The night Canadian Master Corporal Darrell Priede of Brantford died in Afghanistan, the Afghan war took a sudden dangerous new twist.
A stream of secret U.S. military intelligence reports released this week by the WikiLeaks website suggests the May 2007 death was the result of a Taliban attack with a heat-seeking, surface-to-air missile launched from the shoulder.
In all likelihood, the deadly weapon was provided by Iran.
Those two facts alone may be transforming the almost nine-year-old Afghan war.
Iran has long been suspected of covertly supplying arms to the Taliban, but the WikiLeaks data dump suggests it could now be almost as crucial to the Afghan insurgency as Pakistan.
Summaries of classified U.S. military and diplomatic reports among the documents demonstrate a growing concern over Iran’s influence in Afghanistan and catalogue fears Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is waging a secret campaign to arm, train, fund and equip the Afghanistan insurgency.
