In interviews with The Sunday Times, Taliban commanders have revealed that hundreds of insurgents have been trained in Iran to kill NATO forces in Afghanistan. The commanders said they had learnt to mount complex ambushes and lay improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have caused most of the deaths of British troops in Helmand province. The accounts of the two commanders are the first descriptions of training of the Taliban in Iran. According to the commanders, Iranian officials paid them to attend three-month courses during the winter.
They were smuggled across the border to the city of Zahedan, in southeast Iran. In desert training camps, instructors in plain clothes provided daily exercises in live firing, attacking convoys and planting IEDs in sequence so that the rescuers of soldiers wounded in one blast would be caught in further explosions.
Local mediators persuaded the commanders to travel to Kabul to tell their stories. They were interviewed on separate occasions on the edge of the city.
Western officials troubled by growing Iranian support for the Taliban describe the accounts as credible. Karl Eikenberry, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, recently described signs of co-operation between Iran and the Taliban as disturbing. “Iran or elements within Iran have provided training assistance and some weapons to the Taliban,” he said.
President Ahmadinejad has publicly backed his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai. But American and British officials have accused Iran of playing a double game by giving covert backing to the Taliban.
Shi’ite Iran had long opposed the Sunni-dominated Taliban. The reason for the change was summarised by one Taliban commander who said of the Iranians: “Our religions and our histories are different but our target is the same. We both want to kill Americans.”

source: Times Online

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