Tehran lowers hostile profile

Iran is no longer actively supplying Iraqi militias with a particularly lethal kind of roadside bomb, a decision that suggests a strategic shift by the Iranian leadership, U.S. and Iraqi authorities said Thursday.

Use of the armor-piercing explosives — known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs — has dwindled sharply in recent months, said Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, head of the Pentagon office created to counter roadside bombs in Iran and Afghanistan.

Gen. Metz estimated that U.S. forces find between 12 and 20 of the devices in Iraq each month, down from 60 to 80 earlier this year.

“Someone … has made the decision to bring them down,” Gen. Metz told reporters.

Asked whether the elite Iranian Republican Guard has made a deliberate choice to limit the use of EFPs, Gen. Metz nodded: “I think you could draw that inference from the data.”

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh agreed that Iran has curtailed its activity inside Iraq. He said he thinks Iran has concluded that a new security agreement between the U.S. and Iraq poses no threat to Iran. Tehran opposed the agreement as a blessing for foreign forces to remain in Iraq, and encouraged Iraq’s government to reject it.

The United States has long claimed that Iran or Iranian-backed groups are using Iraqi Shi’ite militias as proxies to kill U.S. troops in Iraq. Iran denies the Bush administration allegations that it supplies money and weapons, but independent analysts have said U.S. evidence is strong, if circumstantial.

Despite the drop in EFP bombs, daily violence continued in Iraq Thursday, with a suicide bomber killing 55 people in the northern city of Kirkuk.

The bomber struck as Kurdish officials and Arab tribal leaders were meeting in Kirkuk, trying to reconcile their differences over control of the oil-rich region.

The attack — the deadliest in Iraq in six months — occurred at a time of rising tension between Kurds and Arabs over oil, political power and Kirkuk.

No group took responsibility for the attack at the upscale Abdullah restaurant, which was crowded with families celebrating the end of the four-day Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha. Suicide operations are the signature attack of al Qaeda in Iraq.

Police Brig. Gen. Sarhad Qadir, who gave the casualty figures, said the dead included at least five women and three children. About 120 people were wounded.

It appeared, however, that the target was a reconciliation meeting between Arab tribal leaders and officials of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the Kurdish party of President Jalal Talabani, on ways to defuse tension among Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen in the Kirkuk area.

Iraq’s parliament exempted the Kirkuk area from next month’s provincial elections because the different ethnic groups could not agree on how to share power.