So, do you think the American anti-war fringe is going to claim that the Brits are lying about Iranian involvement in Iraq, too?
A missile which brought down an RAF Lynx helicopter and killed five British Service personnel was smuggled into Iraq by Iranian agents, an official inquiry into the attack will reveal.
The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that a British Army Board of Inquiry (BOI) into the events surrounding last May’s attack will state that the weapon, a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile known as an SA14 Strella, came from Iran.
The attack, which was also responsible for the death of Flt Lt Sarah Mulvihill, the first British servicewoman to be killed on active service since the Second World War, appears to provide further evidence of Iran’s direct involvement in the deaths of British troops serving in Iraq.
[…] Although the weapon is cheap to produce and easy to assemble, operators need some skill to use it effectively, suggesting that the missile was fired either by an Iranian agent or by someone who had been trained by a skilled soldier.
[…] The Lynx Mark 7 was travelling low over central Basra on a sortie to familiarise Wg Cdr Coxen with the dangers that his pilots might face. Although it was believed at first that the helicopter had been brought down by a “lucky hit” from a rocket-propelled grenade, British troops found discarded missile parts in a nearby building after the incident.
The Iranians are at war with us, and have been since 1979. Time to stop pretending that they’re not.