Early reports suggest that in his testimony to a congressional committee today, General David Petraeus will claim that the Iranians assisted the Mahdi Army militia to fight the forces of Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki in the recent week-long battle in Basra.
What happened in Basra and the Sadr City district of Baghdad recently had less to do with Maliki's claim to disarm "rogue" militias than his strategic objective to squash the Sadrist movement as a political force during the run-up to the provincial and local elections on 1 October.
"Before they were three provinces – Baghdad, Mosul and Basra.
That was also true of the militia of the Islamic Fadhila ("Virtue") Party, which controls the Basra port from where oil is exported.
Judges described their report of the 'honour' killing in Basra of 17-year-old Rand Abdel-Qader as "an extraordinary piece of journalism of a shocking nature".
So why did the Iranians assist the Mahdi Army militia at a tactical command level against the forces of Maliki in Basra, if they did?
Two bombs killed at least 15 people in the southern Shia-dominated town of Basra on the same day, while 12 Iranian pilgrims were killed by another bomb north of Baghdad.
A hospital in Basra, miserably short of all its imported supplies, says that even its blood-bank (presumably not imported) has been empty for the past six days.As one unemployed scientist puts it, "Life is very, very bad".
Attacks in the past week stretched from north of Baghdad, the capital, to the normally calm southern city of Basra, killing more than 200 people.
It certainly does not lay claim, as dreamers of a unified Greater Kurdistan do, to a fantastical spur of land that would jut across south-eastern Turkey and northern Syria to reach the Mediterranean, plus another tongue of territory stretching south-eastwards to let Kurds dip their toes in the Persian Gulf beyond Basra.
The invasion of Iraq was sullied by manipulated intelligence, bad planning, human-rights abuses and, for Britain, the hurtful idea that its army underperformed in Basra.
