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SULAIMANIYAH, 30 September 2007 (IRIN) - Aid agencies in the northern semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan have said the continuing closure of Iraq's border with Iran will not hamper their work as they do not use the Iranian border for getting supplies. However, Azad Ahmed, a 45-year old pharmacist in Sulaimaniyah, said that although medicines are imported from neighbouring countries other than Iran some critical items do come from Iran as well. "There are a lot of items which come from Turkey, Jordan and Syria but we have some important medical items which are imported from Iran such as painkillers, syringes, cough syrup and optic medicines," Ahmed said. "We have not seen any shortages so far as stores are still well stocked, but I think if this situation [the border closure] continues for another month, then we'll see acute shortages," Ahmed added. On 24 September Iran closed five border crossings with northeastern Iraq to protest against the US detention of an Iranian official whom the US military accused of weapons smuggling. Other Iran-Iraq border crossings are still open. Stranded The measure has affected Kurdistan's economy, leaving travellers and cargo stranded, officials and local people said on 27 September. "Nearly 35,000 people - truck drivers, workers and traders - are now deprived of work due to the closure and hundreds of trucks are stranded at the border, some of them with goods which can't stay fresh for long, like vegetables, fruit and dairy products," said Hassan Baqi, head of Sulaimaniyah Chamber of Commerce. "The commercial sector… especially in Sulaimaniyah, has been particularly affected over the past three days as up to 60 percent of consumer items come from Iran, and there are over 80 Iranian trading companies operating in the region," Baqi added. Prices up Since 24 September the prices of imported goods like vegetables, fruit, dairy products, potatoes and construction and industrial materials have risen sharply. "I came to the market to buy five items: bananas, apples, watermelons, melons and oranges, but could buy only three as the prices had gone up by at least 500 Iraqi dinars (about 50 US cents) a kilogramme," said Sazan Mohammed, a 35-year old employee at the city's electricity directorate and a mother of five. "If things go on like this, we will definitely, as employees, not be able to find anything to feed our children," said Sazan at Sulaimaniyah main market. "These are political things, why are we involved? Civilians have nothing to do with such things." Traders consider options As hope of reopening the border crossing faded, Rashid Qadir, a 58-year-old dairy merchant, was thinking of sending his goods to another border crossing outside Kurdistan. "I have 17 tonnes of dairy products in two trucks stranded at the border right now and 30 more tonnes at factories," said Qadir, who with his three brothers, runs one of Sulaimaniyah's wholesale stores. "I have to find a way to get these goods in Kurdistan otherwise I will lose out, and of course the prices of these goods will go up," he said. According to Rustom Ahmed at the Bashmakh border crossing, the daily average number of trucks crossing this border used to be about 200. "Now the trucks are lined up on the Iranian side, the travellers have vanished and the workers have no work," Ahmed said. The arrested Iranian official has been identified as Mahmudi Farhadi and was arrested on 20 September in a raid on a hotel in Sulaimaniyah. US officials said Farhadi was a member of the elite 'Quds' force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that smuggles weapons into Iraq. But Iraqi and Iranian leaders said he was in the country on official business and with the full knowledge of the Iraqi government.

 At least 14 people died when a fuel tanker slammed into a bus on a highway stretch in south-eastern Iran, state media reported on Saturday.

Both vehicles were set on fire in the collision which occurred late Friday in Sistan-va-Baluchistan Province, the state-run news agency ISNA said.

The report added that 15 people were injured in the crash.

Iran's highways are considered to be among the most dangerous in the world, with some 100,000 road-accident deaths occurring in the last five years, the equivalent of three deaths an hour.

Deutsche Presse-Agentur

Tehran (dpa) - An local cleric was the target of a failed assassination attempt in the south-western Iranian city of Ahvaz, the ISNA news agency reported Sunday.

Samir Dorkavandi, a prayer leader, was on his way to mosque Saturday evening when he was shot and wounded by an unidentified man on a motorbike.

The cleric was immediately taken to a nearby hospital in Ahvaz where he unwent surgery, ISNA said.

Ahvaz, centre of the oil-rich province of Khuzestan bordering Iraq, has in the last two years been scene of violent unrest and fatal bombings by Iranian-Arab separatists.

Tehran has accused the United States and British agents of links to the unrest, which both Washington and London deny.

Three men were hanged earlier this month in Ahvaz for involvement in bombings, and according to local judiciary officials, other men linked to the incident are awaiting execution.

The As
Edith M. Ledere

UNITED NATIONS -- Iraq's foreign minister says Iran is punishing the Kurdish region for something the Kurdish authorities were not responsible for — the arrest of an Iranian official by the U.S. military on Sept. 20.

Hoshyar Zebari said late Saturday that he raised the issue of Iran's closure of five border crossing points into the northern Kurdish region with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly's ministerial meeting.

Zebari said he told Mottaki "this is not a wise move, this can only undermine the atmosphere of confidence, and you're punishing the whole region for an act that they were not responsible for."

The U.S. military said the Iranian, Mahmudi Farhadi, was a member of the Quds Force, a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards alleged to smuggle weapons to Shiite extremists.

The arrest has raised friction between U.S. and Iraqi authorities at a time when tempers were already running high over the killing Sept. 16 of 11 Iraqi civilians allegedly by security guards from Blackwater USA, which protects American diplomats in Iraq.

Blackwater insists its guards acted legally and were returning fire from armed insurgents.

Zebari said the Iraqi government has asked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad for all the facts, and reiterated Iraqi calls for the U.S. to release the Iranian official. But Zebari said the Iranian remains in U.S. custody, and the border remains shut.

"I think that was a direct response to the detention of an Iranian official by the U.S. military in Sulaimaniyah, and this was a collective punishment for the region, for something that the Kurdish regional authorities were not responsible," Zebari said.

"And I personally feel it's unfair and unjust, and it has affected the economic life of the region. Prices have gone up," he said. "The region is dependent in some way on fuel supplies from Iran, but the Iranians want to make a point here."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied in an Associated Press interview on Monday that Iran closed its border with Iraq over the arrest of the Iranian.

"On an annual basis, millions of Iranians visit Iraq and Iraq's holy sites for pilgrimage purposes," he said.

"Recently, as a result of some clashes and the explosion of some bombs, a number of Iranian civilian casualties arose. So the government has asked Iranian citizens to avoid traveling for pilgrimage purposes until security is restored. The commercial goods and freight transactions continue, and the travel across the border for those purposes continue," Ahmadinejad said.

By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
AP

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran's parliament voted Saturday to designate the CIA and the U.S. Army as "terrorist organizations," a largely symbolic response to a U.S. Senate resolution seeking a similar designation for Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

The parliament said the Army and the CIA were terrorists because of the atomic bombing of Japan; the use of depleted uranium munitions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq; support of the killings of Palestinians by Israel; the bombing and killing Iraqi civilians and the torture of imprisoned terror suspects.

"The aggressor U.S. Army and the Central Intelligence Agency are terrorists and also nurture terror," said a statement by the 215 lawmakers who signed the resolution at an open session of the 290-member Iranian parliament. The session was broadcast live on state-run radio.

The resolution, which urges Ahmadinejad's government to treat the two as terrorist organizations, would become law if ratified by the country's hardline constitutional watchdog but probably would have little effect as the two nations have no diplomatic relations.

Ahmadinejad's government was expected to wait for U.S. reaction before making its decision. The White House declined to comment Saturday.

The U.S. Senate voted Wednesday in favor of a resolution urging the State Department to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. Charged with defending the system put in place after Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Guards answer to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and are revered by many for their defense of the country during the 1980s war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

The terrorist designation, the first such move against a foreign government entity, would cut the Revolutionary Guards off from the U.S. financial system and freeze the assets of its members or subsidiaries have in U.S. jurisdictions. It would also allow the Treasury to move against firms subject to U.S. law that do business with the Guards, which have vast business interests at home and abroad.

While the proposal attracted overwhelming bipartisan support, a small group of Democrats said they feared that labeling the state-sponsored organization a terrorist group could be interpreted as a congressional authorization of military action in Iran.

Back home after a tour of the U.S. and Latin America, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the hostile reception he received at Columbia University failed to damage Iran's image and instead hurt America's prestige abroad.

University President Lee Bollinger said before an Ahmadinejad speech at his university that the hard-line leader exhibited "all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator" who was "brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated" for his denials of the Holocaust.

Ahmadinejad, who appeared shaken and irate but did not reciprocate the insult, said that the world had witnessed "the greatness of the Iranian nation" in the face of "insults" by its American host.

"With the grace of God, the Columbia University issue revealed their aggressive and mean-spirited image. ... It backfired. What happened was exactly opposite of what their shallow minds had presumed," Ahmadinejad said late Friday in comments broadcast Saturday on state television. "I believe they made a big mistake. ... They sacrificed the prestige of their whole system."

The harsh reception boosted Ahmadinejad's image at home during a time of high tensions with Washington over U.S. allegations that Iran is secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons and supplying Iraq's Shiite militias with deadly weapons that have killed U.S. troops. Iran denies both claims.

After Ahmadinejad told world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly in New York that his country would defy attempts to impose new sanctions by "arrogant powers" seeking to curb its nuclear program, accusing them of lying and imposing illegal penalties on his country.

Iran and the U.S. have not had diplomatic ties since Iranian students took American diplomats hostage in Tehran following the 1979 overthrow of U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Iranians have a long list of grievances against the United States, including a CIA-backed coup in 1953 that overthrew democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and put Pahlavi back on the throne.

More recently, there are fears in Iran that either the U.S. or Israel will carry out a military strike against it — something Iranian officials have said would provoke retaliation against Israeli or U.S. bases in the region.

Washington has said it is addressing the situation through diplomacy but refuses to rule out the use of military action.

By C. ONUR ANT
Associated Press Writer

ISTANBUL, Turkey - Kurdish rebels ambushed a minibus carrying pro-government village guards and civilians in southeastern Turkey and killed 12 people on Saturday, a local official said.

The rebels armed with machine guns attacked the minibus in Sirnak province near the border with Iraq, killing seven village guards and five civilians, governor Selahattin Apari said. Two civilians were injured and were rushed to nearby hospitals in military helicopters, Apari's office said in a statement.

It said troops were combing the rugged area in search of the rebels.

Turkish troops killed 20 rebels in operations over the past 15 days in Sirnak province, authorities said Friday. No soldiers were killed, they said.

The ambush came a day after Turkey and Iraq signed an agreement to cooperate in cracking down on separatist Kurdish rebels who have been attacking Turkey from bases in Iraq.

Despite Ankara's insistence, Iraq refused to allow Turkey to send its troops across the border to chase the Kurdish rebels.

Turkey has pondered a cross-border military operation to root out the members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, holed up in the mountainous areas of northern Iraq. However, the United States _a close ally of Ankara_ objected to such a move, fearing it could destabilize the relatively calm part of Iraq.

Kurdish lawmakers in Iraq also oppose any military move by Turkey across the border.

The PKK is labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the European Union. The group has been fighting for autonomy since 1984 and tens of thousands have been killed in the conflict.

SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq (AFP) - Iran's closure of its frontier with Iraq is costing the autonomous Kurdish region one million dollars a day, a government minister said on Wednesday, as trucks remained stuck at the border.

"There are goods costing millions waiting across the border," Kurdistan trade minister Mohammed Raouf told AFP, referring to the Haj Umran frontier post near the northern Iraqi Kurdish city of Arbil.

Efforts were now under way to redirect the trucks, many carrying frozen goods such as chicken, meat and eggs, through neighbouring Turkey into Iraq, he said.

"The Kurdistan region is losing one million dollars per day because of the closure."

Iran said on Monday it was closing its frontier with Iraq in protest at the detention last week of Iranian national Mahmudi Farhadi by US troops.

The US military charges that Farhadi is an officer in the covert operations arm of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, accused by American commanders of helping Shiite militias involved in Iraq's bloody sectarian conflict.

Iran has made clear that it regards Iraqi sovereignty as at stake in Farhadi's continued custody, after both the regional and national authorities of Iraq said he had been visiting with their consent.

Angry Kurdish merchants in Arbil said they were being forced to search for other sources of foodstuffs and electronic goods, the main items imported from Iran, possibly in Turkey or Syria.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, himself a Kurd, on Tuesday declared the arrest of the Iranian "illegal" and again demanded his release.

"We have asked the US authorities to release the arrested man," Talabani told reporters in the northern city of Sulaimaniyah.

"Arresting a person in Kurdistan is illegal because his security file was under the jurisdiction of the provincial government," said Talabani.

AP

ANKARA, Turkey - Turkey and Iraq have agreed to sign a counterterrorism deal cracking down on separatist Kurdish rebels holed up in bases in northern Iraq, officials said Wednesday.

The agreement would require Turkish forces to seek Iraqi authorization to cross into Iraq for small-scale operations to chase separatist Kurdish rebels, private NTV television reported, citing unnamed Iraqi and Turkish sources.

The agreement was reached during a visit by Iraqi Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani, who arrived in Ankara on Tuesday for talks on Turkish concerns over rebels of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, launching attacks against targets in Turkey from bases in northern Iraq.

Turkey has long been pressing Iraq for a counterterrorism pact to crack down on the PKK and has threatened to stage a military incursion into northern Iraq to eradicate rebel bases there if U.S. or Iraqi forces failed to take action against the group.

The guerrillas have been fighting for autonomy in southeast Turkey since 1984. The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people. The PKK is considered a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union.

Iraqi Interior Ministry Undersecretary Aidn Khald said the sides had reached an agreement on Wednesday and a deal would be signed Thursday. Officials would work on Turkish, Arabic and English versions of the text, he said.

NTV television, citing Iraqi sources, said that under the agreement, Turkey would seek Iraqi authorization for future "hot pursuit" operations — cross border military offensives aimed at tracking down and eliminating rebel armed groups that are limited in time, scale and in scope.

But Khald would not confirm that the agreement would allow Turkish troops to engage in hot pursuits. "Everything will become clear tomorrow," he said.

During a visit by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to Ankara in August, Turkey and Iraq agreed to try to root out the rebels. But al-Maliki said the Iraqi parliament would have the final say on efforts to halt the guerrillas' cross-border attacks into Turkey.

On Tuesday, a soldier was killed and four others were wounded when suspected Kurdish rebels detonated a bomb that was placed inside a van at the entrance of a Turkish military outpost in the southeastern province of Tunceli, the private Dogan news agency reported.

A soldier and four Kurdish rebels also were killed in two days of fighting in the province of Sirnak, near the border with Iraq, according to the agency and the military.

WASHINGTON, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Legislation mandating sanctions on foreign energy companies doing business with Iran was passed on Tuesday by the U.S. House of Representatives, which approved removing the U.S. president's power to waive the penalties as previous administrations have done.

