Provisional deal in Iran N-talks

[Excerpt]
From CNN's Kasra Naji in Tehran
and Robin Oakley in London
Sunday, November 7, 2004 Posted: 1056 GMT (1856 HKT)

(CNN) -- A provisional agreement has been reached over Iran's nuclear program in talks conducted in Paris, but it must now be taken back to the capitals of Iran, Britain, Germany and France for confirmation, Iran and the EU said.

The agreement could usher in an important change in Iran's relations with Europe and much of the international community, said Iranian delegation spokesman Hussein Mousavian.

"The agreement will have to be approved at the highest levels of government," Mousavian told Iranian TV.

"My impression is that if this is approved by all four parties, we will witness an important change in Iran's relations with Europe and much of the international community in (the) not-too-distant future."

The European Union's so-called "Big Three" -- France, Germany and the United Kingdom -- have been holding their third round of talks with Iran in an effort to persuade Tehran to suspend its nuclear enrichment activities in return for improved trade and political relations.

Washington had warned Tehran that if no agreement was reached, Iran's nuclear program would be referred to the U.N. Security Council at the next meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors.

"The agreement is the outline of future cooperations between Iran and the EU in political, economic, security and confidence-building spheres," Mousavian said.

EU spokeswoman Ewa Hedlund confirmed that an agreement was reached Saturday on a "technical level," but she would not comment on details of its substance until it has the "political blessing by the governments in the four countries."

A spokesman for the French foreign ministry also confirmed the breakthrough, saying there was "considerable progress towards a provisional agreement."

Once the agreement is approved by the four capitals, expert-level talks about specific cooperation will begin.

It was not clear just how the two sides have resolved their difference over the EU demand that Iran suspend uranium enrichment activities -- something Iran has repeatedly said that it would not do for a sustained period. ...

Extremists Moving Across Iran-Iraq Border

Nov. 05, 2004

Extremists Moving Across Iran-Iraq Border

LOUIS MEIXLER/ Associated Press Writer

ANKARA, Turkey - Islamic extremists have been moving supplies and new recruits from Iran into Iraq (news - web sites), say Iraqi Kurdish and Western officials, though it's unclear whether Tehran is covertly backing them or whether militants are simply taking advantage of the porous border

Iranian involvement with extremist groups in the Iraqi insurgency would be potentially explosive, especially given the history of U.S.-Iranian animosity. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said recently Iran was engaged in "a lot of meddling" in Iraq but gave no details.

Iran, which shares a mountainous 800-mile border with Iraq, has confirmed that loyalists of the al-Qaida-linked Ansar al-Islam group illegally entered Iran from Afghanistan (news - web sites) after the start of the U.S.-led 2001 war to oust the Taliban and destroy Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s terrorist training camps. But Iran's government has repeatedly denied it is backing the radicals.

A handful of senior al-Qaida operatives who were among those fleeing to Iran after the Afghanistan war may have developed a working relationship with the Revolutionary Guards, a special military unit in Iran linked to Tehran's hard-liners, U.S. counterterrorism officials have said.

The U.S. government report on the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks also pointed to contacts between Iranian security officials and senior al-Qaida figures and found evidence that eight to 10 of the Sept. 11 hijackers passed through Iranian territory. There was, however, no evidence the Iranians knew that the hijackers were planning to attack the World Trade Center.

Iraqi officials have suggested privately that Iran, which is overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim, is backing its Shiite brethren, who form a slight majority in Iraq. One Iraqi official said more than 100 volunteer fighters have entered this year from Iran into southern Iraq, where Iran may be trying to use its influence within the dominant Shiite community there.

Iran might also support extremists from the rival Sunni branch of Islam — such as al-Qaida or the group loyal to Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — to gain influence in the Sunni community, which is powerful in central Iraq, and to destabilize U.S. efforts to control the country, some analysts say.

Brig. Sarkout Hassan Jalal, director of security in Sulaimaniyah, the largest city in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq near the Iranian border, said that Islamic militants "are smuggling recruits to Iraq from Iran ... (and) then take them to Fallujah or other hot spots."

He gave no figures for the number of people who are crossing but said the number has fallen since Kurdish security forces boosted border security in the past few months.

Another Kurdish official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press that at the start of the year, dozens of militants were crossing the mountainous, poorly patrolled border each week, but that the number had fallen sharply in the past six months.

The official said that extremists who crossed the border often headed for Mosul, the largest Arab Sunni Muslim city in the north and an area where Islamic extremist groups are powerful. He said some of the militants have repeatedly crossed back and forth, returning to Iraq with better weapons, explosives and training.

The fall in the number of people crossing could be attributed to increased Iraqi patrols or to the fact that foreign militants have recently built up better infrastructure within Iraq and now find it easier to train fighters and arm people within the country, the official said.

