Admiral confirms Iranians clashed with US troops in September

Admiral confirms Iranians clashed with US troops in September

A U.S. defense expert says the recent crisis over the seizure of 15 British sailors by the Iranians was just one of several incidents of Iranian incursions in recent months. Rear Admiral Mark Fox, U.S. Chief of Strategic Effects in Baghdad, recently briefed Pentagon advisor Bob Maginnis, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, and confirmed that Iraqi and U.S. forces engaged Iranian troops who had crossed the border into Iraq in September.

"An entire Iranian platoon came up and started to engage us with fire," Maginnis says. "They were firing primarily at U.S. forces, not at Iraqi forces. Unfortunately, four Iraqis were killed and an Iranian was killed, and the Iranians withdrew into their own territory," he notes.

This incident should have been big news when it happened, the defense analyst observes. "This, as far as I'm concerned, is a fairly underreported [event] but not untypical of the type of behavior we're seeing," he says, "certainly [with the Iranian] security forces and the like. And I think it's tantamount to the type of incident that took place with the 15 Britons."

Rear Admiral Fox "confirmed the incident in September ... that our forces were attacked by Iranians that were inside Iraq," Maginnis asserts. He says the U.S. Navy official is going to provide more details as they become available.

The fact that this and other such incursions have occurred "is not well known," the Pentagon advisor says, "but people on the ground know it for a fact, and it is something that is really not new."