Bush administration officials and some business groups have expressed unease over the bill, which could hit European energy groups. It passed by 397-16, easily enough to overcome any presidential veto. However, its future is murky in the Senate, where similar legislation has 69 co-sponsors but has yet to have a hearing.

Speaking to the House on the same day Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was to address the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the legislation's author, Rep. Tom Lantos, said U.S. law had to be strengthened to put a stop to Iran's "headlong pursuit" of nuclear weapons. Critics argue Iran's nuclear program is funded by oil and gas revenue.

Iran's economy relies on oil to bring in 80 to 90 percent of the country's export earnings, according to the U.S. Energy Department. Iran holds 10 percent of the world's proven oil reserves and it has the second-largest natural gas reserves.

Although current law imposes sanctions in the U.S. market on any foreign company that invests $20 million or more in the Iranian energy sector, the law lets the executive branch waive those sanctions, and presidential administrations of both parties have done so for years, Lantos said.

"Since 1999, giant companies such as Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L: Quote, Profile , Research), France's Total (TOTF.PA: Quote, Profile , Research), Italy's ENI (ENI.MI: Quote, Profile , Research) and Inpex (1605.T: Quote, NEWS , Research) of Japan have invested over $100 billion -- over $100 billion in the Iranian energy industry, and the United States has done nothing to stop them," Lantos, a California Democrat, said.

"If we wish to impose serious and biting sanctions on Iran -- effective measures that will change the behavior of the regime in Tehran -- it is clear what we must do," he said. "We must take away the power from the administration to waive the sanctions we pass."

A presidential executive order already prohibits U.S. companies and their foreign subsidiaries from conducting business with Iran, banning any "contract for the financing of the development of petroleum resources located in Iran."

The legislation also would impose a total ban on Iranian imports. It would eliminate some tax breaks for companies investing in Iran, decrease U.S. contributions to the World Bank if the bank invests in Iran, and bar a nuclear cooperation agreement with Russia if Moscow continues to assist Tehran's nuclear program.

Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but the West suspects the Islamic Republic of enriching uranium to develop a nuclear weapons capability.

Allowing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons could destabilize the world and lead to war, French President Nicolas Sarkozy told the United Nations on Tuesday. In his maiden speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Sarkozy said: "There will be no peace in the world if the international community falters in the face of nuclear arms proliferation."

Iran was entitled to nuclear power for civilian purposes, he said, "but if we allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, we would incur an unacceptable risk to stability in the region and in the world".

In a broader warning against the dangers of appeasement, the new French leader said: "Weakness and renunciation do not lead to peace. They lead to war."

Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but the West suspects the Islamic Republic of enriching uranium to develop a nuclear weapons capability.

Underlining French support for tougher sanctions against Tehran, sought by the United States but opposed by Russia and China, Sarkozy said: "We can only resolve this crisis by combining firmness with dialogue."

In an interview with the New York Times published on Monday, Sarkozy said that if the U.N. Security Council was unable to agree on further financial sanctions, the European Union should take its own measures to raise pressure on Iran.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner caused an outcry last week by saying if diplomacy failed to stop Iran's nuclear program, the world should prepare for the worst -- war.

But Sarkozy appeared to deliver the same message in a coded form, without mentioning the possibility of military action to prevent Iran achieving a nuclear capability.

Reuters

By: Reza Shafa
Quds Force Commander of Zafar Base, located in the Western city of Karmanshah, Brig. Gen. Mahmoud Farhadi was arrested by the U.S. forces in the Palace Hotel in Soleimanieh, Iraq on September 20.

Those familiar with the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war would remember Farhadi as one of the commanders of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Ramadan Base.

Ramadan is the main headquarters of the IRGC-Quds Force base with four tactical bases, the largest one Zafar in Karmanshah, Naser in the northwestern city of Naqadeh, Raad in the northwestern city of Marivan, and Fajr in the southwestern city of Ahwaz, along the 1,200 kilometers boarder with Iraq. Farhadi in his capacity as a commander of Quds Force, after the war, has been involved in some of more than 150 terrorist operations against the opposition People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) in Iraq; many of which claimed heavy civilian causalities among the local residents. The commanders of Ramadan Base have also been responsible for assassination of many Iranian Kurdish leaders in exile on the other side of the boarder in Iraq's Kurdistan.

Presently, Zafar Base under Farhadi is operating from northern Iraqi Kurdistan down to Diyala Province which extends to the northeast of Baghdad as far as the Iranian border.

In 1995, Farhadi received a raise and a new assignment as intelligence officer in Zafar Base of the Quds Force in Karmanshah. Farhadi's ruthlessness in dealing with the opponents of the regime, Ten years later, gained him a new position as the commander of the base.

When the war broke out in March 2003, Farhadi with Bader Brigades under his command rolled down from Khosravi border crossing and went all the way to Baghdad.

Following the early days of the war, with the new changes in Iraqi cities, Zafar Base was quick to move the base to the boarder city of Qasr-e-Shirin. Brig. Gen. Ahmad Mesgari was the new commander. To closely follow the events, Farhadi moved to Kalar in Iraq’s Kurdistan, supervising the Quds Force's operations in Diyala.

His mission in Kalar was to organize the Bader Brigades which nowadays has changed its name to Bader Organization. These paramilitary units were deigned form the beginning by the Quds Force to collect information on and carryout terrorist attacks both against the PMOI and the coalition forces in Iraq.

In 2003, the U.S. forces in hot pursuit of the bombers and terrorists coming from Iran attacked the Zafar headquarters in Kalar.
Farahdi and his deputy Mohsen Zanganeh with the help from their local operatives and another group called the Socialist Party of Kurdistan close to the regime were able to survive the raid. They ended up in Karmanshah some days later.

To put his expertise into use, Farhadi was then assigned to intelligence and security unit of the Quds Force in northern Iraq. He was working in the so-called Iranian Public Relations Office in the Kurdish city of Darbandikhan some 45 kilometers south of Soleimanieh.

Subsequently, he returned to Karmanshah with the task of organzing terrorist networks in Diyala, Baghdad, and Soleimanieh provinces in Iraq.

For his excellent services in Iraq, he once again replaced his superior Mesgari as the commander of the Zafar Base of the Quds Force.

At the same time, Farhadi runs the terrorist network headed by Qeas Nasef Jasam al-Azawi (a.k.a Abu nidal al-Baghdadi) in Diyala. The network has instigating in brutal sectarian violence and is well connected to Abu Mostafa Shaybani network in Karmanshah. On August 30, 2007, Shaybani was arrested by the coalition forces in a border village.

He has a long record of terrorist activities in Iraq some of which are listed below:
• Sending road side bombs and Explosively Formed Projectiles (EFP) as well as anti aircraft missiles to Iraq via of Diyala Province;
• Dispatching new recruits from Iraq for training in the camps near Tehran and the holy city Qom;
• Supervising the tactical bases of the Quds Force in the Kurdish cities of Khanaqin, Soleimanieh, Baladroze on the Iraqi side of the border and cites of Qasr-e-Shirin, Nosod, and Somar in Iranian Kurdistan.

Reza Shafa is an expert on the Iranian regime’s intelligence networks, both in Iran and abroad. He has done extensive research on VAVAK (MOIS), IRGC’s Intelligence Office, and Quds Force among others. Currently he is a contributor to NCRI website.

NCRI

Iran Focus

London, Sep. 24 – Coalition forces conducted an operation to arrest a kidnapper and detained four other “criminals” supported by Iran in East Baghdad early Monday, the U.S. military announced.

“These criminals were part of a Special Groups cell supported by Iran. They were involved in kidnapping operations and other crimes against the Iraqi people and security forces”, the Multi-National Force – Iraq (MNF-I) said in a statement.

During the operation, Coalition forces were engaged with small arms fire and improvised explosive devices including at least one explosively formed penetrator, it said, adding that one individual was killed in the skirmish.

“Precise fires from air support had to be used to engage individuals emplacing IEDs. These individuals were placing the explosives along the road to attack coalition forces departing the objective”, the statement added.

TEHRAN (Reuters) - U.S. troop movements are being monitored by Iran using satellites and other technology and would be in range of Iranian missiles if an attack was launched, a top Iranian military official said. In remarks published by Iranian newspapers on Monday, Yahya Rahim Safavi, an advisor to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also said he did not expect any U.S. attack because America was too bogged down in Iraq. Washington has refused to rule out military action against Iran if diplomacy fails to end its atomic work, which the West says is aimed at making bombs despite Tehran's denials. Speculation about a U.S. attack has been spurred on by comments by French officials who have said an extra diplomatic push was needed to avoid the possibility of a war with Iran. "Iran has now a strong intelligence system and missiles. We are closely watching the foreigners' moves in neighboring countries by highly advanced satellite technology and advanced radars. If they enter our airspace or our territorial waters, they will get a fair response," Rahim Safavi said. "It seems very unlikely that foreign troops in the region could start another attack because they have been busy with the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and they should focus on that," he added in comments carried by Iran Daily. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a U.S. television interview on Sunday his country was not heading for war with the United States. Iranian officials regularly dismiss talk of a war, saying U.S. and other Western states are playing "psychological" games to make Iran give up its legitimate atomic activities. Rahim Safavi was commander of the ideologically driven Revolutionary Guards until September, when he was replaced and appointed adviser to Khamenei, Iran's top authority. "Today our missile industry is in very good shape. Americans cannot confront our missile capabilities. Americans should know that their 200,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are in Iran's range," the daily Tehran-e Emrooz quoted Rahim Safavi as saying. Iran showed off what it said were new, home-made missiles during a military parade on Saturday. Iran often declares it has made technological advancements in its weaponry that could confront any U.S. military threat but Western experts say Iranian weaponry would be no match for American technology in any conventional war. But they also say Iranian forces could still deliver a punch using so-called "asymmetrical" tactics, such as guerrilla-style attacks to disrupt shipping in the Gulf oil shipping lanes or supporting insurgents against U.S. forces in Iraq or elsewhere. Washington already accuses Iran of backing militants in Iraq although Tehran denies the charge and says violence in its neighbor is the result of the U.S. occupation which should end.

Iran Focus

Tehran, Iran, Sep. 24 – Iranian authorities have closed down the offices of a Persian-language news website, state media reported on Sunday.

Seals were placed on Wednesday on the entrance to the offices of Baztab, which was founded by the former Commandant of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Mohsen Rezai, according to the news agency Mehr.

Mehr said that the decision to ban Baztab came after complaints against the website by the Office of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The website’s former director, Fouad Sadeghi, was previously an official of Iran’s secret police, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security.

Associated Press

By KATARINA KRATOVAC

Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD (AP) - Iran closed major border crossings with northern Iraq on Monday to protest the U.S. detention of an Iranian official the military accused of weapons smuggling, a Kurdish official said.

At least four border gates had been closed, with just one remaining open in a move that will severely curtail trade between the two countries, the governor of the Kurdish province of Sulaimaniyah, Dana Ahmed Majeed, told The Associated Press.

The move came four days after U.S. troops arrested an Iranian official during a raid on a hotel in Sulaimaniyah, 160 miles northeast of Baghdad.

U.S. officials said he was a member of the elite Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that smuggles weapons into Iraq. But Iraqi and Iranian leaders said he was in the country on official business and with the full knowledge of the government.

Failed asylum seeker Yaghob Largani, 27, from Bristol, last night dramatically halted an attempt to deport him - by slitting his throat with a razor blade.Mr Largani's partner, Kate Pickett, of Filton, said the suicide attempt took place at Heathrow Airport as the activist awaited a flight to Iran, where he was certain he would be immediately executed.

Miss Pickett said: "He phoned me at 2am today to say he wanted to die here in Britain so that our baby son would have a grave to visit,"

She was shocked that he had been left alone even for a moment at the airport and that he had been allowed to have a razor blade.

Early yesterday evening immigration officials took Mr Largani from Campsfield House detention centre, near Oxford, to Heathrow to be put on the 9.35pm British Airways flight to Tehran.

He called Miss Pickett from the van he was travelling in, urging her to look after the couple's year-old son, Benyamin. He said he expected to be tortured, then executed by the Iranian authorities as soon as he landed at Tehran airport.

The Evening Post has seen a copy of what his family say is an Iranian court's sentence of death imposed on Mr Largani in his absence.

Miss Pickett, 34, said last night: "The Home Office gave us no review. They have shown no humanity. They are sending a man to his death.

"Yaghob phone me from the van taking him to the airport. He was absolutely hysterical. He kept saying, 'They are going to kill me'."

Miss Pickett said last-minute attempts to convince the Home Office of Mr Largani's plight had failed. Officials told her they did not believe the evidence she presented, including a letter from the opposition National Front of Iran which Miss Pickett said had stated: "He was an active member and his life was in danger."

The death sentence - "the penalty of cropped on earth" is how the translation is worded - was imposed by the revolutionary court of the Mozandaran province, according to Miss Pickett.

Today she said Mr Largani had been taken to hospital near Heathrow last night and from there to a nearby detention centre. He remained convinced the Home Office still planned to deport him.

Iranian national Mr Largani had lived in Bristol for three years. His application to remain was turned down and subsequent appeals were also rejected, which led to him being arrested and taken to Southmead police station last week.

Miss Pickett, who met Mr Largani after he arrived in the UK, said she given immigration officials documents which prove he will be killed on his arrival in Tehran.

Paulette North, of the Defend the Asylum Seekers Campaign, in Bristol, said: "He is certain to face a death at the other end. This is yet another example of how the immigration system is failing genuine asylum seekers."

A Border and Immigration Agency spokeswoman refused to comment on Mr Largani's case last night, but said: "We only return those who the asylum decision-making and independent appeals processes have found do not need international protection and who can, therefore, return safely."

No one was available for comment at the Home Office this morning.

Source:www.thisisbristol.co.uk

Reason Magazine
Michael J. Totten

In a green valley nestled between snow-capped peaks in the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq is an armed camp of revolutionaries preparing to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran. Men with automatic weapons stand watch on the roofs of the houses. Party flags snap in the wind. Radio and satellite TV stations beam illegal news, commentary, and music into homes and government offices across the border.

Komala vs. Komala
Don’t confuse the Komala Party with the Komala Party. Iraqi Kurdistan hosts two exiled leftist parties from Iranian Kurdistan, both with the same name, the same (red) flag, and the same founder. Both parties have armed camps and military wings. Both built their compounds on the same road outside the city of Suleimaniya. They’re right next to each other, in fact. Stand in the right place, and you can see one from the other. The difference is that one is liberal and the other is communist.

