt. Col. David Labouchere, said last month. "And I intend to prove it."

Britain has found nothing to support the U.S. contention that Iran is providing weapons and training in Iraq, several senior military officials said.

"I have not myself seen any evidence — and I don't think any evidence exists — of government-supported or instigated" armed support on Iran's part in Iraq, British Defense Secretary Des Browne said in late August.

"It's a question of intelligence versus evidence," Labouchere's commander, Brig. James Everard of Britain's 20th Armored Brigade, said last month. "One hears word of mouth, but one has to see it with one's own eyes."

Allegations that Iran or its agents are providing military support for Iraqi Shiite Muslim militias and other armed groups are among the issues raising tensions between Washington and Tehran. Most gravely, U.S. officials accuse Iran of providing infrared triggers for special explosives that are capable of piercing heavy armor.

Evidence of Iranian armed intervention in Iraq is "irrefutable," U.S. Brig. Gen. Michael Barbero said in August. The lead U.S. military spokesman in Iraq renews the allegation almost weekly in Baghdad.

Iraq's Maysan province is "a funnel for Iranian munitions," said Wayne White, who led the State Department's Iraq intelligence team the past few years and now is an adjunct scholar at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. White said that in the first year of the occupation, a well-placed friend saw "considerable physical evidence of it, and just about everyone in al-Amarah knew about it." Al-Amarah is a common name for Maysan province.

In Maysan, Jasim Alawa Salum, an Iraqi father of 10 whose farmhouse is near the border, agreed.

"All troubles come from Iran," he said, bending his head to show a wound from the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.

But British Maj. Dominic Roberts of the Queen's Dragoons said: "We have found no credible evidence to suggest there is weapons smuggling across the border."

Iraqi guards at one of the 27 border forts now used to guard Maysan were dismissive of talk of military support from Iran.

"It's just fabrication," said one, Haidar Hassan.

At one checkpoint, two border guards grinned awkwardly when a British patrol stopped in. No smugglers had come by, no untoward travelers, no problems, the guards said. The guards, however, come from tribes with a history of smuggling, and since the fall of Saddam Hussein, reports of border workers being bribed are up.

To determine the truth of the weapons smuggling charges, British commanders say, the British troops did something no other large conventional unit in the U.S.-led coalition has tried. They gave up their base outside Amarah, Maysan's capital.

The British spread out over a desert carpeted with shrapnel, the legacy of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war that claimed the bulk of its 1 million dead in the deserts of Maysan.

Ultimately, the British can do little more than demonstrate that the border is closed, Labouchere said. Save for that, he said, they find themselves trying "to prove a negative."

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