Questions Linger on Scope of Iran’s Threat in Iraq

WASHINGTON — The United States has gathered its most detailed evidence so far of Iranian involvement in training and arming fighters in Iraq, officials say, but significant uncertainties remain about the extent of that involvement and the threat it poses to American and Iraqi forces. Some intelligence and administration officials said Iran seemed to have carefully calibrated its involvement in Iraq over the last year, in contrast to what President Bush and other American officials have publicly portrayed as an intensified Iranian role. It remains difficult to draw firm conclusions about the ebb and flow of Iranian arms into Iraq, and the Bush administration has not produced its most recent evidence. But interviews with more than two dozen military, intelligence and administration officials showed that while shipments of arms had continued in recent months despite an official Iranian pledge to stop the weapons flow, they had not necessarily increased. Iran, the officials said, has shifted tactics to distance itself from a direct role in Iraq since the American military captured 20 Iranian operatives inside Iraq in December 2006 and January 2007. Ten of those Iranians remain in American custody. Since then, Iran seems to have focused instead on training Iraqi Shiite fighters inside Iran, though the exact number remains unclear. Some officials said only handfuls of fighters at a time had recently trained in Iran. At the same time, Iran has sought to retain political and economic influence over a variety of Shiite factions, not just the most extremist militias, known as “special groups.” “They don’t want to be identified with activities that might be seen by the international community as illegitimate,” a senior official familiar with the intelligence about Iran said in an interview. Iran has sought to spread its influence inside Iraq not only by its support to militias, officials said, but also through legitimate economic assistance, in particular across the oil-rich Shiite south. The Iranians also support a number of Shiite parties and militias — including providing weapons to militias fighting the Shiite-led government in Baghdad as well as to militias supporting that government. For weeks, Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the top American officials in Iraq have portrayed Iran as a significant and growing threat to the American war effort in Iraq. In particular, they have cited an intensified barrage of Iranian-made rockets hitting the Green Zone in Baghdad — including attacks during a visit by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — that have killed Americans and Iraqis. None of the officials interviewed disputed the notion that Iran sought to undermine American interests in Iraq, but in recent weeks the administration has sought to emphasize the threat by citing new evidence. The interrogations of four Iraqi Shiite militia commanders, for example, have provided new details about the extent of training conducted by the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, officials said. Still, the officials offered an assessment of Iranian involvement that was more complicated and nuanced than public statements by Mr. Bush and other officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, who said at a news conference this week that “what Iranians are doing is killing American servicemen inside Iraq” by providing training and weapons to Shiite fighters. Two weeks ago, Mr. Bush cited Iran as a primary justification in his announcement that he would halt further withdrawals of American troops in Iraq after the level reaches 140,000 this summer. He said an American withdrawal “would embolden its radical leaders and fuel their ambitions to dominate the region.” At the White House, the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and the military headquarters in Baghdad, officials declined to detail publicly the extent of Iran’s support for fighters in Iraq, referring instead only in broad terms to training, equipping and financing Shiite militias. But in the wake of his briefings to Congress on April 8 and 9, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior commander, ordered his subordinates to prepare a public dossier on Iranian involvement as part of the administration’s efforts to expose Iran’s covert activities and sustain support for the war, which is increasingly unpopular at home. On Capitol Hill, General Petraeus said Iranian-backed militias could “pose the greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq.” Publication of the dossier — which includes pages of charts and photographs of seized Iranian-made weapons — has been widely expected but has now been delayed while the government of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, confronts Iran diplomatically with new evidence of Iranian assistance to Shiite militias, one of the officials said. The administration’s focus on Iran has raised alarms among the war’s staunchest critics, who accuse the White House of overstating the threat and laying the groundwork for military action against Iran. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California who has called for opening talks with Iran, said that while she believed that there was evidence that Iran was aiding Shiite militias, she worried about the tenor of the administration’s latest warnings. “This is not a new thing,” she said of Iran’s involvement. “Why all of a sudden do the sabers start to rattle?”