"There seems to be logistical and practical support," the official said. "These people flee to Iran and come back days or weeks later with better equipment."

Kurds living in mountainous villages near the border who have traveled inside Iran to visit relatives said they have seen Arabs living in what appeared to be safe houses in the Iranian border town of Mariwan.

Former Ansar prisoners held by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan — one of two Kurdish militias that control the north — have backed up the claim as have PUK intelligence officials.

A U.S. official said Kurdish security forces found passports from Arab countries including Yemen, Egypt and Saudi Arabia buried under the dirt floor in one safe house on the Iranian side of the border.

"We are not just talking about Iranians passively dealing with al-Qaida," one former U.S. official who worked in Iraq said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We are talking about al-Qaida at Revolutionary Guard bases and safe houses. This is active assistance."

The Revolutionary Guards are the shock troops of Iran's Islamic revolution, a well-funded force of 200,000 that answers to the country's Islamic leaders and not the military.

Who could be assisting the militants is sharply contested, however.

The Iranian leadership is deeply divided between moderates and hard-liners.

Hard-liners and elements of the Revolutionary Guards could be backing the insurgents with the Iranian government turning a blind eye or unable to respond, experts say. Many hard-liners are extremely fearful that the United States, which now has some 140,000 troops in bordering Iraq, could try and destabilize Iran.

"There are forces in the Revolutionary Guards who are very, very hard-line and who generally have their own foreign policy and ... are almost never held accountable for their actions," said Gary Sick, professor of international affairs at Columbia University and a former adviser to the U.S. National Security Council. "There is very serious suspicion that members of the Revolutionary Guard felt that they had something to gain from these people who were seriously trying to stir up trouble in Iraq."

Sick called it "extremely unlikely" that the Iranian government itself would sponsor and actively promote Sunni terrorist activities, though officials might want to "keep an eye on the Sunnis." He also noted the matter could simply be a border control problem.

"They have been trying for years to stop the trafficking of drugs coming across the Afghan border with zero success," Sick said.

In the past, Iran has been accused of backing Ansar al-Islam, a militant fundamentalist Kurdish group that opposed ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), as a way of destabilizing and pressuring the secular Kurdish groups that controlled northern Iraq.

Tehran, while confirming that Ansar elements might have crossed its border illegally, has denied the charges.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of pro-Taliban fighters possibly linked to al-Qaida left Afghanistan and made their way to northern Iraq, where Ansar al-Islam controlled an enclave on the Iranian-Iraqi border, U.S. intelligence reports said. Al-Zarqawi, one of the most feared terror leaders in Iraq, is believed to have had a role in running Ansar al-Islam in 2002.

Al-Zarqawi, whose group has been responsible for car bombings and beheadings, recently proclaimed his loyalty to bin Laden in a statement released on the internet.

U.S. forces attacked the Ansar al-Islam enclave at the start of the war and many of the activists reportedly fled, either into Iran or Sunni Muslim areas of Iraq, where they eventually ended up in places like Fallujah, a hotbed of violence.

Some experts doubt the Iranian government would risk supporting an extremist anti-U.S. group in Iraq and thereby provoking a reaction from Washington and more instability on their border.

"By allowing al-Qaida to go about its business several Iranian interests are served but it is an incredibly risky card to play and Iran has at times been quite cautious in Iraq," said Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution.

___

EDITORS: Associated Press writer Yahya Barazanji in northern Iraq contributed to this report.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041107/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iran_iraq_insurgency_1

Iran Gives Boost to Iraq Uprising

November 07, 2004
[Excerpt]
Thanassis Cambanis

TUWELLA, Iraq -- A dirt track winds from this Kurdish border outpost to the top of a jagged mountain ridge separating Iran from Iraq's northern Kurdish enclave. For years, and with the blessing of Iranian officials, Islamist terrorist groups have smuggled weapons and money into Iraq on this road, many Kurdish intelligence and security officials said.

When US special forces and Kurdish peshmerga fighters attacked Ansar al-Islam, an Al Qaeda affiliate, in March 2003, hundreds of its members fled to Iran, the officials said, and have regrouped in several towns just over this border.

There, they continue to train, raise funds, and plan terrorist operations in Iraq, infiltrating operatives across a porous, rocky, high-altitude border that has long been a haven for smugglers and that, in practical terms, is impossible to police, the Kurdish officials say.

Iraqi and US officials have grumbled for more than a year about what they perceive as Iranian interference in Iraq. Iran has repeatedly and forcefully denied any such interference.

But here in the mountains of Kurdistan, the Kurdish officials point to what they say are tangible footprints of Iran's collaboration with terror and insurgent groups responsible for attacks inside Iraq.