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TEHRAN (AFP) — Iran has confirmed for the first time it has been firing artillery shells on camps of Kurdish militants inside northern Iraq, saying the local authorities had not listened to its warnings. The militant Kurdish separatist group PJAK -- linked to Turkey's outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) -- has been behind a string of deadly attacks on security forces in northwestern Iran in recent months. "Some of their bases are 10 kilometres (six miles) deep inside Iraqi territory so this is part of our natural right to secure our borders," said General Yayha Rahim Safavi, military adviser to the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "Of course we issued warnings to the Iraqi government and told them to take them (the rebels) away from the border and respect its obligations," Safavi said in an interview with Iran's English language channel Press TV late Saturday. "But unfortunately the Kurdistan region, the northern part of Iraq, did not listen, so we feel entitled to target military bases of PJAK and they have been under our artillery fire," he added, according to the channel's English translation. Safavi, the former head of the elite Revolutionary Guards, gave no details of when the firing had taken place or if it was continuing. Iraqi Kurdish officials said last month that hundreds of Iraqi Kurds had fled remote mountain villages near the country's eastern frontier after Iranian gunners targeted separatist guerrilla bases. But Vice Foreign Minister Mehdi Mostafavi vehemently denied on September 3 that Iran had shelled rebel bases in Iraqi Kurdistan. Safavi said that "groups of four to five" Kurdish militants from PJAK (Party of Free Life of Kurdistan) at a time moved across the border from their bases in Iraq to carry out attacks in western Iran. "They set off bombs and they create insecurity. And I think it is part of our natural right to fight such rogue counter-revolutionary armed groups as they are creating insecurity." Earlier this month, seven members of the Iranian security forces were killed in a shootout with "rebels" in the western province Kermanshah, which has a substantial Kurdish population.

ANKARA - Nine Kurdish rebels have been killed in two separate clashes with the army in Turkey’s restive southeast, the military said Saturday.

One of the clashes, in which four militants of the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) were killed, occurred overnight in a mountainous area in the province of Hakkari, which borders Iraq and Iran, a statement on the army’s website said.

Five others were killed in fighting in the neighbouring province of Sirnak on Friday, it said.

The security forces also seized weapons and explosives in the clashes.

The PKK, which has bases in neighbouring northern Iraq, has stepped up its military activity this year.

The group, considered a terrorist organisation by Ankara, the United States and the European Union, has been fighting for self-rule in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish east and southeast since 1984. The conflict has claimed more than 37,000 lives.

Source:AFP

The Associated Press
Ali Akbar Dareini

TEHRAN, Iran -- Threats and economic sanctions will not stop Iran's technological progress, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned Saturday at a large parade of missiles and other weapons aimed at showing off the country's military might.

The parade outside the capital Tehran marked the 27th anniversary of the Iraqi invasion of Iran that sparked the bloody 1980-88 war. It also came as the U.S. and its European allies continue discussing a third round of U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran for its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment.

"Those (countries) who assume that decaying methods such as psychological war, political propaganda and the so-called economic sanctions would work and prevent Iran's fast drive toward progress are mistaken," said Ahmadinejad, who is due to visit New York next week for the U.N. General Assembly.

Iran launched an arms development program during its war with Iraq to compensate for a U.S. weapons embargo. Since 1992, Iran has produced its own jet fighters, torpedoes, radar-avoiding missiles, tanks and armored personnel carriers. Many such weapons were on display at the parade.

Some of the trucks carrying Iranian missiles were painted at the back with popular slogans such as "Down with the U.S." and "Down with Israel." The parade also featured flights by two of Iran's new domestically manufactured fighter jets, known as the Saegheh, which means lightning in Farsi.

Iran says it has managed to weather a broader U.S. embargo for 28 years, and while many Iranians acknowledge some hardships, they credit the embargo with making them more self-reliant.

"Those who prevented Iran, at the height of the (Iran-Iraq) war from getting even barbed wire must see now that all the equipment on display today has been built by the mighty hands and brains of experts at Iran's armed forces," Ahmadinejad said.

"Learn lessons from your past mistakes. Don't repeat your mistakes," he said in a warning to the U.S. over its push to impose more sanctions against Tehran.

The U.S. is calling for more economic sanctions against Iran after two sets were imposed by the U.N. Security Council for Iran's decision not to stop uranium enrichment.

Washington accuses Tehran of secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons. Iran denies the charges, saying its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, including generating electricity.

The Washington Post
John Ward Anderson

A top NATO commander said Thursday that a shipment of weapons intercepted by international forces in western Afghanistan this month clearly came from Iran and almost certainly was sent here with the knowledge of "at least the Iranian military." U.S. Army Gen. Dan K. McNeill, NATO's senior commander in Afghanistan, said a convoy of weapons captured Sept. 6 in the far western province of Farah, which shares a long border with Iran, was transporting "upscale" roadside bombs that had the hallmarks of those made in Iran and used with lethal regularity against U.S. forces in Iraq.

"Field analysis of those devices that were found profiled them clearly as ones that had been used in Iraq" and that, according to intelligence sources, are manufactured in Iran, McNeill said in an interview.

"I think there is sufficient intelligence to put together a picture that says this convoy that we intercepted the other day, which clearly geographically originated in Iran, and other things that we've encountered -- it would be hard for me to imagine that they had come into Afghanistan without the knowledge of at least the military in Iran," McNeill said.

"Who is that military?" he said. "Likely the Republican Guard Corps, could be the Quds Force part of that," he said, referring to Iran's elite military corps and its unit that specializes in covert operations.

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that international forces had intercepted the convoy in Farah province, a remote and sparsely populated area of desert and swampland, as it apparently was seeking a less-traveled route into Afghanistan.

International forces captured two smaller shipments of sophisticated roadside bombs believed to be from Iran in April and May in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province, a stronghold of the Taliban insurgency and one of the most violent areas in the country.

Afghanistan, which is predominantly Sunni Muslim, and Iran, which is overwhelmingly Shiite, share a 581-mile border and have had roller-coaster relations for years, if not centuries. Recently, there have been signs of a limited detente, with Afghan President Hamid Karzai going out of his way to praise and thank the Iranian government for development assistance.

U.S. officials, however, have been building a case against Iran for allegedly trying to destabilize Afghanistan by supplying weapons to the Taliban, an extremist Sunni Muslim and ethnic Pashtun group. The Taliban has been waging an increasingly active insurgency against U.S., NATO and Afghan government forces.

Many analysts believe that Iran, sandwiched between 160,000 U.S. troops based in Iraq to the west and roughly 50,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan to the east, has a keen interest in striking U.S. forces and helping to push them from the region by supplying insurgents in both countries with money, weapons and training.

Iranian officials have denied funneling military aid to insurgents in either country, saying they have good relations with the leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan and have no interest in destabilizing either.

Many independent analysts have questioned U.S. allegations that Iran is shipping arms to the Taliban and have suggested the accusations are part of a campaign by the Bush administration to push for military action against Iran. European officials have said they see no evidence of a large or sustained effort by Iran to supply the Taliban with weapons.

McNeill said there was "no doubt . . . that sometimes in the past, certain Iranian elements have supported the Taliban. Are they still doing it? I don't know." He said Iranians could be motivated by a desire to harm U.S. interests or to bolster security in their border area with Afghanistan or perhaps to somehow interfere with the cross-border drug trade.

"I think it's possible all these things could play into it, but I don't have the silver bullet answer," he said.

While pointing the finger at Iran's military for funneling weapons into Afghanistan, McNeill cautioned, "We didn't say that we could prove they were coming from the Iranian government." But concerning the recently intercepted convoy, he emphasized, "I do not believe it could have originated and come here without the knowledge of the Iranian military."

original article

IRBIL, Sept 21 (KUNA) -- The regional government in semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region called Friday on US forces to release an Iranian they arrested in Sulaimaniya on Thursday.
"We consider the arrest by the Multi-National Force of a Kermanshah delegation member (Iran) an illegal matter. So, we call for setting him free as soon as possible," the regional government said in a release.
Such behaviors are not in anyone's interest, it said, noting that the arrested Iranian identified as Aghai Farhadi had arrived in Sulaimaniya on September 18 at the invitation of its governor and in coordination with the region's government representative office in Iran.
US forces arrested the Iranian man early Thursday morning, taking him from his residence in Sulaimaniya Palace Hotel to an unknown place, according to the release.
The arrested man was part of a commercial delegation from Kermanshah Province, which arrived in the region for talks with its officials on trade and issues and the cholera disease that had recently broke out in the region, it noted.
However, the US army said the detained man was a member of the Quds Force -- an elite unit of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, adding that he was "involved in transporting improvised explosive devices." The US has accused the Quds Force of helping arm Shiite militias in Iraq. Iran denies any involvement with militants.
A statement by the US military said the arrested man had been involved in the "infiltration and training of foreign terrorists in Iraq".

By Nick Farrell
the inquirer

A COURT in Turkey has ordered Youtube to be switched off because it runs clips insulting to leading political figures.
This is the second time the "Kurd murdering nation" has blocked Youtube after a complaint that some clips insulted Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. It is a against the law to insult Ataturk which means that the Monty Python team, who claimed he had an entire menagerie called Abdul, should be arrested on sight.

A court in the eastern city of Sivas ordered the block, saying a video on the site insulted Ataturk, President Abdullah Gul, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the army.

Quite how a country which deported the Greek population which helped to build the nation can be so protective of its politicians is uncertain.

Turkey has a long history of censoring things it didn't like for the last five hundred years. Constantinople is now Istanbul and Haga Sophia was converted into a Mosque so that its new owners could pretend that they built it.

By Peter Symonds
World socialist web site

A string of articles have appeared in the US press over the past week reporting on the Iranian shelling of border areas inside the Kurdish north of Iraq since August. One American journalist after another has trekked to the Qandil mountains to interview guerrillas belonging to the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK) and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), and describe first hand the resulting devastation to crops, livestock and impoverished villages.

The sudden interest in this remote, mountainous region has nothing to do with concern for the plight of local Kurds. It is another element of the anti-Iranian propaganda campaign being cranked up by the Bush administration and media. Iranian “meddling” in Iraq’s north is being added to Tehran’s alleged nuclear weapons programs and support for anti-US insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. All of the articles deliberately obscure Washington’s responsibility in fuelling the conflict and turning northern Iraq into a potential regional battleground.

The establishment of an autonomous Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq was the Bush administration’s payoff to the Kurdish elites that fully supported the criminal US-led invasion in 2003. The encouragement of Kurdish separatism has created tensions not only with Iran, but also with Syria and US ally Turkey, all of which have substantial Kurdish minorities. The Turkish military warned earlier this year that it would invade northern Iraq to destroy PKK bases if the US and Iraqi forces did not do so. Significantly, Turkish shelling and incursions into northern Iraq in June and July did not prompt a gaggle of US reporters to travel to survey the damage.

The Bush administration has gone out of its way to pacify the Turkish government and military, while opposing any full-scale Turkish invasion that would destabilise northern Iraq. Last year, the US appointed retired air force general, Joseph Ralston, as a special envoy to Ankara to coordinate a joint approach on the PKK. In the case of Iran, however, the Bush administration is, in all likelihood, assisting, arming and training them, if not directly then through proxies, particularly Israel.

This duplicity is highlighted by the fact that the US State Department formally maintains the PKK, which operates inside Turkey, on its list of terrorist organisations, while PJAK, which is carrying out attacks inside Iran, is not. And if the recent media coverage is any indication, the US will soon be hailing PJAK guerrillas as Iranian “freedom fighters” rather than denouncing them as terrorists.

Despite lame denials, the PKK and PJAK have the closest relations—by many accounts, the PJAK is simply the PKK’s Iranian offshoot. Both make similar appeals for a Kurdish confederation stretching across Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. Their guerilla camps are in the same mountainous area. Indeed, the latest US press articles make little attempt to distinguish between the two groups, interviewing PKK and PJAK officials as if they were the same.

PJAK denies receiving any US assistance, but its pro-US sympathies and contacts are evident in recent interviews with US journalists. Local PJAK leader Amin Karimi told the Pittsburgh Tribune Review: “We had some contacts because the Americans are here in Iraq and they are our neighbours now. Sometimes they want to know who is PJAK and what we are doing.” But, he stressed, “we have no cooperation”.

PJAK leader Rahman Haji Ahmadi, who lives in exile in Germany, made a low-key visit to Washington in July to appeal for money and guns. While an account last month in the Washington Times played down any contact with US officials, Newsweek’s September 13 “exclusive” from the Iran-Iraq border quoted PJAK commander Beryar Gabare as saying that Ahmadi had held discussions “at a high level” with US officials over “the future of Iran”. He denied receiving support from the US, but added: “If some day our common interests [with the US] are on the same line, we’re ready, we can negotiate.”

The US is also quietly maintaining contacts with the PKK. Of those who recently interviewed PKK leader Murat Karayilan on the Iran-Iraq border, only the correspondent for the British-based Telegraph reported the obvious: “In the Qandil mountains, signs of a conflict gathering momentum are easily found. US army helicopters are reportedly used to shuttle officers to regular meetings with Kurdish fighters. There is a landing pad complete with spotlights near Mr Karayilan’s headquarters, while four wheel drive vehicles belonging to a US private security contractor, are easily seen.”

A long-running campaign

Reports of the Bush administration’s efforts to foment armed opposition inside Iran not only among Kurds, but also other ethnic minorities including Arabs, Azeris and Baluchis, stretch back to 2003. Among the most detailed have been articles in the New Yorker by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. As far back as June 2004, he pointed out in an article entitled “Plan B”, based on senior American and Israeli sources, that the Israeli intelligence and military had trained Kurdish commando units to run covert operations inside the Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria to gather intelligence and plant sensors and other devices.

In an article entitled “The Next Act” published last November, Hersh wrote: “In the past six months, Israel and the United States have also been working together in support of a Kurdish resistance group known as the Party for Free Life [PJAK] in Kurdistan. The group has been conducting clandestine cross-border forays into Iran, I was told by a government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon civilian leadership, as ‘part of an effort to explore alternative means of applying pressure on Iran.’ (The Pentagon has established covert relationships with Kurdish, Azeri and Baluchi tribesmen, and has encouraged their efforts to undermine the regime’s authority in northern and southeastern Iran.) The government consultant said that Israel is giving the Kurdish group ‘equipment and training.’ The group has also been given ‘a list of targets inside Iran of interest to the US’.”

The White House has dismissed or ignored Hersh’s reports. The Israeli government has officially denied any involvement with the PJAK. However, it is no secret that the Bush administration is seeking “regime change” in Iran. In early 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sought $75 million in extra funding for so-called pro-democracy activities—that is, to finance anti-government propaganda and opposition groups inside Iran. This May, ABC News reported that Bush had signed a “non-lethal presidential finding” in early 2007 authorising “a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions”. Unlike the Pentagon, the CIA requires a formal finding to engage in covert operations.

