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Iran spent over $1 billion on meddling in Iraq: Defence Minister
Mon. 17 Jan 2005
Iran Focus

Baghdad, Jan. 17 - The Iraqi Defence Minister, Hazem al-Shaalan today accused Iran of interference, saying, "Iran has spent more than $1 billion on meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq".

In a telephone interview with the Arab language Ilaf website, al-Shaalan also accused candidates on the opposition list of Shiite figures led by Abdol Aziz Hakim as a group trying to invite sectarian and religious strife among the people of Iraq.

He blasted Ahmad Chalabi, the disgraced Iraqi opposition candidate who was discovered to be secretly passing on U.S. intelligence to the Iranian regime.

Al-Shaalan has repeatedly called Iran "Iraq's number one enemy" and consistently accused the clerical state of funding insurgent attacks against the Iraqi people.

Al-Shaalan had previously said that the reason Iraq’s interim deputy-Prime Minister, Barham Saleh, had been dispatched to Iran was to warn Iran’s leaders to halt their actions.

Over the past year, a string of Iraqi officials, including Iraq’s interim-Prime Minister, Ayad Allawi, and the interim-President Ghazi al-Yawar, have accused Iran of meddling in Iraq. In December al-Yawar accused Iran of pouring “huge amounts of money” into fundamentalist Shiite parties hoping to create an Iraqi Islamic Republic.

Separately, sources within the Iranian opposition yesterday confirmed to Iran Focus that they were able to obtain a classified document from within Iran's intelligence and security apparatus showing Iran's connections to insurgents carrying out attacks in Iraq.

The document is a report written by an Iraqi group mounting armed attacks on Iraqi civilians and U.S. and Coalition troops in Iraq. It was addressed to Revolutionary Guards Brigadier General Obeydavi, a senior commander of the Qods (Jerusalem) Force.

The Qods Force is the extra-territorial arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and oversees the Iranian regime's external military activities in Iraq.

The report described how attacks were "successfully carried out". It acknowledged that the Iraqi group was primarily mounting attacks in Baghdad and provinces to its west.

That report mentioned that the fatwa calling for the group to carry out operation in Iraq was issued in Iran's holy city of Qom.