According to a half-dozen officials in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, known as the PUK, which controls the southern half of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and commanders in the peshmerga, the force that provides security in the region, Iran has extended its network of agents inside Iraq.

Iran, the officials say, continues to aid groups like Ansar al-Islam and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group, now named Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

Even though Iran is a Shi'ite theocracy, these officials said, it helps Sunni insurgent groups because it wants to prevent a strong unified government from taking shape in Iraq.

"They go back and forth after running missions here," said Anwar Haji Othman, head of security in the area around Halabja, including a long stretch of the Iranian border. "They bring cash from Iran to Iraq across the border."

Iran denies supporting Iraqi insurgents, and has declared its support for a peaceful, democratic Iraq. Tehran has argued that an unstable, violent neighbor would undermine Iran's security.

Iraqi and Iranian officials have met repeatedly, and have pledged to work closely on security matters.

At Iraq's request, Iran stopped tens of thousands of Iranian Shi'ite pilgrims who were flooding across the border to visit Iraq's shrine cities -- and bringing with them crime, infiltrators, and drug dealers, some Iraqi officials say.

Tensions have flared publicly. This summer, in widely repeated comments, the Iraqi defense minister, Hazem Shaalan, called Iran his country's "first enemy," and said Tehran's policies had "added fuel to the fire."

American officials have warned Iran against interfering in its neighbors affairs, but have sent mixed signals about whether they believe Iran's government is helping insurgents. Many top officials, including Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, have called Iran's activities unhelpful, but General John Abizaid emphasized in April that "there are elements within Iran that are urging patience."

Tehran has said it does not allow militants to cross the border, but Iranian officials have not ruled out that Islamic fighters might be moving illegally from Iran to Iraq.

Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, said at the time: "From the outset, Iran has tried to help Iraq overcome its problems."

But Othman, the Kurdish regional security chief, said that despite impressive internal security forces, Iran has not stopped terror groups from living and training just across the border in a group of Iranian Kurdish cities.

Othman said that Kurdish forces had arrested many members of Ansar al-Islam, including three top leaders over the last six months. Ansar al-Islam operated for two years in a cluster of villages between Halabja and Tuwella. The US government identified Ansar as a terrorist group, and believes it sheltered Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for two months before the US invasion in 2003.

According to Othman and other intelligence officials, Ansar's members have reconstituted as a new group, Ansar al-Sunni, or have joined Zarqawi. US officials have made the same claim.

According to information gleaned from questioning of the arrested Ansar members, Othman said, former Ansar fighters are now based in the Iranian border towns of Marivan (home to about 60 Kurdish Islamists), Sanandaj, Dezli (where about 30 Iranian villagers have joined the Islamist cause) and Orumiyeh (the base for up to 300 Islamists, including Gulf Arabs, Afghans and Kurds). They have a training camp in Dolanau, just a few kilometers from the Iraqi border. Three other leading officials have confirmed this.

"Iran continues its relationship with Ansar," Othman said. "They are training them how to use explosive ordnance for terrorist attacks in the south of Iraq."

The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan controls the half of the region that includes the major cities of Suleimaniya and Halabja, where three powerful groups held territory from 2001 to 2003.

Its security and intelligence arm, the Asaish, has offices across Iraq, including Mosul, Baghdad, and Baquba, and has sources in centers including Fallujah, said the agency's leader, Dana Ahmed Majid. The Asaish has operated as an independent agency for more than a decade, and has worked closely with US intelligence.

Mohammed Mohammed Saeed, a peshmerga commander and the top PUK official in the region around Halabja, said that Iran regularly sends intelligence agents into Kurdistan to monitor the Kurdish peshmerga and the movements of Americans.

Iran used to have offices in Suleimaniya and Halabja until US special forces landed in the region in March 2003. But, Saeed said, the Iranians have retained their spy network inside Iraq, and are now using it to watch American forces and to help insurgents.

"The Iranians are worried," he said. "They don't want a pro-American government in Iraq. The Iranians want neighboring countries to be full of anarchy, violence, and chaos."

When Iran still operated openly in Kurdistan, Saeed said, locals bribed Iranian officials with television sets to get visas. The PUK, he said, paid the Iranians to restrain the Islamist forces that controlled the valley stretching from Halabja to Iran. There, one group, Komala, or the Islamic Group, led by Ali Bapir, controlled the town of Khurmal. Ansar al-Islam controlled Biyara, and a third allied group, called the Islamic Movement, held Tuwella.

One Kurdish official in Tuwella, named Tahir Mustafa Ali, said the three groups should be viewed as "three wings of the same bird." Ali added that the terror groups responsible for much of the killing, hostage-taking, and bombing in Iraq, despite their different names, should similarly be viewed as part of a single network.