Significantly, an upsurge of PJAK attacks inside Iran this year has shown increasing sophistication. In February, PJAK claimed responsibility for shooting down an Iranian military helicopter with a shoulder-held missile, killing eight soldiers and capturing one. According to a recent Gulf News.com article, one of the dead was General Saeed Qahhari, a regional commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). “Since then,” the article noted, “the IRGC has issued cryptic reports about dozens of other ‘engagements’ in which scores of policemen, border patrols and IRGC members have been killed or wounded, while killing at least 100 Kurdish insurgents.”

At this stage, the PJAK does not appear to have roots among Iran’s Kurdish minority, but relies on its bases inside US-occupied Iraq. Most of its “engagements” appear to be in West Azeribaijan, rather than in the two Kurdish majority provinces of Kurdistan and Kermanshahan. Abdullah Mohtadi, secretary general of Komala, a long-standing Kurdish Stalinist party, told Pittsburgh Tribune Review: “If PJAK can be an independent party, we welcome them. But they are just taking their orders from somewhere else—they are just PKK... It does not help the Kurdish movement in Iran, and it doesn’t help the Iraqi Kurds.”

The result has been a build up of Iranian security forces along the border. According to Gulf News, the IRGC has established a special command centre at the Hamza Base, near the Iraqi border, and committed a full division plus one unit of airborne special forces to curb the insurgency. Over the past month, Iranian shelling of PKK and PJAK strongholds, at times in apparent coordination with the Turkish military, has wreaked havoc in Kurdish border villages and there are reports of at least one cross-border raid by Iranian ground troops. Tehran has rejected Iraqi protests, but there is little doubt of its activities. They are in keeping with the regime’s consistent reliance on state repression to stamp out any opposition, including from the country’s ethnic and religious minorities.

However, the chief responsibility for turning the northern Iran-Iraq region into a war zone rests with the Bush administration, which is cynically using the PJAK to undermine and destabilise the Kurdish areas as it draws up war plans for attacking Iran. It is a rerun of Washington’s strategy of using Kurdish guerillas to undermine the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion. Once again, the Kurds are being manipulated by US imperialism, with the complicity of the thoroughly venal Kurdish leaderships, to advance its strategic and economic interests in the Middle East.

By Jim Randle
VOA News

The U.S. military says it has arrested an Iranian officer accused of smuggling powerful roadside bombs into Iraq for Tehran's elite Quds force. The military says the Iranian man was seized from a hotel in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah. In Baghdad, Correspondent Jim Randle has this report.

The Sulaimaniyah Palace Hotel, 260 kilometers northeast of Baghdad, after an Iranian officer accused of smuggling powerful roadside bombs into Iraq for elite Quds force was arrested, 20 Sept 2007

The U.S. military says the Iranian officer was involved in bringing explosives into Iraq that were specially-designed to wreck American vehicles and kill U.S. soldiers.

"This individual has been involved in transporting improvised explosive devices and explosively-formed penetrators into Iraq," said Army Specialist Megan Burmeister. "Intelligence reports also indicate he was involved in the infiltration and training of foreign terrorists in Iraq."

News reports say three Iranians were initially arrested, but two were later released.

In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the man arrested Thursday is the seventh Iranian Quds Force operative that U.S. forces have detained in Iraq. He said Tehran is ignoring repeated U.S. requests to stop such activities.

"I think it's a further reflection that they've not ceased these activities that we find troublesome and are inconsistent with being a good neighbor to Iraq," he said.

Iran has denied U.S. allegations that the Quds Force, of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, is helping arm Shi'ite militias in Iraq.

The detention of Iranians is a sensitive issue after last month's arrest of eight Iranian nationals in a central Baghdad hotel and a January arrest of five Iranians during a U.S. raid in the northern city of Irbil.

Iraq's government is backed by the United States but has good relations with its neighbor Iran. Iraq has been trying to get Iran and the U.S. to cooperate in reducing violence in the country.

Earlier Thursday, the number two commander of U.S. forces in Iraq said violence in the country has fallen sharply and is still declining.

Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno said a seven-month-long surge of U.S. troops and a new strategy have cut attacks and deaths in Iraq.

"Attacks nationwide have fallen to the lowest level since before the golden mosque bombing in February of 2006. Car bomb and suicide attacks have dropped to the lowest level in a year, but until we can stop all of them we will not be satisfied," he added.

The bombing of the major Shi'ite shrine in Samarra sparked a wave of sectarian killings in many parts of the country.

Odierno said the decline in violence across Iraq is also seen in Baghdad. He said al-Qaida in Iraq is being pushed out of Baghdad and nearby areas, and some militants are even fleeing Iraq.

U.S. troops have been moving out of large bases into smaller combat outposts in Baghdad and in other areas.

The U.S. military says closer contact with Iraqis has yielded more tips and better information, boosting the number of weapons discovered and cutting the number of roadside bomb attacks on U.S. troops.

The latest assessment comes amid heightened tensions between the United States and Iraq's government, after 11 Iraqi civilians were killed when guards from the U.S. private security firm, Blackwater, opened fire in a busy Baghdad square on Sunday.

Blackwater says its guards acted in self-defense, but Iraqi eyewitness have disputed this.

U.S. and Iraqi authorities say they have set up a joint commission to investigate the deadly shoot-out.

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran said on Wednesday it would use "all our means" to defend itself if attacked by the West, three days after France's foreign minister publicly raised the possibility of war over Tehran's disputed nuclear activities. When asked whether Iran would block the Hormuz Strait, the world's most important water way for oil shipments, if attacked, government spokesman Gholamhossein Elham dismissed it as "far- fetched" that anybody would take "this foolish option". But, "we would use all our means to defend ourselves because territorial integrity is a key issue for every country," he told a news conference. He did not elaborate. Iran has previously threatened to hit U.S. regional interests if the United States launches a military strike against the Islamic Republic. The world's fourth-largest crude producer, which rejects Western accusations it is seeking to develop nuclear bombs, has also said it will not rule out using oil as a weapon if attacked. Analysts fear Iran could seek to impede traffic through the Strait of Hormuz in any retaliation by threatening merchant shipping. U.S. naval chiefs are concerned that Iran could resort to mining the strait and the wider Gulf in a major conflict. The strategic sea channel which shares Iran's coastline at the entrance to the Gulf is a choke point because of the huge volume of oil exported through it daily. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday comments by French government officials talking about the possibility of war over Iran's nuclear programme were intended for the media and should not be taken seriously. Western nations fear Iran is seeking to build atomic bombs despite Tehran's denials. The United States insists it wants diplomacy to end the row but has not ruled out military action should such a route fail. French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on Monday everything must be done to avoid war with Iran, a day after Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Paris should prepare for that possibility though he did not think any war was imminent. Kouchner's comments prompted major powers including the United States to say they believed the nuclear standoff could be resolved diplomatically. French Defence Minister Herve Morin said on Wednesday France had no plan to attack Iran "No one can think for one instant that we are imagining and preparing plans against Iran," he told Canal Plus television.

A Turkish soldier was killed and another injured when a group of militants of the banned Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) attacked a Gendarmerie outpost in an eastern province, the semi-official Anatolia news agency reported on Wednesday.

A 21-year-old private died in the attack staged by the PKK members in Celtikli town of Bitlis province with long-range weapons at Tuesday midnight, according to the report.

The report said that Private Mustafa Sahin who was wounded in the attack was taken under medical treatment in Tatvan Military Hospital.

Turkish security operations are underway in the region in pursuit of the PKK militants who fled after the attack, added the report.

The PKK, listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, launched an armed campaign for an ethnic homeland in the mainly Kurdish southeastern Turkey in 1984, sparking decades of strife that has claimed more than 30, 000 lives.

Source: Xinhua

Associated Press

By ANNE GEARAN

AP Diplomatic Writer

SHANNON, Ireland (AP) - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday warned the United Nations' chief nuclear inspector not to complicate the international ultimatum to Iran to shutter disputed atomic work, saying diplomacy is best left to diplomats.

"It is not up to anybody to diminish or to begin to cut back on the obligations that the Iranians have been ordered to take" by the U.N. Security Council, Rice said.

Although she did not mention U.N. nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei by name, Rice was referring to his plan, widely seen as an attempt to head off a third round of U.N. sanctions, to account for Iran's past nuclear behavior.

ElBaradei said Monday that nations critical of his last-ditch effort should wait until the end of the year to see whether Iran answers outstanding questions before taking any other action.

Rice said Iran may not be sincere in its agreement with ElBaradei's International Atomic Energy Agency to resolve technical questions about the origin, scope and purpose of its once-secret nuclear research. Iran claims the program is peaceful, but the United States and other nations suspect that Tehran is working to build a bomb.

"The IAEA is not in the business of diplomacy," Rice said with undisguised irritation. "The IAEA is a technical agency" whose role is to inspect nuclear facilities and report on and enforce nuclear agreements, she said.

In blunt language unusual among diplomats, Rice suggested that the IAEA's board and director are freelancing where they do not belong.

"There are a lot of elements that the IAEA needs to be concerned with, and the one that they need to be concerned with Iran is ... whether and when and if they are living up to the agreements that they have signed," Rice told reporters traveling with her to the Mideast.

ElBaradei also said Iran's harshest critics should learn from the Iraq invasion and refrain from "hype" about a possible military attack, calling force an option of last resort.

The Nobel laureate is an old Rice nemesis. They have differed publicly for years, including over the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, when Rice was President Bush's national security adviser.

On Tuesday, Rice called the recent IAEA agreement with Iran over outstanding nuclear questions "a good thing." In the next breath she added: "But this wouldn't be the first time that the Iranians made an agreement only to break it."

Rice said the United States and its partners will move forward with a request for a third round of Security Council sanctions. She said she will discuss sanctions this month with other members of the six-nation international bloc that has offered Iran economic incentives if it gives up uranium enrichment and other activities that worry the West.

The Security Council is not expected to take up the issue before October. Iran has ignored the previous U.N. demands and associated mild sanctions. It is not clear whether the United States can win a third round.

"We believe the diplomatic track can work, but it has to work both with a set of incentives and a set of teeth," Rice said.

The Bush administration has pursued a cautious outreach to Iran despite internal divisions over how best to contain or counter Iran's growing regional ambitions and alleged nuclear weapons program.

Rice declined comment on remarks over the weekend from her French counterpart warning of possible war with Iran.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner on Sunday said "we must prepare ourselves for the worst" if Iran obtains nuclear weapons, and he specified that could mean a war.

He appeared to soften the warning a bit on Tuesday, emphasizing instead a need to "negotiate, negotiate, negotiate without respite."

Kouchner is meeting Rice in Washington on Friday.

Why are a growing number of young women in this relatively safe corner of Iraq showing up in local hospitals, dying of suspicious burns?

Web Exclusive

Sept. 18, 2007 - The doctor knows, just from glancing at the burns, that someone is lying to him. Srood Tawfiq, a reconstructive surgeon at Sulaimaniya Hospital in Iraq's northern Kurdish region, buttons his white lab coat and steps into the burn unit. "Busy day yesterday," he says, pulling back a curtain to reveal a sleeping 16-year-old girl with kerosene burns over 90 percent of her body. The mother of the young woman, hovering over the hospital bed, tells Tawfiq that her daughter slipped and scalded herself while carrying a portable stove. The doctor listens sympathetically. But later, out of the woman's earshot, he explains that he doubts the mother's explanation. If it were really an accident, he whispers, "You don't get this degree of burn." Outside the hospital room, he pulls off his hygienic mask and shakes his head. "We never tell them that they're going to die," he says quietly.
 
Kurdistan has long been considered the one consistently safe and relatively prosperous region of Iraq. So why, in increasing numbers, are the territory's young women showing up to local hospitals dying of suspicious burns? According to the Women's Union of Kurdistan, there were 95 such cases in the first six months of 2007, up 15 percent since last year. A December 2006 report from the Asuda women’s rights group in Sulaimaniya says that the "phenomenon is increasing at an alarming rate." Ninety-five percent of the victims are under 30, and roughly half are between 16 and 21. On the day before I stopped by the emergency hospital in Sulaimaniya, six young women were admitted with major burns, three of them telling suspicious stories. When I called Zryan Yones, the Kurdish health minister, he said that the trend among young women is more disturbing than a recent outbreak of cholera. He provided a startling statistic: Since August 10, Kurdistan had nine deaths from its cholera epidemic; in the same period, there were 25 young women dead of burns. "I have one young girl lying in our morgues every single day," he told me.
 
So what's going on? Most of the survivors tell doctors that the burns resulted from a "cooking accident." But surgeons told me they can tell that the vast majority are not telling the truth. Kerosene, the fuel used to cook here, is not particularly volatile; if a woman comes in with burns over the majority of her body, it is likely intentional. Women's rights advocates in Sulaimaniya believe that the majority of the burn cases are suicide attempts; the remainder are suspected to be honor killings or other murders disguised as accidents or suicide. ("Cooking accident" has long been a euphemism for dowry killings in India.) Doctors told me that it's virtually impossible to distinguish between murder and suicide from the burns and the women's stories. Still, anecdotal evidence suggests that the trend may be aggravated by a copycat effect among Kurdistan's teenagers. One 20-year-old woman, Heshw Mohammad, who briefly considered burning herself after her father killed her boyfriend two years ago, told me that self-immolation has become a sort of fashion among teenage Kurdish women. "They imitate each other," she says.
 
What's the motive—and why fire? Doctors, rights advocates, and young women I spoke to described a collision of local tradition with modern technology and the fallout from the Iraq war. Death by immolation has a long history among ethnic Kurds. When someone is angry here, a popular interjection is: "I'm going to burn myself!" Locals I talked to attributed the fire obsession to various local cultural sources. The Zoroastrian religion uses fire as a prominent symbol. The Kurdish new year, called "Nawroz," commemorates the day a folk hero named Kawa killed a tyrant named Zohak and then set a fire on a mountaintop to tell his followers; Kurds celebrate the day by burning tires and other pyrotechnic displays. "Burning, traditionally, has been the way to die among the Kurdish people," says Yones, the health minister.

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A Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) militant was killed in a clash with Turkish security forces in eastern province Igdir, the semi-official Anatolia news agency reported on Monday.

Acting on a tip-off, the security forces launched an operation against the militants of the outlawed PKK and killed a PKK member in Aralik town of Igdir province on Monday morning, said the report.

In separate incident, three soldiers of the security forces were injured after a landmine, planted by PKK members, exploded in southeastern Sirnak province, said the report.

