NCRI – The news that Taliban rebels are being armed with Iranian-supplied weapons poses an added threat to the 5,000 British troops battling insurgents in southern Afghanistan, Sunday Times reported.
“I have to tell the truth. It is clear to everyone that Iran is supporting the enemy of Afghanistan, the Taliban,” Colonel Rahmatullah Safi, head of border police for western Afghanistan, told The Sunday Times.
Afghan intelligence sources believe that many deals between the Taliban and the Iranians are conducted through a drug smuggler in southern Afghanistan who acts as a middle man. He is from the minority Baluch tribe; as well as smuggling heroin through Iran to Europe, he is also believed to have bought weapons off the Iranian government and sold them on to the Taliban.
"The deadliest weapons known to cross the border are Iranian-made armour-piercing explosives. Colonel Thomas Kelly, an American under the command of Nato, said that the explosives that have been used to deadly effect in Iraq have been found recently in western Afghanistan", the report added.
“These are very sophisticated IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and they’re really not manufactured in any other place to our knowledge than Iran,” he said, adding that the explosives were factory made".
"Along with supplies of Kalashnikov assault rifles and mortars, Afghan military sources fear that the Iranians may also have supplied heat-seeking missiles", Sunday Times added.