Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, whose command includes the volatile southern rim of Baghdad and districts to the south, said his troops are tracking about 50 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps in their area.
"We know they’re here and we target them as well," he said, citing intelligence reports as evidence of their presence.
"We’ve got about 50 of those," he said, referring to the IRGC forces. "They go back and forth. There’s a porous border."
The military has stepped up allegations against Tehran in recent weeks, saying it supplies militants with arms and training to attack U.S. forces, but Lynch’s comments were the first detailed allegation that Iranians have been training fighters within Iraq’s borders.
The Bush administration is moving toward blacklisting Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a "terrorist" organization, subjecting at least part of the entity to financial sanctions in a new move against the Islamic republic, U.S. officials said this week.
A decision has been made in principle to name elements of the corps a "specially designated global terrorist" group, but internal discussions continue over whether it should cover the entire unit or only its main military wing, the Al-Quds force.
Lynch, whose mission is to block the flow of weapons and fighters into the Baghdad area, said Sunni and Shiite extremists have become increasingly aggressive this month in a bid to influence the debate in Washington before a pivotal progress report on Iraq.
But he singled out the Shiite extremists as being behind an uptick in attacks using armor-piercing explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, which he said were largely assembled in Iraq from parts smuggled in from Iran. He also noted a marked increase in Iranian-rockets that have been increasingly effective against U.S. bases.
There has been an overall decrease in attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces, as well as civilians, south of Baghdad, but 46 percent of those were being carried out by Shiite extremists, Lynch said.
"The real difference now is we’ve got to spend as much time fighting the Shia extremists as Sunni extremists," he said.
He also expressed concern that the attacks were increasingly effective because of Iranian training. He said the Iranian’s were using remote houses and surrounding land to conduct training. He said his forces had destroyed at least one camp.
Lynch also said the military planned to erect six more checkpoints by Nov. 1 with the help of about 2,000 Georgian forces along the porous border with Iran to stop the smuggling of weapons.
He said no trucks have been caught smuggling weapons through the southern border region since the military began focusing on the area on June 20, but he expected that to change with the increase in border security.
"With the Georgians we can establish these checkpoints," he said. "We can block that Iranian influence."
He said about 1,200 people a day move through the Iran-Iraq border, most Shiite pilgrims visiting holy sites, but the Iraqi military plans to increase that number to 2,500 a day soon. He did not provide more details.