The PKK has increased attacks on Turkish troops in southeastern Turkey in recent months, which led to rising Turkish demands for an incursion into northern Iraq to crush the rebels based there.

Brussels, 17 Sept. (AKI) - A leading Kurdish politician has accused the Iranian government of conducting a new wave of repression against journalists and other activists seeking greater human rights.

Hassan Sharafi, the deputy head of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan (PDKI), said the government reserved 'particular attention' for ethnic Kurds who had always represented ' a thorn in the side' of the regime.

Iranian Kurdistan has been for months the scene of clashes between Iran's Revolutionary Guards and guerrillas from the Iranian PJAK, which supports of the nationalist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

The Iranian government is accused of bombing villages and arresting journalists, union officials and other activists. It recently condemned to death two journalists, Adnan Hassanpour and Hiwa Boutimar and prominent union leader, Mahmoud Salehi.

"The new repressive wave of arrests against the Kurds that had imprisoned 15 journalists and several human rights activists and the death sentence of two, Boutimar and Hassanpour, demonstrated the government's fear of a popular resistance," Sharafi told Adnkronos International (AKI).

"Until a few years ago, there were only Kurds opposing the Islamic Republic and claiming our rights, now other ethnic minorities are fighting for their rights from the Azerbaijanis to the Beluchis, and the Arabs and the Turks.

"It is a war, not a military war but it has the objective of bringing down the Islamic Republic."

The government continues to accuse opponents, from journalists to women who demand equal rights, of being foreign spies, he said.

"For years the PDKI has been committed to the creation of a broad democratic alliance but unfortunately many political forces are anchored in old conceptions of the state and are not disposed to accept modern and efficient federalism," he told AKI.

Sharafi downplayed the significance of the recent election of Iran's pragmatic former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to head of the influential assembly of experts. The body appoints and oversees Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

"This cannot herald any change of foreign of domestic policy in a country governed by religious ideology," he stated.

"Moreover, in all his years in power, Rafsanjani as always backed highly repressive domestic policies."

"And his foreign policy has always been geared towards increasing tensions with the international community," Sharafi said.

During the eight years that Rafsanjani was president of Iran (1989-1997), several attacks were made against opposition figures living abroad. Two PDKI leaders and members of their staff were killed in attacks in Vienna and Berlin, Sharafi noted.

He rejected claims by Tehran that Irans' etnic minorities are backed and orchestrated by foreign powers, notably Britain and the United States.

He also denied that Iranian Kurds want to secede. "At this time I dont see the possibility of redrawing the border of our region," he told AKI.

"The time-honoured equation of federalism and decentralisation of power with secessionism is an old pretext," he said.

"Avoiding the breakup of a country is used as an excuse by those who want to wield centralised power based on the repression and negation of the rights of ethnic minorities," Sharafi stressed.

15th Anniversary of Assassination of Dr. Sadigh Sharafkandi, Berlin 17 September 1992

Dr. Sharafkandi was born on January 1st, 1938, in the Bokan region of Iranian Kurdistan. He spent two years of his elementary studies in his native village, then his family moved to Mahabad, where he completed his primary and secondary education.

In 1959, he received his degree in chemistry at the Institute of Higher Education in Teheran; from then onwards, up to 1965, he taught chemistry in the Kurdish towns of Ourmieh and Mahabad.

Because of his political activities, he was transferred first to Arak, then to Karaj by the Shah's regime, before being appointed assistant lecturer in chemistry at the Teachers' Higher Training College in Teheran.

In 1972, he went to France to study at the University of Paris VI, where he received his Ph.D. in analytical chemistry in 1976. The same year, he went back to Iran to teach at the Teachers' Higher Training College in Teheran.

After the fall of the Shah's regime in February 1979, he resigned from his position and joined the reawakening Kurdish movement, which in August became the target of a "Holy War" decreed by Ayatollah Khomeini.

Married and the father of 3 children, aside from Kurdish, he also spoke Persian, Arabic, Turkish and French.

HIS POLITICAL LIFE

While studying in Paris in 1973, he met Dr. Abdul Rahman GHASSEMLOU, the Secretary-general of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), and joined the Party. Upon his retum to Iran, he became Dr. Ghassemlou's representative in his country.

In February 1979, after the fall of the Shah's regime, the PDKI's activities became legal. Dr. Sharafkandi was elected alternate member of the Central Committee and appointed as the Party's official in Teheran.

During the summer of 1979, he became a permanent Party cadre and in 1980, during the following Congress, he acceded to the Political Bureau. From then onwards, up to the assassination in July 1989 in Vienna of Dr. Ghassemlou by Iranian emissaries, he was regularly re-elected and put in charge of the Party's publications. In 1986, he also took office as assistant Secretary-seneral of PDKI.

After Dr. Ghassemlou's assassination, he temporarily took over the Party's leadership until December 1991, when he was unanimously elected Secretary-general during the IXth Congress.

Some individuals and groups believed that Dr. GHASSEMLOU's death meant the end of our fight and would bring about the dissolution of PDKI. However, Dr. SHARAFKANDI, in the exercise of his duties as head of the Party, showed such great clear-sightedness, know-how and stout perseverance that the cruel loss of Dr. GHASSEMLOU, immortal leader of the Kurdish people, had less effect on our friends than our enemies had predicted. In all respects, Dr. SHARAFKANDI showed himself to be a worthy successor of Dr. GHASSEMLOU and an exemplary leader of the Kurdish people during a particularly troubled phase of its national liberation fight.

Like his predecessor, Dr. SHARAFKANDI fully understood the necessity to link our people's struggle to the fight of the Iranian population as a whole. He strove incessantly to create stronger ties with the organisations belonging to the Iranian democratic opposition. And it was precisely during one of his meetings with members of the Iranian opposition that he was brutally killed by the enemies of the union of all liberation forces of the peoples of Iran.

Comrade SHARAFKANDI was equally convinced of the need to establish ties of mutual solidarity between the population of Iranian Kurdistan and the Kurds living in other parts of Kurdistan. He proved to be a man of conscience in this respect as well, fully aware of the duties and responsibilities that were his. He also strove to do away with the paradoxical feelings shared by quite a few people about being Iranians as well as Kurds. Dr. SHARAFKANDI saw no contradiction between these terms. He firmly believed that there was not opposition anywhere in the world between the legitimate rights of peoples.

Our Secretary-general also realized the necessity of heightening public awareness of the Kurdish issue, and the important role played by international organisations through their efforts to help the Kurdish liberation movement to achieve victory. It was his aim to draw the international community's attention to the Kurdish issue and to try to obtain its full support. That was the reason for his coming to Europe that summer in 1992. It was also with this aim in mind that he went to Berlin to attend the Congress of the Socialist International between September 15-17 of 1992. Also, barely a few hours after its closing session, the life of this great man in the history of the Kurdish people was brutally and heinously cut short by criminal hands.

These qualities, and many others, earned him the implacable hatred of the Iranian Republic's criminal regime to such an extent that its terrorists pursued him relentlessly wherever he went and eventually managed to assassinate him on September 17, 2001 in Mykonous Restaurant in Berlin.

The Sunday Telegraph

By Philip Sherwell and Tim Shipman

General David Petraeus will press Gordon Brown to increase the number of British troops patrolling the Iraqi border with Iran when he meets the Prime Minister this week.

The US commander in Iraq wants Britain to move a significant proportion of the 5,000 troops garrisoned at Basra airport to cut off the smuggling of Iranian weapons to Shia militias.

But British commanders fear that the move carries a serious risk of embroiling the UK in a war with Iran at a time when they want to withdraw from Iraq.

A former US under-secretary of defence who is now a Pentagon adviser told The Sunday Telegraph that Gen Petraeus would use the meeting to brief Mr Brown on how Iran is stepping up the supply of weapons and the training of insurgents.

"He will argue that action must be taken soon to stop or at least reduce these activities, and that Britain should be a part of this action," the official said. "He will talk about the possibility of increasing security along the Iraqi border with Iran.

"While he will not make the request, he will present the argument that some British forces now being withdrawn from Basra should be transferred to the border security mission."

Last week, at the Americans' request, 350 British troops from 1 Mechanised Brigade began patrolling the border east of Basra and the Shatt al-Arab waterway.

But The Daily Telegraph has revealed that in November about 2,500 of the Basra contingent could be moved out of harm's way across the border into Kuwait, from where they will escort convoys and train Iraqi troops. The move will put Britain further at odds with US commanders.

An adviser to President George W Bush said Britain should think about sending far more troops to the Iranian border instead.

"There are 5,000 troops there," he said. "We want them to stay in Iraq but we also want them to do something useful."

Dan Goure, a Pentagon consultant, said: "Petraeus will be looking for what the British can do to shore up the Iranian border. We are putting a new base there and it's logical we would seek help from our allies."

The move, in the words of an adviser to Mr Brown, leaves the Prime Minister "spinning like a top between the Americans and Richard Dannatt", the head of the Army, who secured a promise from Tony Blair's government that it would not have to fight on two fronts, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gen Petraeus will also call on Britain to keep SAS special forces engaged in Iraq and to maintain control of the headquarters unit overseeing southern Iraq. He will ask for a long notice period if, as expected, the bulk of British troops are ordered home early next year.

For their part, the Americans hope Iranian meddling will force British troops to stay in Basra longer.

But a defence insider who has discussed the issue with officials at the highest levels in the Ministry of Defence said: "They are worried that if they do more on the Iranian border there will be nasty incidents for us at the fag end of a campaign and that we could get sucked into a long-lasting conflict with Iran."

A government official acknowledged: "Gen Petraeus is the commander of coalition forces. If he makes a request, then as long as we have troops there it will be hard to ignore."

Gen Petraeus's trip is designed to damp down angry exchanges over the future of Britain's Iraq deployment.

The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that the US commander in Baghdad, Gen Ray Odierno, is furious at British plans for withdrawal and believes that the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, misled him on the reason for the recent pullback from Basra.

An adviser to Gen Petraeus said: "Odierno said: 'If there's one thing I hate more than being lied to by an American politician, it's being lied to by foreigners'. Browne had to come back to him and admit that it wasn't because the job was done but because the Army can't do both [Iraq and Afghanistan]."

Gen Petraeus will hold a press conference on Tuesday to address British concerns and, in his meetings with Mr Brown and defence chiefs, he will "give assurances that the fighting in Afghanistan is not being neglected as the result of developments in Iraq".

In return, Gen Dannatt is expected to discuss leaving some troops in the Basra headquarters. A US senator who has discussed the issue with Gen Petraeus said: "As far as he is concerned, they are staying."

A Man accused of murder following the death of an Iraqi Kurd on a Scunthorpe street, yesterday denied the charge.

Dlear Ali Mohammed (28), of Digby Street, Scunthorpe, stands accused of the murder of Ako Jabar Abdullah.Mr Abdullah died after being stabbed in the shoulder during an incident on Digby Street on June 24.

Mohammed, who used the services of an interpreter when he appeared at Sheffield Crown Court, spoke only to confirm his details and to enter a not guilty plea to the murder charge.

The case was adjourned for trial. Neither a date or a venue for the trial, which is expected to last 10 days, was set at yesterday's hearing.

There was no application for bail and Mohammed was further remanded in custody.

this is scunthorpe.co.uk

Iran Focus

Iranian authorities hanged three individuals in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan, south-west Iran, state media reported earlier this week.

The unnamed individuals were hanged after the State Supreme Court upheld their sentences earlier this week, said Mousa Piriai, the prosecutor in the provincial capital Ahwaz. He comments were reported by the official news agency IRNA on Thursday.

The three people were accused of involvement in deadly bombings in the restive province more than a year ago. Khuzestan, which borders Iraq, has a large Arab population.

In February, three men hanged for having a role in the bombings. In January, authorities in Ahwaz hanged four men facing similar charges. Three other Arab men were also executed in December for alleged involvement in the attacks.

Dissident Arab activists in Khuzestan have accused the government of setting up trump charges against Arab activists fighting against Tehran’s “repressive policies”.

A string of top Iranian officials, including hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have accused Britain of being behind the bombings in Ahwaz. Tehran has repeatedly accused the British secret services of training ethnic Iranian Arabs in southern Iraq and sending them to Iran to carry out sabotage operations.

London has repeatedly denied any involvement in the events in the region.

Telegraph
Thomas Harding

The battlements of the Iranian border fort began filling with guards alarmed at the sight of four British armoured vehicles 200 yards away with their guns trained across the border. It was the closest that British armour had ever come to Iran and was perhaps a subtle signal that toleration for Teheran's continued supply of weaponry to southern Iraq would no longer be tolerated.

Driving away along the border, littered with rusting tanks from the Iran-Iraq war, our Warrior's main gun now tactfully pointed in the opposite direction towards Basra as we attempted to hunt down the arms smugglers.

This was perhaps not the time to antagonise Teheran's mullahs, with two divisions of Iranian armour conducting exercises just across the border, which had led the Foreign Office to take the unusual step of informing the Iranian embassy about the impending military operation.

With the detention of 15 Royal Navy personnel last March and eight Royal Marines three years earlier, the coming months of British operations on Iran's border could prove sensitive as the diplomatic language from the United States hardens.

Mindful of these sensitivities, the cavalrymen of the King's Royal Hussars, veterans of a summer of ferocious fighting in Basra, were not taking any risks.

The threat of kidnap was taken seriously and as night closed in after our first day in the desert the guard was doubled.

advertisementMajor Chris MacGregor, the commander of D Squadron, KRH, re-emphasised to his troops the risk from across the border a mere five miles from our camouflaged position.

Either the Iranians would try to spy on our position or perhaps even attempt to snatch a British soldier.

"Or nick one of our iPods," one of the cavalrymen joked in reference to one of the 15 kidnapped sailors who cried when his music player was confiscated.

Operation Certain Shield continues today as part of the new thrust to clamp down on Iran's smuggling of "lethal aid" to Iraq.

Following the withdrawal of British troops from Basra two weeks ago, the Iraqi commander in the south, General Mohan, has asked the Army to secure the flanks on either side of the city.

This will mean a near constant British presence in the large expanse of desert 12 miles from Basra and along the Shatt al Arab waterway.

Stopping the weapons coming in is vital, as with Teheran's assistance the insurgents have achieved in one year a sophistication in bomb-making that took the Provisional IRA 20 years to develop, senior British officers told The Daily Telegraph.

Explosive Formed Projectile (EFP) bombs have penetrated the very best of British armour and regularly kill and injure soldiers.

A senior military commander in southern Iraq said the influence of Iranian manufactured munitions meant the insurgents could "attack us more decisively".

The motivation, in what has been called a proxy war, was to "oppose asymmetrically" the pressure Western powers were applying to stop Iran's nuclear programme and to "embarrass the coalition mission".

