U.S. Army says it has disrupted Iraq weapons network

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S.-led forces in southeastern Iraq have disrupted an arms-smuggling network blamed for distributing deadly Iranian-made roadside bombs and rockets in Iraq, a U.S. military officer said on Thursday.

Col. Philip Battaglia, who commands the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division, said he committed 1,800 troops or more than half his 3,500-strong force to Iraq's Maysan border province north of Basra in July.

Battaglia is also responsible for two other provinces in southeastern Iraq.

He told Pentagon reporters that his soldiers have since seized more than 8,000 weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran, including about 600 explosively formed penetrators or projectiles (EFPs) and a number of Iranian-made rockets.

EFPs, which can pierce armor, are a particularly deadly form of roadside bomb. U.S. officials have accused the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' elite Qods force of supplying those munitions as well as rockets to Shi'ite militias in Iraq for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces.

Iran has denied stoking violence in Iraq and blames turmoil there on the presence of 155,000 U.S. forces.

"Al-Amarah in the province of Maysan ... was an area where these devices were assembled and then from there shipped to other parts of the country, into Baghdad and other places," Battaglia said in a video link from Iraq.

"We believe -- we know -- that we have interrupted the flow of these explosives," he added.

Another U.S. officials who appeared with Battaglia said the province seems to be free of Shi'ite militias following an Iraqi security crackdown on militia activities in southern Iraq earlier this year.

"This is what we thought was a militia-controlled province and the militias aren't there thus far. So we're very optimistic," said Dan Foote, a State Department official who leads a U.S. reconstruction team in Maysan.

As evidence that the Maysan weapons network has been checked, Battaglia said the number of weapons caches found by his troops has begun to decline in recent weeks.

The same phenomenon has been occurring elsewhere in Iraq, according to U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, the former Iraq commander credited with saving the country from civil war.

"We think we are literally running out of safe havens and strongholds and starting to run out of these areas where there were these very significant caches," Petraeus said in a speech in Washington this week.

(Reporting by David Morgan; editing by Mohammad Zargham)