By MICHAEL R. GORDON and ANDREW W. LEHREN

On December 22, 2006, American military officials in Baghdad issued a secret warning: The Shiite militia commander who had orchestrated the kidnapping of officials from Iraq’s Ministry of Higher Education was now hatching plans to take American soldiers hostage.

Intelligence reports said Azhar al-Dulaimi “reportedly obtained his training from Hizballah operatives near Qum, Iran, who were under the supervision of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force (IRGC-QF) officers in July 2006,” the report noted .


Five months later, Mr. Dulaimi was tracked down and killed in an American raid in the sprawling Shiite enclave of Sadr City in Baghdad - but not before four American soldiers had been abducted from an Iraqi headquarters in Karbala and executed in an operation that American military officials say literally bore Mr. Dulaimi’s fingerprints.

Scores of documents made public by WikiLeaks provide a ground-level look at the shadow war between the United States and Iraqi militias backed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Citing the testimony of detainees, a captured militant’s diary and numerous uncovered weapons caches, among other intelligence, the field reports recount Iran’s role in providing Iraqi militia fighters with rockets, magnetic bombs that can be attached to the underside of cars, “explosively formed penetrators,” or E.F.P.’s, which are the most lethal type of roadside bomb in Iraq, and other weapons.

Those include the Misagh-1, an Iranian portable surface- to-air missile which downed an American helicopter in east Baghdad in July 2007. Iraqis went to Iran to train as snipers and saboteurs , the field reports assert, and Iran’s Quds Force collaborated with Iraqi extremists to encourage the assassination of Iraqi officials.

The reports make it clear Iranianbacked militias remained active after President Obama sought to open a diplomatic dialogue with Iran’s leaders . “I think the Iranians understand that they are not going to dominate Iraq,” Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador in Iraq from 2007 until early 2009, said, “but I think they are going to do their level best to weaken it ? to have a weak central government that is constantly off balance, that is going to have to be beseeching Iran to stop doing bad things without having the capability to compel them to stop doing bad things.

And that is an Iraq that will never again threaten Iran.” A November 27, 2005, report, issued before Iraq’s December 2005 parliamentary elections, cautioned that Iran -backed militia members in the Iraqi government were giving Iran influence over Iraqi politics. The reports also recount an array of border incidents, including a September 7, 2006, episode in which an Iranian soldier who aimed a rocket-propelled grenade launcher at an American platoon trying to leave the border area was shot dead by an American soldier .

The platoon returned to its base under fire from the Iranians even when the American soldiers were “well inside Iraqi territory,” a report noted. The reports suggest that Iraniansponsored assassinations of Iraqi officials became a serious worry. On March 27, 2007 a report said Iranian intelligence agents within the Badr Corps and Jaish al-Mahdi, two Shiite militias, “have recently been influencing attacks on ministry officials in Iraq.” O fficials at the Ministry of Industry were high on the target list. “The desired effect of these attacks is not to simply kill the Ministry of Industry Officials,” the report noted, but also “to show the world, and especially the Arab world, that the Baghdad Security Plan has failed to bring stability,” referring to the troop increase that General David H. Petraeus was overseeing .

The provision of Iranian rockets, mortars and bombs to Shiite militants has also been a major concern. A November 22, 2005, report recounted an effort by the Iraqi border police to stop the smuggling of weapons from Iran, which “recovered a quantity of bombmaking equipment, including explosively formed projectiles ” capable of blasting a metal projectile through the door of an armored Humvee.

A Shiite militant from the Jaish al- Mahdi militia, also known as the Mahdi Army, was planning to carry out a mortar attack on the Green Zone in Baghdad, using rockets and mortar shells shipped by the Quds Force, according to a report on December 1, 2006. A June 25, 2009, report about an especially bloody E.F.P. attack that wounded 10 American soldiers noted that the militants used tactics “being employed by trained violent extremist members that have returned from Iran.” An intelligence analysis of a December 31, 2009, attack on the Green Zone using 107-millimeter rockets concluded that it was carried out by the Baghdad branch of Kataib Hezbollah, a militant Shiite group that American intelligence has long believed is supported by Iran. According to the report, a technical expert from Kataib Hezbollah met before the attack with a “weapons facilitator” who “reportedly traveled to Iran, possibility to facilitate the attacks on 31 Dec.”

That same month, American Special Operations forces and a specially trained Iraqi police unit mounted a raid that snared an Iraqi militant near Basra who had been trained in Iran. A December 19, 2009, report stated that the detainee was involved in smuggling “sticky bombs”? explosives that are attached magnetically to the underside of vehicles ? into Iraq and was “suspected of collecting information on CF [coalition forces] and passing them to Iranian intelligence agents.


American soldiers in Baghdad display a large cache of armor-piercing bombs of a type that Iran has reportedly smuggled to Shiite militias.


A kidnapping of U.S. soldiers in Karbala ended with four dying.