Iran was also feeling the pressure with coalition troops on its borders with Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The real ability the insurgents have got is EFP penetrating our main battle tank, which they did once in April," the senior officer said.

"That gives an idea of the capability and sophistication they have got."

He also gave warning that the British force in Helmand province would have to prepare for "the potential movement of the capability into Afghanistan" if Iran "wanted to similarly disrupt coalition activity".

Major Edward Dawes, the battery commander of Chestnut Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, said his six 155mm guns had rained 900 shells on insurgents firing Iranian-made rockets and mortars at Basra air base.

The deadly EFPs are made from a conical cone of steel which fires a super-heated bolt of metal that burns through nearly all armour and could only have been made on very precise machine presses.

Lt Col Patrick Sanders, who commanded 4Bn The Rifles in Basra Palace during some of the most intense warfare experienced in Basra, said the bombs were "not something you can make in a shed".

He believed Iran's motivation was to gain credit for "driving us out". Iran was looking in the longer term "to humiliate the British and try and deter us from going back and doing this sort of thing again".

Publishers wishing to reproduce photographs on this page should phone 44 (0) 207 931 2921 or email syndication@telegraph.co.uk

Iran Focus Tehran, Iran, Sep. 14 – Authorities have stepped up arrests of young people in the city of Karaj, west of the Iranian capital Tehran, as part of a nationwide “plan to eradicate corruption”. Dissidents charge that Tehran’s clerical rulers are fiercely cracking down on youths disenchanted with the government’s repressive policies rather than on “trouble-makers”. The following photos of the crackdown were published earlier this week by state media:

Iran Focus Iranian authorities have stepped up arrests of young people in the city of Karaj, west of the capital Tehran, as part of a nationwide “plan to eradicate corruption”. Dissidents charge that Tehran’s clerical rulers are fiercely cracking down on youths disenchanted with the government’s repressive policies rather than on “trouble-makers”. The following photos of the crackdown were published earlier this week by state media:

by Abdel Hamid Zebari

ARBIL, Iraq (AFP) - Iraq's northern Kurdish administration has demanded Baghdad's oil minister be sacked, following his remarks that oil contracts signed by the regional government are "illegal."
The call by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) late Thursday deals another blow to attempts by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to forge a national consenus on the controversial issue of dividing up the spoils of Iraq's vast oil reserves.

Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani should quit rather than "interfere in the internal affairs" of the Kurdish region, KRG spokesman Khalid Saleh told reporters in Arbil.

Shahristani at a recent meeting of OPEC in Vienna said that all oil contracts signed in Iraq's Kurdish region are "illegal" as a controversial oil law is yet to be passed in the parliament.

The regional government has signed contracts with several global oil companies to explore crude oil in its region, which houses the bulk of the country's oil reserves.

Kurdish officials say they will honour the contracts, and also claim to have reached an agreement with Baghdad whereby it will receive 17 percent of the country's oil revenues.

In a separate statement, the KRG said the minister was "strongly advised to stay out of issues over which he has no authority."

"But once again he has repeated his false mantra of 'it is illegal'. Unfortunately this has been his way of dealing with the legitimate concerns of the hard working oil union members in the south, with the achievements of the KRG or with any other organisation that he does not like."

The statement said the minister must focus on preventing "illegal oil smuggling under his watch, which is crippling the Iraqi economy."

Saleh said if Shahristani failed in this he should resign and allow some other "person more qualified than him" to do his job.

The regional government also accused the minister of favouring contracts signed with companies who operated during the former regime of Saddam Hussein.

"The answer is to get on with the agreed draft oil law and present it without changes to the parliament. That way we will all get on with the task of developing the oil industry for the benefit of the people," the KRG said.

Iraq's oil infrastructure has been hit by decades of under-investment as a result of successive Gulf wars, 13 years of UN sanctions and the rampant insecurity that followed the US-led invasion in 2003.

Washington regards passage of the controversial oil legislation as key to efforts at national reconciliation in the country which is wracked by an insurgency and sectarian violence.

US President George W. Bush in his televised address to the nation late Thursday bluntly acknowledged he was not satisfied with the pace of Iraqi political reforms that Washington views as critical to forging national unity.

"The government has not met its own legislative benchmarks," said Bush, who directed a message to Iraq's people that "you must demand that your leaders make the tough choices needed to achieve reconciliation."

The draft oil and gas law provides for earnings to be shared equally between Iraq's 18 provinces in a bid to allay Sunni fears they will be monopolised by Kurdish and Shiite provinces which contain the oilfields.

But it also opens up Iraq's long state-controlled hydrocarbons sector to foreign involvement.

The draft law was passed by Maliki's cabinet in July but faces tough passage in the 275-seat legislature, where the Kurdish bloc has 53 seats.

By Brian Padden
Irbil
VOA NEWS

The Kurdish region of Iraq is still coming to terms with the cultural and political ramifications of the brutal honor killing of a 17-year-old Yazidi girl in April. Men in her village killed the girl because she was in love with a Muslim boy. A video of the killing helped fuel public outrage after it appeared on the Internet. Human rights groups say so-called honor killings in Iraq are all too common and not limited to any one religious sect. VOA's Brian Padden reports on how one group is using the controversy in an attempt to educate the public and change the culture.

An outdoor art exhibit in the Kurdish city of Irbil displays the instruments typically used in honor killings. These are acts in which women are killed by their husbands or other men in the community for perceived moral transgressions. There is a knife like the one used by a man who reportedly stabbed his 19-year-old sister, a kerosene stove that activists say is often used to burn women to death and cinder blocks like those used in the most infamous honor killing in the Kurdish region of Iraq.

In April, men from the Yazidi sect, a religious minority in Northern Iraq, used cell phone cameras to record the killing of Do'a Khalil. The footage that appeared on the Internet shows men crushing her skull with cinder blocks. The scenes are too graphic for VOA to broadcast.

The art exhibit organizer Chilura Hardi is trying to sustain the public outrage that followed Do'a Khalil's death and change a culture that condones violence against women. "It's OK to raise awareness about it. Why these things are happening in the past? This is a different day and maybe we should look at changing these kinds of things."

Chilura Hardi heads a Kurdish women's center in Irbil. She says the problem of honor killings permeates all ethnic and religious groups in Iraq. Her organization produces a magazine and operates a call-in radio station by and for women that tries to raise awareness about these issues. But she says reaching Muslim men is more challenging.

She is quite critical of what she calls uneducated mullahs who blame women for the problems in society. "It is always women, women, women. And who's listening to all these talks that the mullahs are giving? [They] are men on Fridays. They go to Friday prayer and they are listening to this."

Imam Basher Al Hadad of the Jelil Hayat Mosque in Irbil says he cannot speak for all the mullahs, but he says the Koran does not condone honor killings.

"Women are human and killing humans without any just reason is forbidden. So killing women is also forbidden. You mustn't do it."

At the art exhibit Chilura Hardi says she is encouraged by comments she hears from some of the men in attendance. "Any man who sees this will be changed.

The honor killing is starting from the communities. So starting from the children, we have to learn them there is no difference between female and male."

Ultimately, Hardi says to end the practice of honor killing, leaders must speak out, laws must be enforced and attitudes towards women on every level of society must change.

Khaleej Times Online
Matein Khaled

We did not make the revolution to lower the price of watermelons”. Ayatollah Khoeimini’s observation was prescient.

The revolutionary era that began in 1979 has proved an economic catastrophe for Iran. US sanctions, colossal capital flight both under the Shah and the clerical regime, gasoline subsidies, erratic policy making, corruption, mismanagement of state companies, the economic monopolies of the bonyads (foundations) and the Revolutionary Guards, the international banking credit freeze engineered by US Treasury and the devastation from the war with Saddam’s Iraq have all contributed to Iran’s economic sclerosis.

Even though Iran earns more than $40 billion in oil revenues, Bank Markazi has $60 billion in central bank reserves and NIOC pumps more oil than any state owned oil company in the Gulf other than Saudi Aramco, the economic metrics of revolutionary Iran are pathetic. The state influences 80 per cent of the Iranian economy. Iran pumps a third less oil in 2007 than in the last year of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s reign in 1978. The jobless rate is estimated above 25 per cent. Gasoline rationing, unpaid wages low teacher salaries have triggered riots and street protests. Iran barely attracts $1 billion in FDI, one tenth the level of Turkey or Egypt, both comparable economies. The stock market has crashed since the election of President Ahmedinijad and his subsequent attack on the economic reforms and the business elite of the Khatami and Rafsanjani era. Iran’s uranium enrichment programme has only provoked US sanctions and deepened its international isolation. Even though Iran enjoyed a petrodollar windfall with $75 crude oil, no less than 150,000 Iranian university graduates emigrate each year and wealthy Iranians are desperate to find offshore nest eggs for hidden cash.

President Ahmedinijad campaigned on a platform of economic populism, fulminating against “oil mafias” and “capital speculators”, the cynical elite of past-Shah Iran, often the progeny of top Iranian officials and clerics. Yet the president’s erratic decisions have only worsened Iran’s economic malaise. Ahmedinijad ordered banks to slash interest rates during a time of high inflation without even consulting the governor of central bank or the minister of planning. The president also ordered the minimum wage to be increased by 50 per cent, thus ensuring that endemic unemployment became worse. His calls for “justice shares” for the poor in Iran’s state owned companies have been the kiss of death for the private sector’s interest in the regimes embryonic but deeply flawed privatisation programme.

Ahmedinijad has also strengthened the economic power of the Revolutionary Guards, awarding them valuable concessions, monopolies and a $2.3 billion contract to develop the South Pars natural gas oilfields. Now that the Bush White House has designed the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organisation, vast swathes of the Iranian economy are off limits to foreign investors. International banks UBS, Deutsche, HSBC, Credit Suisse and Barclays have also ended their financial ties to Iran under American pressure. The US Treasury has also blackballed Bank Saderat and Bank Sepah from the international money markets, accusing the banks of financing arms shipments to Hezbollah and nuclear component smuggling.

Iran’s economic failure cannot be blamed on President Ahmedinijad alone. US sanctions have prevented Iran from importing American technology to develop its industrial base or oil infrastructure. While oil sales account for 80 per cent of Iranian exports, Teheran’s buyback terms and corrupt bureaucrats have inhibited production joint ventures with even Indian, Chinese and Russian oil companies.

The IMF estimates that Iran state subsidies on gasoline, food, housing, bank credit and fertiliser account for 25 per cent of GDP, a recipe for economic disaster. Government spending in Iran has gone ballistic with the rise in crude oil prices. The gasoline subsidy ensures Iran has the cheapest petrol in the world, a major factor that explains Teheran’s clogged traffic, pollution and oil smuggling syndicates. The billions of dollars Iran wastes in subsidising gasoline should have been used to build local refining capacity or upgrade ageing oilfields in a rational world but the economics of revolutionary Iran is anything but rational.

The state owned foundations (bonyads) wield extraordinary power in Iran, owning hundreds of companies whose output is 25 per cent of the national GDP. They enjoy tax subsidies and preferential access to the banking system that enable them to simply “crowd out” the private sector. Privatisation in Iran has proved an illusion, a mere reshuffle of state assets among companies owned by rival fractions in the theocratic elites of Qom and Teheran. It is ironic that though the merchants of the Teheran bazaars were the financiers of Ayatollah Khomeini in the last decade of the Shah’s regime and the pistachio magnate Ali Akber Hashemi Rafsanjani became the president of Iran and is still the regime’s eminence grise and power broker, no pro-business political party exists in Iran’s political constellation. The arbitrary intervention and quixotic decision making of President Ahmedinijad has dealt a serious blow to investor confidence. Iran’s economic failure is all the more poignant given the financial success and wealth creation in the GCC. The economic malaise of revolutionary Iran has hit its young hardest, 800,000 of who graduate from university each year in an anemic job market. This is a political time bomb for the regime in the years ahead.

Matein Khalid is a Dubai-based investment banker and economic analyst.

original article

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 13, 2007; Page A01

RANIYAH, Iraq -- They have made camp below the mountainsides that smolder and smoke in the thin alpine air. They live in caves now, or old tents, or under goat-hair tarps, and sleep on woven rugs over a bed of stones. Their villages are empty of all but ducks and chickens, because the villagers will not hike back until they can no longer hear the sounds.

"Do you hear that?" asked Taban Koha Rasheed, over a deep, distant rumbling, as she knelt under her tarp in a creek bed sheltered by the walls of a steep ravine. "It's started again."

For four weeks now, Kurdish villagers in this far northeastern corner of Iraq have endured a punishing barrage of rockets and artillery shells from what they say are Iranian troops across the border. The seemingly indiscriminate shelling has burned acres of orchards and grassland, damaged homes, killed livestock and driven about 2,500 people to abandon about two dozen villages.

The attacks are an ominous reminder that the emergence of an increasingly self-sufficient Kurdish region in northern Iraq could provoke reprisals or even invasions by Iran and Turkey.

"This is the worst bombing that this area has ever seen," said Ibrahim Muhammed Amin Muhammed Sor, a 37-year-old Kurdish chicken farmer.

For a few days in August, Sor endured the barrage. These rugged mountain dwellers are accustomed to violence: The area was shelled repeatedly during the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s.

In more recent years, neighbors Iran and Turkey have staged sporadic attacks in an attempt to drive out Kurdish separatist guerrillas who reside in the hills. The attacks grew more intense beginning Aug. 16, and one night, leaflets floated down onto Sor's farm.

"The Islamic state of Iran sends its greetings," began the letter, written in a Kurdish dialect called Sorani. It accused the United States of using "hired agents and spies" in the area to "destabilize security in our country, through your borders."

"And we would like you to be aware that our land and air operations will go on through the coming days to chase away those elements," it read. "We are making you aware so that none of you get hurt."

Villagers and Iraqi officials in the area say their territory is now caught up in a growing regional war made worse by deteriorating relations between Iran and the United States. Some accuse Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has close ties with Iran, of failing to protect the Kurds.

"I don't like Saddam Hussein, but he considered this Iraqi territory and he defended it," said Aziz Khuder Hussein, 75, a shepherd and fruit tree farmer who fled his village when the shelling began. "Maliki is an ally of Iran and he would not damage his alliance for us."

In diplomatic meetings in Tehran and Baghdad, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, has demanded that Iran cease its attacks in Iraq.

"We want this shelling to be halted, because it's causing damage to the border population and is disproportionate to the level of threat that some of the armed groups or terrorist groups are causing to the interests of the Islamic Republic" of Iran, he said at a news conference Sunday in Baghdad.

An official at the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad said that within the past three months, Kurdish rebels have staged suicide attacks and committed other violence that killed at least 10 members of the Iranian security forces. "This is why Iran wants to solve this security matter on the borders," he said.

