US launches fresh accusations at Iran over Iraq

BAGHDAD: The US military in Iraq displayed more weapons it said were made in Iran and alleged on Wednesday militants were being taught in the Islamic Republic how to use roadside bombs.   

US military spokesman Major-General William Caldwell showed the weapons to journalists in Baghdad. They included mortar rounds and rocket-propelled grenades, which he said had been found at a house and in a car in Baghdad this week.   

Iran has stepped up pressure on Baghdad's government to secure the release of five Iranians being held by US forces. It is threatening 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 United States accuses Tehran of trying to destabilise Iraq and says Iranian-made weapons are increasingly being used in attacks on US troops in Iraq. Iran denies the accusations.   

"The death and violence in Iraq are bad enough without this outside interference. Iran and all of Iraq's neighbours really need to respect Iraq's sovereignty," Caldwell said.   

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

Caldwell said training was taking place in Iran on how to use explosively formed projectiles (EFPs), a particularly lethal roadside bomb that has killed a number of American soldiers.   

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 was trying to hide its own failure in Iraq by blaming others.   

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 United States. 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 about 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 witnessing 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.   

"The suffering that Iraqi men, women and children are enduring today is unbearable and unacceptable," Pierre Kraehenbuehl, director of operations for the ICRC, told a news conference in Geneva.   

Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died in spiralling violence between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunnis, once-dominant under Saddam Hussein. US and Iraqi forces have launched a major crackdown in Baghdad, epicentre of the bloodshed.   

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

Releasing new details, Caldwell said a total of 14 gunmen and four Iraqi soldiers were killed, 16 US soldiers wounded and four attack helicopters hit and forced to return to base.   

The political movement of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a sizeable bloc in parliament, again threatened to pull out of government unless a timetable was set for a US troop withdrawal. Maliki said on Tuesday he was opposed to this.