Despite the recent spotlight on Iran, U.S. officials say the majority of weapons used by Sunni and Shiite extremists have been in this country for years and were looted from Iraqi military arsenals after the fall of Saddam in April 2003.
About 30 percent of the insurgent weapons found here in Diyala province date back to the Iran-Iraq war, said Maj. Suzanne MacDonald, an intelligence officer with the 1st Cavalry Division's 3rd Brigade.
They include not only mines planted along the Iranian border but also weapons caches buried by the Iraqi military decades ago in a labyrinth of clay dunes and stone outcroppings, said MacDonald, 38.
"Terrorists go and collect those weapons � land mines and mortars � that are left from the Iran-Iraq war," said Gen. Nazim Shareef Muhamed, a former Kurdish guerrilla fighter who heads the Iraqi Department of Border Enforcement in Khanaqin.
It is easier for locals, who have farmed this difficult terrain for generations, to find the buried weaponry, said Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq.
They "don't need night vision technology" to locate it, Mixon said. The Iraqis then presumably remove the detonators before transporting the mines for sale to insurgents.
Those recycled weapons have been used against U.S. and Iraqi forces across a wide area of eastern Iraq.
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Just as I posted the above, I saw this: Most Iraq casualties come from IEDs in ambushes, not gunfire in firefights
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