But the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, insisted that the accounts of shelling were "rumors and not true" and that "everything that we have done is inside the Iranian territory, not inside Iraq."

"No Kurds have been wounded or affected by that," he said.

Iraqi and U.S. soldiers do not regularly patrol the steep slopes and narrow rocky paths that make much of the border region nearly impassable. The de facto authorities here are the Kurdish guerrilla groups -- considered terrorist organizations by the Turkish and Iranian governments -- whose grenade-strapped fighters stand lonely sentry on the mountain switchbacks.

The young men and women who hail from the Kurdish diaspora in Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria fight for greater Kurdish influence in those countries. The most prominent among the guerrilla groups is the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which focuses its efforts against Turkey. Its affiliate organization of Iranian Kurds is called the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.

"They are targeting the area under the pretext that the PKK and PJAK are there, but they're not hitting the positions," said one PKK official on condition of anonymity. "Iran's actual goals, which they will not announce, is to strike the U.S. and destabilize Iraq."

At a safe house on a desolate slope in the Qandil range, the head of the PKK, Murat Karayilan, said he believed the recent campaign arose because Iran, Turkey and Syria have aligned against what he calls the "Kurdish freedom movement." Karayilan, a stout, mustachioed man in olive-drab fatigues and a thick leather belt, has taken control of the rebel group in Iraq while its highest leader, Abdullah Ocalan, languishes in an island prison in Turkey.

While Karayilan now is pushing for more rights for Kurds across the Middle East, he suggested that his organization's long-term goal is to establish semiautonomous regional entities in those countries similar to the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq. Many politicians in Iraqi Kurdish territory, however, say they are hostile toward the PKK and would like to drive out the rebel group but cannot spare the soldiers.

This year, Turkey sent tens of thousands of troops to the Iraqi border, raising fears of a major invasion, in what Turkish officials said was a response to PKK attacks in southern Turkey. The shelling by Iranian troops, Karayilan said, serves as a vote of solidarity with Turkey in the campaign against the rebels and the larger Kurdish community. But the timing, he indicated, also reflects an attempt to delay an important Iraqi referendum, scheduled for later this year, on whether to include the oil-rich city of Kirkuk as part of the Kurdish region.

"The third aim of these attacks is to try to give a message to the United States of America and the other international forces," he said. "The Iranians are against the Kurds but at the same time they are very much against the Americans as well."

Iran's deputy foreign minister for Arab affairs, Mohammad R. Baqiri, told reporters in Baghdad on Sunday that an Iranian committee had been formed to look into the border response. But he also accused the U.S. military of supporting Iranian Kurdish rebels in Iraq and said that "if a terrorist group wants to launch attacks from the territories of the other country . . . we should discipline those people who conduct those operations."

A U.S. Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col. Jonathan Withington, said in an e-mail: "I am not aware of any support being provided to the PJAK."

The Kurdish refugees from the shelling say they are the victims of the Iranian strategy. Ahmed Shilhan, 89, said his son lost an eye when he was struck by shrapnel. Several of Baiz Aziz Khuder's sheep died in the shelling. His father, Aziz Khuder Hussein, recalled watching his apple orchards burning, then piling his family into his Nissan Patrol to escape. A shell burst nearby, spraying shrapnel into his vehicle, he said.
"My daughter-in-law is pregnant and I am afraid she will miscarry," he said, huddled with 30 relatives and neighbors under a tree where they are living. "It feels like we have lost everything."

When the shelling started, Taban Koha Rasheed, 28, was sitting at her breakfast table with a bowl of goat's milk yogurt. The first shells fell high on the mountain above Upper Arcae village, then dozens more swept down into the valley. Her dishes crashed down off the shelves. The windows in her stone house shattered. A shell slammed into the outhouse. "It was like an earthquake hitting the house and everything fell down," she recalled.

Rasheed, a nurse, led several relatives and children into a nearby cave, but a shell burst next to the entrance, spraying them with rocks and dirt, so they rushed farther down the mountain. "The kids kept crying and we couldn't keep them silent," she said. "During the bombing it felt like they wanted to eliminate us."

After walking for several hours, Rasheed and her neighbors camped along a creek, with little more than a few blankets and the food they could carry. The Iraqi Red Crescent and officials in the Kurdish region have contributed additional supplies.

Residents from different villages have staked out territory in these ravines. As the days passed, they brought their goats, sheep and cattle down to the river, and arguments have sprung up over animals crossing into other villages' campsites.

Rasheed now passes her days treating scorpion bites, fevers and stomach sickness from drinking creek water. Other villagers milk goats, cook rice and tea over wood fires, and watch over the children.

One morning last week, after a few days of respite from the shelling, the sound of thunder filled the ravine, but there were no clouds in the sky. Mir Hamza Farha, an elderly woman with bright red hair under her black and white head scarf, knelt by the shallow creek. She closed her eyes, raised her face and open palms to the sun, and prayed she would be spared.

"The bombs are coming," she shouted across the water. "You must leave now!"

Smoke from the shelling began to rise from the tan hills above their campsite. Farha herself had no place left to go.

Special correspondents Saad al-Izzi and Dlovan Brwari contributed to this report.

i receive this letter from some one

WHERE IS HUMAN RIGHT ?
WHERE IS DEMOKRACY ?
WHERE IS RIGHTEOUSNESS?
WHERE IS HUMANITY ?

ALL OF THEM FALSELY

Dear sir/madam
my name is * im a kurdish from iran and i live in united kingdom my hospital number is * .
my home office Ref: ***
Nass Ref ***
I have diabetis and i had heart attack on 12/02/2007 and heart operation on 06/03/2007 but im homless in this country because the government not support me and i live in friend house some time or i sleep in friend car.
i have 2 route

1- i go hunger strike in *** city centre close my mouth,eyes,ear,foot,hands until to die.

2- i want to sale or gift 1 of my kidney.
if some one support me for 2 years i will give them 1 of my kidney
if not any one support me i will sale to any one who give me more many.
Iam filed asylum on 5/09/2007 to leave united kingdom but i had fresh claim on 24/08/2007 and homeoffice not accept my fresh claim until now. .
my life is danger in iran if my life is safe in iran why i stay for 7 years in the united kingdom really i miss my wife and my family but i cant go back hope i see them 1 days.
this letter will be send to human right www.amnesty.org www.rsf.org,*** mp,refugee council,all website media,home office,nhs,more
Yours sincerely
***

TO HELP HIM SEND MAIL TO UR LOCAL MP

www.theyworkforyou.com/mps OR http://www.writetothem.com

OR SEND MAIL TO: Amy Harris
Email: Amy_Harris@mrn.co.uk

By SELCAN HACAOGLU
Associated Press Writer

ANKARA, Turkey - Turkish troops killed four Kurdish guerrillas in a southeastern province Wednesday, a day after police defused a bomb in the capital that authorities believe may have been planted by separatist rebels.

The clash in the southeastern province of Siirt was the latest bout of fighting between soldiers and rebels who have bases in neighboring Iraq and have been at war with the Turkish state since 1984.

On the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, authorities discovered more than 1,320 pounds of explosives packed into a minibus parked near a marketplace in Ankara.

Police were looking for the driver of the minibus, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported. A witness said an unidentified man parked the minibus at a parking garage lot near a market around 4 p.m. Monday, saying he was bringing goods to sell, the agency said.

Experts said explosives found in the vehicle, which was stolen from Istanbul last year and yielded no fingerprints, were similar to those seized in the past from Kurdish separatists. Police have said the findings so far suggest Kurdish rebels were behind the foiled attack.

Sniffer dogs led officers to the blue minibus as Turkey, an ally of the United States, had increased security ahead of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Ankara governor's office said police found sacks of bomb-making materials, including chemicals and gas canisters connected to a cell phone — a method often used by Kurdish rebels in roadside bombings against troops in the Kurdish-dominated southeast near the Iraqi border.

Some newspapers said Wednesday the chemicals were ammonium nitrate or cheap fertilizer, a bomb ingredient.

Also on Tuesday, police found explosives and a weapon when they searched a car in the eastern province of Van before President Abdullah Gul's arrival there, according to private Star television. Two people in the car were arrested, Star said.

Suicide bombers linked to al-Qaida hit Istanbul in 2003 with truck bombs containing ammonium nitrate-based bombs, killing 58 people in attacks that targeted two synagogues, the British Consulate and a British bank. In February, a court sentenced seven people to life in prison in the bombings.

Turkey, a predominantly Muslim but secular country, is a key NATO ally. It supports U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq through the Incirlik Air Base in the southern part of the country, one of the most important U.S. military bases in the region.

The van's license plate had been stolen from another vehicle, and the owner had tipped off police about the theft, Anatolia said.

In May, a suicide bombing in one of Ankara's busiest markets killed six people and wounded dozens more. That bombing was blamed on the Kurdistan Workers' Party, but the group denied involvement.

Turkey has accused Kurdish rebels of smuggling hundreds of pounds of explosives into the country from Iraq, where the guerrillas have been based for decades. Turkey is pressuring Iraq and the United States to crack down on the group in Iraq, threatening its own measures if others do not.

Associated Press Writer C. Onur Ant in Istanbul contributed to this report.

The hands of four men were chopped off as punishment for robbery in north-west Iran, state media reported on Wednesday.

The prosecutor’s office in the city of Mashad identified the four men only by their initials E. K., H. F., M. D., and Q. R., according to the state-run news agency ISNA.

The sentence was carried out on Tuesday, the report added.

The men had been charged with repeated robbery. Each had one hand amputated.

Iran Focus

Iranian authorities hanged seven individuals in public on Wednesday in the south-eastern town of Mahan, state media reported.

The seven men were identified as Ali Orang, Davoud Talebi, Majid Barzekar, Majid Man’ami, Mohammad Bameri, Amr Bameri, and Mehdi Pour-Sheikh-Ali

“These seven individuals were hanged for trouble-making and armed drug trafficking”, the head of Mahan’s Revolutionary Court, Ali Salari, told the government-owned news agency Fars.

On Friday, the chief of state security forces in Mahan was killed by “trouble-makers”, the report added.

Iranian authorities routinely execute dissidents on bogus charges such as armed robbery and drug smuggling.

Reuters

LONDON -- A mysterious Israeli air raid in Syria may have been triggered by suspicions Damascus is building nuclear arms, to test new Syrian air defences or to stop Iranian weapons reaching Hezbollah, U.S. and Western officials say.

Amid widespread media speculation and a blanket silence from the Israeli and U.S. governments, however, nothing is certain.

Recalling the failure of U.S. forces to find much evidence of Iraqi secret weapons whose alleged development was part of the justification for the 2003 invasion, some analysts caution that there seems little evidence for suspicions against Syria.

An Israeli government spokesman again on Wednesday declined all comment on the incident, over which Syria has complained to the United Nations saying Israeli aircraft "dropped munitions".

The U.S. government, for which Syria forms part of a hostile alliance with Iran and Hezbollah, has also declined to comment.

Israeli President Shimon Peres on Wednesday called the episode "spilt milk" but gave no details of what actually did happen and insisted that Israel still wanted peace with Syria.

But Israeli public radio stations, which like all media in the country are under military censorship, led Wednesday's bulletins with a New York Times report that U.S. officials said Israel did carry out an air strike on September 6 and that U.S. officials believed Syria may have obtained nuclear material.

Israeli newspapers gave prominent coverage to a CNN report quoting U.S. sources saying that Israeli aircraft and possibly ground troops struck Iranian arms bound for Lebanon's Hezbollah movement, with which Israel fought a war last year.

One U.S. diplomatic source told Reuters that Deir az-Zor, the northeastern area where Syria said the Israeli bombs caused no damage, was suspected by U.S. officials of being the focus of some form of cooperation on nuclear weapons with North Korea.

"The suspicion is that North Korea is outsourcing uranium enrichment to Damascus," the diplomatic source said.

However, another U.S. official and former U.S. intelligence officials said this seemed unlikely and technically difficult.

"TARGET"

The New York Times quoted an unnamed Pentagon official saying Israeli jets struck at least one target in northeastern Syria but adding that it was not clear what was hit.

One U.S. official source told Reuters there was some concern in Washington that North Korea had hidden uranium enrichment facilities abroad. But the source added that it seemed unlikely Pyongyang would risk derailing a deal with the United States to end its nuclear arms programme by sending material to Syria.

In Vienna, two senior diplomats familiar with the International Atomic Energy Agency said they knew of no serious suspicions of nuclear links between Syria and North Korea.

The New York Times quoted U.S. officials saying Israel's most likely targets in Syria were Iranian arms for Hezbollah, against whom Israel fought a month-long war last year.

The paper also quoted one U.S. official saying Israel believed that North Korea was selling Syria nuclear material.

One former U.S. intelligence official who still follows the Middle East closely said he believed previous comments from Western diplomats in Damascus that last week's incident centred on an attempt by Israel to test whether Syria's air defences had been improved since purchases of new equipment from Russia.

The former official said he doubted Syria had significant secret weapons. Another former U.S. intelligence official said he was not aware of serious suspicions in Washington that Syria had a nuclear programme of any kind.

JERUSALEM - Israeli warplanes last week bombed and destroyed a northern Syrian missile base that was financed by Iran, an Arab Israeli newspaper reported on Wednesday. Citing anonymous Israeli sources, the Assennara newspaper said that Israeli jets “bombed in northern Syria a Syrian-Iranian missile base financed by Iran... It appears that the base was completely destroyed.”

Syria on Tuesday lodged a formal complaint with the United Nations over the “flagrant violation” of its airspace last Thursday, during which it said its air defences opened fire on Israeli warplanes flying over the northeast of the country.

Israeli officials have refused to comment on the report, as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “specifically instructed ministers not to talk about the incident related to Syria at all,” one senior Israeli government official said.

A US defence official said on Tuesday that Israel had launched an air strike well inside Syria, apparently to send Damascus a message not to rearm Shiite Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.

The official did not know the target of the strike.

“The Israelis are trying to tell the Syrians: “Don’t support a resurgence of Hezbollah in Lebanon.’”

Israel fought a devastating 34-day war in July and August 2006 against Hezbollah, whose missile firepower and use of sophisticated weaponry surprised the Israelis.

CNN said the strike, which could have also involved the use of ground forces, was believed to have targeted weapons either coming into Syria or moving through Syria from Iran to the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.

AFP
Khaleej Times Online

By Amir Taheri
Newyork post

September 12, 2007 -- FOR the last year at least, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the back bone of the Islamic Republic in Iran, has been engaged in a bloody war against Kurdish rebels in four provinces bordering Iraq.

Initially, the authorities in Tehran tried to keep the war a secret, referring to it only occasionally as "operations against evildoers."

