IRA veterans aid NIreland dissidents, report says

Irish Republican Army dissidents are posing their greatest security threat in Northern Ireland since the province's peace accord 11 years ago - and are receiving help from a handful of IRA veterans in plotting gun and bomb attacks, an expert panel found Wednesday.

The Independent Monitoring Commission, which reports regularly on the underground activities of Northern Ireland's myriad paramilitary groups, said dissidents backed by a "small number" of mainstream IRA members are responsible for a surge in violence since March.

These include shooting to death two British soldiers and a policeman; several failed attempts to kill security-force members with bombs in vehicles and on roadsides; and shooting 20 people non-fatally in a campaign to deter civilians - particularly within the IRA's Catholic power bases - from cooperating with the security forces.

The surge in dissident activity seeks to undermine Northern Ireland's power-sharing government of British Protestants and Irish Catholics at a critical juncture in their uneasy 2 1/2-year-old coalition.

The dissidents hope to sow division between Protestants and Sinn Fein, the IRA-linked party that represents the Catholic minority, and sabotage Britain's hopes of transferring its control of the Northern Ireland justice system to local hands by the end of this year.

Dissident IRA violence "is an attack on the peaceful political approach adopted by Sinn Fein and is designed to affect policing and to raise public fears about security," the experts said.

The experts, who include former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency director Richard Kerr and former Scotland Yard anti-terror chief John Grieve, have filed reports on paramilitary violence to the British and Irish governments since 2003.

They said the two major splinter groups, the Real IRA and Continuity IRA, both have pursued heightened levels of recruitment, training and weapons smuggling from March to August, the period scrutinized in their report. "The seriousness, range and tempo of their activities all changed for the worse in these six months," they wrote.

But they said the biggest new threat came from experienced veterans of the main IRA faction, the Provisionals, who have been giving the dissidents technical and tactical help in defiance of their group's 2005 decision to renounce violence and disarm.

"The majority of new recruits are inexperienced young males," the commission said. "There are however now indications that former republican terrorists have, as individuals, provided services in some instances to dissident republican groups, which even if occasional can significantly add to the threat."

The experts emphasized, however, that Provisional IRA leaders were focused on keeping rank-and-file veterans in line and identifying members collaborating with the breakaway factions.

The IRA killed about 1,775 people, including 300 police officers, during its failed 1970-1997 campaign to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom. The dissidents have failed to mount anything close to that relentless campaign of violence in the years since 1998, when Sinn Fein leaders accepted the U.S.-brokered Good Friday peace accord that envisioned power-sharing as the best way to promote compromise and reconciliation.

Four months after that landmark pact, the Real IRA committed the deadliest bombing of the entire Northern Ireland conflict: the car-bomb attack on Omagh that killed 28 people, mostly women and children. It has killed only a handful of people since.

Wednesday's report said the Real IRA and its Continuity IRA rivals have increasingly cooperated when planning attacks on the police since mid-2008. The experts said both factions specifically were training members in the manufacture and use of explosives.

They said the best strategy for isolating the dissidents would be to transfer responsibility for Northern Ireland's justice system from Britain to the power-sharing coalition in Belfast. Sinn Fein and the governments of Britain, Ireland and United States all support the move but Protestant leaders are blocking it.

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On the Net:

Report, http://tinyurl.com/yjbfvpe