Those officials spread out on two small tables during a news briefing an array of mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades with visible serial numbers that the officials said link the weapons directly to Iranian arms factories. But by far the most potent item on display was a squat canister designed to explode and spit out a molten ball of copper that cuts through armor. That bomb is perhaps the most feared weapon faced by American and Iraqi troops here.

Never before displayed in public, the canister, called an explosively formed penetrator, or E.F.P., arrives in Iraq in what the officials described as a “kit” containing high-grade metals and highly machined parts, like a strangely shaped, concave lid that folds into the ball while hurtling toward its target.

The officials, who insisted on anonymity as a condition of the briefing, also disclosed that since June 2004, when the first member of the American-led forces here was killed by an E.F.P., the toll had reached more than 170 dead and 620 wounded. The pace of the attacks with those weapons nearly doubled in 2006 compared with the previous year and a half, the officials said.

They said that at least one shipment of E.F.P.’s was captured as it was being smuggled across the border from Iran into southern Iraq in 2005. The precise machining, the officials said, is another feature that links the weapons to Iran. “We have no evidence that this has ever been done in Iraq,” a senior United States military official said.

The officials also gave fresh details on recent American raids in Baghdad and the northern city of Erbil in which they said members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, or the Qods Force, were picked up and accused of working with extremist groups to plan attacks on American and Iraqi forces.

Because the elite Qods Force is involved, a senior military analyst said, the American intelligence community believes that the weapons shipments have been approved at “the highest levels of the Iranian government.” Still, no direct evidence was presented of how the intelligence community has made that link.

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