Iran Focus
The US State Department’s annual “Country Reports on Terrorism” 2009 charged that Iran’s financial, material, and logistic support for terrorist and militant groups throughout the Middle East and Central Asia had a “direct impact on international efforts to promote peace, threatened economic stability in the Gulf and undermined the growth of democracy”.
“Iran remained the principal supporter of groups that are implacably opposed to the Middle East Peace Process. The Qods Force, the external operations branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), is the regime’s primary mechanism for cultivating and supporting terrorists abroad”, the report said, adding that Iran was providing weapons, training, and funding to HAMAS and Palestine Islamic Jihad.
“Iran has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in support to Lebanese Hizballah and has trained thousands of Hizballah fighters at camps in Iran. Since the end of the 2006 Israeli-Hizballah conflict, Iran has assisted Hizballah in rearming, in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701”, it said.
The report accused Iran’s Qods Force of provided training to the Taliban in Afghanistan on small unit tactics, small arms, explosives, and indirect fire weapons. “Since at least 2006, Iran has arranged arms shipments to select Taliban members, including small arms and associated ammunition, rocket propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 107mm rockets, and plastic explosives”.
“The Qods Force continued to supply Iraqi militants with Iranian-produced advanced rockets, sniper rifles, automatic weapons, and mortars that have killed Iraqi and Coalition Forces, as well as civilians. Iran was responsible for the increased lethality of some attacks on U.S. forces by providing militants with the capability to assemble explosively formed penetrators that were designed to defeat armored vehicles”, the State Department said. “The Qods Force, in concert with Lebanese Hizballah, provided training outside of Iraq and advisors inside Iraq for Shia militants in the construction and use of sophisticated improvised explosive device technology and other advanced weaponry”.
The report pointed out that Iran’s Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi is wanted by INTERPOL for his role in the 1994 bombing of the Argentine-Jewish Mutual Association (AMIA) in Buenos Aires.
