By day Ahmed works for an Iraqi security company. By night the stocky 30-year-old fights the "American occupier" in his Baghdad neighbourhood. Ahmed admits he is a member of what the US military terms "Special Groups" -- secret cells it says wage acts of "terrorism" in Iraq with the financial and military backing of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards units.
"Our mission," Ahmed tells AFP during a discreet interview in a Baghdad hotel car park: "Kill the Americans, as many Americans as possible." He says he is proud to have been chosen, along with other fighters from his district of Bayaa, to do a one-month course on explosives and guerrilla tactics.
"I still don't know where I'll be sent. This will be communicated to me at the last minute," he says while fidgeting nervously with a string of black prayer beads. "The best go to Lebanon, to be trained by Hezbollah, or to Iran in camps controlled by the Quds Force," the covert operations arm of the Revolutionary Guards. "Others go to camps in the (mainly Shiite) south of Iraq," where they are trained by Iraqi, Lebanese and Iranian instructors.
According to Ahmed, whose claims could not be independently verified, most members of the Special Groups are drawn from Iraq's main militia, the Mahdi Army of radical anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
"Our chiefs are in regular contact with the leadership" of the Mahdi Army but "each acts independently," he says. The US military has identified the Special Groups, which they say are fighting a proxy war for Iran, as a long-term threat. Tehran continually denies it is training or funding militants to fight in Iraq. Son of a Shiite father and a Sunni mother, Ahmed says he is himself "not very religious."
His group of around 50 fighters can mobilise in minutes by means of coded phone calls. All have a trade, none is engaged in high-profile political activity, and unlike other militia groups, they operate as discretely as possible.
"Our numbers are limited to avoid spies. All are co-opted. It is preferable to have fought at Najaf in 2004 (when the Mahdi Army clashed bloodily with the US military), to live and to be known in the district, and especially to be cleared by the chief of the sector," says Ahmed. Ahmed claims his group never targets Iraqi civilians, saying that if they do kill a civilian, they themselves face execution by their own chiefs.
Sunni insurgents, too, are not in the line of fire. "After all, one of our military commanders, Azhar Dulaimi (killed on May 19 by US troops), was a Sunni." But the Americans certainly are targets, and the Bayaa group has a heavy arsenal of weaponry available for use against them. These range from light weapons to rocket launchers and heavy-duty hand grenades, mostly of Iranian or Russian origin.
Their most powerful weapons are bombs, improvised explosive devices and deadly Explosively Formed Penetrators -- which propel at high velocity a white-hot slug of molten copper that can slice through the armoured skins of US military vehicles. The IEDs and EFPs arrive "already assembled thanks to our Iranian contacts," says Ahmed.
The Bayaa Special Group's best-known hit was against a Stryker, an imposing armoured vehicle used for transporting US infantry troops. "The Americans came each day to patrol the same area," says Ahmed. "We buried an IED where they usually parked their vehicles. We saw three killed, but they acknowledged only one of them."
US military spokesman Major Winfield Danielson told AFP that between 20 and 60 Iraqis at a time are being trained in Iran by Quds Force operatives. "The Quds Force and Lebanese Hezbollah train the Special Groups to operate rockets and mortars, conduct sniper operations, IEDs including EFPs, intelligence gathering and kidnapping. We know this from the Special Groups members we have captured," Danielson said.
Last month, Major General Rick Lynch, commander of US forces in central Iraq, told reporters that around 50 Quds Force members are inside Iraq and training extremists to launch attacks on US and Iraqi security forces.
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