Iranian Rebels in Iraq 'Contained' - U.S. Military
September 11, 2003
Reuters
Andrew Cawthorne
BAGHDAD -- The U.S. military said on Thursday it was holding 3,800 Iranian rebel detainees in eastern Iraq and denied that the People's Mujahideen was still mounting cross-border raids into Iran.
"Are they continuing to enter Iran? I can guarantee you that is not happening. They are contained," Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, told a news conference in Baghdad.
He was responding to a report in the Washington Post newspaper that the U.S. military may be turning a blind eye to renewed activity by the Iranian opposition group that is on the State Department's list of "terrorist" groups.
The Post quoted State Department officials saying they suspected the Pentagon was allowing the group to retain its weapons, move in and out of camps at will, broadcast propaganda and cross into Iran to conduct attacks.
Sanchez said: "There is no problem with the MEK that we are having today."
The People's Mujahideen, or MEK, was allowed to operate on Iraqi soil by Saddam Hussein's anti-Iranian government but was forced to surrender to the U.S. military after the March invasion of Iraq.
Giving the first official figure for the number of MEK fighters being held, Sanchez said the roughly 3,800 detainees had been "separated from their weapons systems" and were undergoing "screening" to determine their "defined end state."
He gave no further clues to their future fate.
Five hundred soldiers are guarding them at a base in Ashraf, he said. Their weapons -- including tanks, rocket launchers and artillery guns -- are at another base in the desert.
IRANIAN-U.S. SWAP?
He said he knew nothing of other Mujahideen fighters based in Iraq. Some reports put MEK numbers far higher than 3,800.
But he said guarding the long Iran-Iraq border was a vast task only really possible with something like a Berlin Wall.
Tehran has demanded that MEK members be extradited.
Security analysts have speculated that Iran may be willing to swap some of its al Qaeda detainees for MEK leaders.
At the start of the U.S.-led war to oust Saddam, the U.S. military bombed the Mujahideen but agreed a cease-fire after Baghdad fell in April, on condition the rebels withdrew into their bases in "non-combat" positions.
The MEK are classed as "detainees" not prisoners of war.
The group still has offices in major cities across the world and says it has an underground network of members in Iran. But its fighters and weaponry were based in Iraq.
For years, Saddam helped the Mujahideen fight his regional foe, Iran, which itself is no friend of the United States. But after the invasion, Washington was determined to clear Iraq of any independent fighting forces, even its enemy's enemy.
Prior to then, the Mujahideen had said they were clashing daily with Iranian-backed forces in the northeast of Iraq.
Some Washington hard-liners back the Mujahideen, despite its position on the "terrorist" list, as allies against Iran which President Bush has branded part of an "axis of evil" with Saddam's Iraq and North Korea.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=3429155