Iran has deep ties with many of the Iraqis who suffered under Saddam Hussein's leadership. They sheltered Kurds when Hussein attacked them with chemical weapons in 1987 and 1988, and in the south they sheltered Shi'ites who were fleeing retribution for the 1991 uprising.

And the Kurds and Shi'ites, among others, who have not secured their future in a post-Hussein Iraq, hesitate to repudiate their erstwhile ally to the west.

"They have been a friend to us," Saeed said. "We do not want to have any problem with Iran."

Daily, about 50 truckloads of legal imports stream into Iraq through this tiny border crossing above Tuwella, carrying cement and soft drinks. The illegal trade is just as important; Iraqi smugglers openly drive by the Iranian checkpoint and, farther down a dirt track, carry goods across the border on foot or by donkey.

At the border post last week, Iranian soldiers -- under the watchful eye of a Revolutionary Guard officer -- refused to speak to a reporter. "The intelligence will punish us if we talk to you," one said with a smile.

Down the dirt track, in the town of Tuwella, the local PUK chief, Ismail Ameen, said he kept his PUK membership a secret during the two years that Islamists ruled Tuwella. Just before the war, in February 2003, he saw six gray Toyota Landcruisers drive into town from the Iranian border. He said the trucks were loaded with bullets and mortar shells for Islamic Movement fighters.

"They would have run out of ammunition . . . without the supplies they got from Iran," he said.

Two top PUK security officials, and three members of the PUK's political bureau, also contended that Iran has continued to support Islamist insurgents.

Majid, head of the PUK's security agency, said that one former Ansar leader, Omar Baziani, had been caught by US forces in Baghdad six months earlier. Through interrogations, authorities heard that Baziani had crossed the border from Iran, Majid said, and had met with Zarqawi in Fallujah.

"It's easy to cross the Iranian border," Majid said. He added that the presence of Islamist terrorists in Iran, and their apparent ease in moving between the two countries, did not prove that Iran was sponsoring the groups.

According to the Kurdish officials, four former Ansar leaders have been arrested in Baghdad, Kirkuk, and the border town of Penjwin in the past six months. All four are believed to have been planning or supervising attacks.

There's a long history in the area of nations giving shelter to their enemies' enemies. ...

Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at cambanis@globe.com.

Nov 7, 1:23 PM EST

Confessions Show Terror's Spread in Iraq

By MAGGIE MICHAEL
Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraqi government television has repeatedly broadcast confessions of what it says were foreign terrorists - 17 Arabs and two Iranians - who allegedly infiltrated the country's porous borders to fight U.S.-led coalition forces.

The confessions, aired several times over the weekend, coincided with the massing of U.S. and Iraqi forces near Fallujah for an anticipated showdown with insurgents who have made the city their headquarters.

The broadcasts were seen as a means of preparing the population for the coming attack on Fallujah, where the government says it's after foreigners and "terrorists" not city residents who are not involved in the insurgency.

The station, Iraqiya, showed 19 men ages of 20 to 40, dressed in blue jumpsuits and lined up against a wall while the camera panned their pale, bearded faces.

An announcer read a statement accusing the prisoners "of carrying out mass killings, sabotage, inciting sectarianism and racism, destroying the economic and the social infrastructure of our people to take us back to the Dark Ages."

Of the 19 - five Syrians, five Saudis, four Jordanians, two Egyptians, a Palestinian and two Iranians, most were said to have entered the country in October, 2003 during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

One of them, Youssef Hassan Suleiman, said he came from the same town in Jordan as did Iraq's most feared terrorist mastermind, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.

"I had $2,000 on me," he said with a smile when asked if he brought money to help finance the insurgency.

Saleh Said al-Rahmani, of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, said that he crossed the Saudi border to Iraq last Ramadan to follow "the call" - a phrase normally meaning to spread the message of Islam.

A young Palestinian, Tayseer Hassan Halabi, said he entered Iraq from Syria where he lived temporarily. "I came to Iraq when the war started to join the fighters," he said. Halabi said that he made contacts with insurgents only after arriving in Iraq.

Others such as Ali Hassan from Yemen, Amer al-Abbas Mohammed from Jordan and Anaas Farouq Ahmed from Syria did not give details of their activities here.

Iraqiya said the 19 were among 167 people arrested recently by Iraqi police and who are now under interrogation.

Iraq's interim government and the United States have been pushing Iraq's neighbors, especially Syria, to secure their borders to prevent foreign fighters from neighboring Arab states and elsewhere to enter Iraq and attack coalition forces.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Provisional deal in Iran N-talks

Iran Gives Boost to Iraq Uprising

North Korea Exported Nuclear Materials to Iran

Confessions Show Terror's Spread in Iraq