WASHINGTON, March 14: US President George Bush, stepping up a war of words with Iran, accused it of contributing to ever-deadlier roadside bombs used against US-led forces and civilians in Iraq.

“Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to build improvised explosive devices in Iraq,” the US president said on Monday.

Mr Bush said that support for terrorism and international suspicions that Tehran seeks nuclear weapons were ‘increasingly isolating’ it and promised ‘America will continue to rally the world to confront these threats’.

Asked about the alleged linkage to Shia forces, two US officials pointed to previously reported ties between the government of Iran and radical Iraqi leader Moqtada Sadr.

Mr Bush’s charge came as he launched a public relations campaign to revive support for the war he launched three years ago, with polls showing the US public sour on his handling of the conflict and seeking a quick withdrawal.

Some 2,300 US troops have been killed, thousands more wounded or maimed, and the conflict has cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

Even some of the most prominent conservative backers of the March 2003 invasion have questioned whether the United States can achieve victory amid deepening fears that sectarian violence in Iraq will flare up into civil war.

“I wish I could tell you that the violence is waning and that the road ahead will be smooth. It will not,” he said. “We will see more images of chaos and carnage in the days and months to come.”

At the same time, as he has in the past, Mr Bush rejected calls to set a timetable for bringing home the roughly 130,000 US troops in Iraq and pleaded for patience from the sceptical public.

“We will not lose our nerve,” said the president. “The battle lines in Iraq are clearly drawn for the world to see, and there is no middle ground. The enemy will emerge from Iraq one of two ways: emboldened or defeated.”

Mr Bush also declared that the United States has a strategy for dealing with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) like roadside bombs, a weapon of choice for guerillas targeting US and Iraqi forces.

Military intelligence sources have said that increasingly powerful IEDs, with greater armour-piercing power and sophisticated triggers, have been traced to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, or to Hezbollah.

Mr Bush said there was ‘evidence’ that some components in the most powerful IEDs came from Iran, and that Western forces had ‘seized IEDs and components that were clearly produced in Iran’.

Last week, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld directly accused Iran for the first time of sending Revolutionary Guard into Iraq to make trouble.

Mr Bush on Monday renewed sanctions barring US firms and citizens from oil dealings with Iran, citing an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat’ from Tehran.

Although he has rejected ‘artificial timetables’ for a US withdrawal, Mr Bush said he wanted ‘the Iraqis (to) control more territory than the coalition by the end of 2006’. —AFP