However, things changed last February when "evildoers" destroyed a Revolutionary Guard combat helicopter, killing nine officers - including the regional military commander, Gen. Saeed Qahhari. The incident took place in a western Azerbaijan province - where Kurds, though present in big numbers, form only a minority.

The Guard retaliated with a series of attacks against alleged Kurdish rebel positions in the mountainous area around the border town of Salmas, killing 17 "Kurdish evildoers," including their local commander, a naturalized German citizen of Turkish-Kurdish origin, code-named Doctor Meraat. Since then, the Guard has issued cryptic reports about dozens of other "engagements" in which scores of policemen, border patrols and Guard members have been killed or wounded while killing at least 100 Kurdish insurgents.

Recently, a group of alleged insurgents ambushed a police van near Kermanshah, a provincial capital close to the Iraqi border, and killed seven police officers.

What is known in Tehran as "the Kurdish threat" clearly represents a key security concern of the Islamic Republic's leaders as they prepare for a broader regional war. To curb the insurgency, the Guard has set up a special command center at the Hamza Base, near the Iraqi border, and committed one full division plus a unit of airborne Special Forces.

The Guard claims that the rebels are based in Iraqi Kurdistan. Yet all the fighting reported until earlier this month has taken place well inside Iranian territory, often in areas with a non-Kurdish majority.

In June, the Guard started shelling Iraqi Kurdish villages - killing an unknown number of Kurds, both Iraqis and Iranians who had sought refuge in Iraq. Despite protests by the Iraqi government, including one delivered face-to-face by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in his meeting with Iranian "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenei in Tehran earlier this summer, the Guard has continued its attacks on Iraqi villages. The shelling has forced thousands of villagers, both Iranian and Iraqi Kurds, to abandon their homes for towns deeper inside Iraq.

The areas most affected by the fighting are within the strongholds of Iraqi Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani. Each has a history of close ties with Iran going back four decades - but because both allied themselves with the United States in toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, Tehran suspects them of trying to foment a Kurdish insurgency in Iran as part of a bigger "American plot" to destabilize the Islamic Republic.

Yet the three Kurdish groups involved in the anti-Khomeinist insurgency can hardly be regarded as vassals of either Iraqi Kurdish chief.

The group most active in the recent fighting is a new outfit, the Kurdistan Free Life Party, better known by its Kurdish acronym, PJAK. Judging by its literature, PJAK is an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) a guerrilla movement of Turkish Kurds that has been fighting for a Kurdish state in eastern Anatolia since the 1970s.

Ironically, Tehran has given the PKK shelter and support against Turkey for years, as a means of bleeding NATO's lone regional member. Some claim that Ankara may have decided to repay Tehran in its own currency by creating PJAK. Others, however, regard PJAK as an effort by PKK to expand its constituency beyond Turkey.

Certainly, however, most of PJAK's leaders are not Iranian Kurds. Some key party figures are Turkish Kurds who have lived in exile in Germany for at least a quarter-century. Moreover, PJAK has been operating in areas in Iran that are close to PKK strongholds in Turkey and Iraq - another indication that the two parties may well be one with two names.

The areas where PJAK is active in Iran are home to substantial numbers of ethnic Kurds. But the majority in most areas consists of Turkic-speaking Azeris. In the Kurdish heartland of Iran - the two provinces of Kurdistan and Kermanshahan, where ethnic Kurds are in majority - PJAK appears to have little support.

There, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (PDK) enjoys the largest support, followed by Komalah, a formerly communist outfit that claims to have converted to democracy after the fall of the Soviet empire.

The PDK, a self-styled social-democratic group, has campaigned for greater autonomy for Iranian Kurds since the 1940s. After the mullahs seized power in 1979, it helped the regime in the hope of obtaining concessions. The mullahs, however, banned it and organized the assassination of two successive generations of its leaders in exile in Vienna and Berlin in 1989 and 2002.

The group has since joined Iranian opposition groups that call for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic, but has not preached armed uprising as a means of achieving that goal. Komalah, however, has waged a guerrilla war against the Islamic Republic for 25 years, paying a high price in human terms.

The Tehran rumor mill claims that the replacement of the senior Guard leaders, including its commander, is a sign that the "Supreme Guide" is unhappy about the spreading Kurdish insurgency along the Iraqi border. As always in the Islamic Republic, however, Tehran's claims of a U.S.-hatched plot to incite the Kurds against the mullahs should be taken with a pinch of salt.

The Tehran leadership may be using the claim to justify building a string of fortifications along the border with Iraq in anticipation of conflict with the United States. If attacked, Iran could then retaliate by entering Iraq from the three Kurdish provinces most loyal to Washington and regarded as the only "safe haven" for U.S. forces there, while inciting the Iraqi Shiites to rise in revolt in the central and southern provinces.

Talk of a Kurdish insurgency also helps Tehran impose what amounts to a state of emergency in parts of the four provinces with large Kurdish populations. This has enabled the authorities to arrest hundreds of opponents - including trade unionists, student leaders, journalists, lawyers and Sunni Muslim clerics - without bothering about legal formalities. At least 20 opposition leaders have been executed since last March, often in circumstances that resemble political assassinations rather than judicial killings.

There's no doubt that the areas where Iran's estimated 4.5 million ethnic Kurds live are in turmoil, posing a challenge to the regime's leadership. The challenge, however, comes from political dissidents, especially working-class activists, not guerrillas operating from bases in Iraq.

Two men were hanged in central and north-eastern Iran on Tuesday, state media reported.

One of the men, identified as Mohammad Hossein-Zadeh, 49, was hanged in public in the holy city of Qom, central Iran, the government-owned news agency Fars said.

The second man, identified only as Javad Z., was hanged in a prison in the city of Mashad, a separate report said.

www.hpg-online.net/eng

The Associated Press

By MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON (AP) — Iran must pay $2.65 billion to the families of the 241 U.S. service members killed in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, a federal judge declared Friday in a ruling that left survivors and families shedding tears of joy.

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth described his ruling as the largest-ever such judgment by an American court against another country. "These individuals, whose hearts and souls were forever broken, waited patiently for nearly a quarter century for justice to be done," he said.

Iran has been blamed for supporting the militant group Hezbollah, which carried out the suicide bombing in Beirut. It was the worst terrorist act against U.S. targets until the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Hundreds of people crowded into a federal courtroom to hear Friday's ruling. Parents have grown old since their children were killed. Siblings have grown into middle-age. Children have married and started families of their own.

Weeping spectators stood and erupted in applause and hugs as Lamberth left the bench.

The ruling allows nearly 1,000 family members and a handful of survivors to try to collect Iranian assets from various sources around the world. Finding and seizing that money will be difficult, however, and the families are backing a law in Congress that would make it easier for terrorism victims and their families to do so.

Families were encouraged by Libya's decision to ultimately accept responsibility for the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am flight over Scotland. The country, once a pariah by Washington's view, agreed to compensate the families of the 270 victims. Part of the $2.7 billion has been paid. A final $2 million installment to each family is outstanding.

"This is a sense of victory, of winning a battle," said Paul Rivers, who was a 20-year-old enlisted Marine on the second floor of the barracks when it exploded. "When we win the war is when we collect, when we make them pay for what they did."

Iran has denied responsibility for the attack. The nation did not respond to the 6-year-old lawsuit and was represented only by an empty table.

Family members said they hoped Friday's ruling would pressure foreign governments not to sponsor terrorism. Lynn Smith Derbyshire, whose brother, Vincent Smith, was killed in the attack, said countries won't stop until "it begins to actually cost them money to kill Americans."

Some disagreed about whether that will happen. Roxanne Garcia-Bates, who was 16 when her brother, Randy Garcia, was killed, said she was surprised to find a sense of comfort being with the other families in court. She said she was pleased that Lamberth had made such a strong statement, but doubted that Iran would change anytime soon.

"You can't take enough money away to get them to stop what they're doing," she said.

All agreed that emotions remain raw to this day.

Rivers described being one of the second floor's five survivors. All but him lost arms or legs, he said. He was buried in the rubble for two hours, he said. Debris had punctured his eardrum and "I literally had rocks inside my head."

Shirley Murry of Baltimore, who was 16 years old at the time, described the tense days of waiting around the television for word of her brother, Ulysses Parker. Today, every time the news carries a story about a fallen soldier or an explosion overseas, she said it's like that first day all over again.

Lamberth said the law "offers a meager attempt to make the surviving members whole." He said he hoped the judgment would alert Iran that terrorism has consequences and help in the families' healing process. Pausing, he added:

"That's all I can do."

Suleimaniyah, Iraq: The Iraqi president raised objections yesterday to the planned execution of Saddam Hussain's former defence minister, who is due to be hanged with two other former regime officials for their roles in a massacre of Kurds.

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, said former defence minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad Al Tai deserved to be spared because he had been carrying out orders under threat of death by Saddam and because he had engaged in official contact with the Kurdish community under the ousted regime.

Earlier this week, an Iraqi appeals court upheld the death sentences imposed against Al Tai, along with Ali Hassan Al Majid, who gained the nickname 'Chemical Ali' after poison gas attacks on Kurdish towns in the 1980s, and Hussain Rashid Mohammad, former deputy director of operations for the Iraqi Armed Forces.

All three were convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in June for their role in the brutal crackdown that killed up to 180,000 Kurdish civilians and guerrillas two decades ago known as Operation Anfal.

Talabani has said he is opposed to the death penalty. But he previously deputised Vice-President Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite, to sign execution orders on his behalf.

The Iraqi president said yesterday, however, that he would not support the decision against Al Tai.

"Personally, I will not support executing Sultan Hashim," he said at a news conference in Suleimaniyah, 260 km northeast of Baghdad.

Seven troops killed

Seven US troops have been killed in Iraq, including four in the western province of Anbar, where gains in security were hailed this week by US President George W. Bush during an unannounced visit to the desert region.

The US military said yesterday that four Marines were killed in the vast province on Thursday while conducting combat operations. The military also said three soldiers were killed in the northern province of Nineveh.

AP

ANKARA: The Turkish Army said Friday that it had extended the duration of three high-security zones in the country's southeast by three months as part of measures to fight Kurdish separatist rebels. The zones - where civilians are barred - cover uninhabited mountainous regions in the provinces of Siirt, Sirnak and Hakkari, close to the border with Iraq, where the rebels have bases.

They were established on June 9 initially for a three-month period.

In Friday's statement, the general staff said the zones would also remain in force from September 10 until December 10.

Turkey says thousands of rebels from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) use bases in the Kurdish-held autonomous north of Iraq as a springboard for attacks on Turkish targets across the border.

The rebels have stepped up their attacks this year.

In response, the Turkish Army has reinforced its presence in the southeast and along the Iraqi border.

More than 37,000 people have died since 1984 when the PKK, listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community, took up arms for self-rule in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast.

Turkey has long pressed the United States and Iraq to wipe out the PKK's presence in northern Iraq and has threatened to launch a cross-border operation if they fail to do so.

AFP

Reuters

TEHRAN -- Iran's supreme leader yesterday rejected reports of a power struggle within the Islamic Republic's leadership and praised President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fierce critic of the West.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's highest authority, was speaking two days after clerics picked former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to lead a powerful government body, a move some analysts and diplomats saw as a setback for Ahmadinejad.

Rafsanjani's victory over a hardline rival to become speaker of the Assembly of Experts was a further step in his political recovery at the expense of Ahmadinejad, who beat the pragmatic, mid-ranking cleric in the 2005 presidential race, analysts said.

But the change is not expected to herald a shift in Iran's foreign or nuclear policy, nor to have a big impact on the assembly's tendency to stay clear of day-to-day politics.

The assembly-an 86-seat body with the power to appoint, supervise and even dismiss the supreme leader-met on Tuesday to replace Speaker Ayatollah Ali Meshkini, who died in July.

Some commentators saw the vote outcome as a victory for a moderately conservative faction led by Rafsanjani, who wants better ties with the West, over ultra-conservative supporters of the president.

But Khamenei appeared to dismiss such talk, saying Iran's enemies had tried to present the assembly as being involved in a power struggle, "by making up false reports or exaggerating some natural differences in opinions".

He warned some domestic media not to follow such "enemy propaganda", state television reported. "The Assembly of Experts can not be an arena for fighting and civil war because of its very heavy responsibilities," he was quoted as saying.

Rafsanjani, president in the 1990s, has increasingly sided with pro-reform politicians opposed to Ahmadinejad, who came to power two years ago on a pledge to revive the values of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

In the vote, he beat Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, head of the Guardian Council, an oversight body reformists blame for blocking many of their candidates in presidential and parliamentary elections. Jannati is a supporter of Ahmadinejad.

CNSNews.com
Julie Stahl

Jerusalem -- Israel must prepare itself for the worst-case scenario -- a nuclear attack by Iran -- even though it is not clear what Iran's intentions are, the former head of Israel's Intelligence agency said on Thursday.

The U.S., Israel, and most of the Western world believe that Iran is using the development of a nuclear program to conceal its pursuit of atomic weapons. Iran denies the charges.

According to a recent deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency, Tehran pledged to answer outstanding questions about its nuclear program. But it never agreed to suspend uranium enrichment -- a key Security Council requirement.

IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei said on Thursday that the next two months would be "critical for Iran to demonstrate its good faith in implementing what it is committed to do." But critics say Iran is just buying time to develop nuclear weapons.

The U.S. has led the diplomatic campaign against Iran. But so far, two U.N. resolutions and the imposition of sanctions have not forced the suspension of Iran's uranium enrichment program, which is key stop in making a bomb.

Former Israeli Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit said the big question facing Israeli intelligence and other Western intelligence agencies is whether Iran would use nuclear weapons if it acquires them. Nevertheless, he said, Israel must be prepared, although he did not offer specifics on what kind of preparations Israel should take.

"Will a nuclear Iran be pragmatic or Messianic? Once they have it, are they going to use it or not? This is the classic dilemma," Shavit told a meeting of diplomats and journalists at the Jerusalem-based Institute for Contemporary Affairs on Thursday.

Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is known to be preparing for what he believes will be the coming of the Islamic "messiah" (the Mahdi or the Hidden Imam), who is supposed to appear at a time of great tribulation. Some analysts say Ahmadinejad believes it is his duty to hasten the Mahdi's coming.

Ahmadinejad also has publicly called for the destruction of Israel, openly supports Hizballah and Palestinian terrorists groups fighting against Israel, and has called the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered, a myth.

That being the case, any intelligence officer would recommend that his state or country be prepared for the "worst case scenario," said Shavit.

"In this case it means that Israel and maybe others need to prepare [for] the eventuality that a nuclear Iran will use this capability," said Shavit.

original article

Iran Focus

Two Iranian men were hanged on Thursday in the southern province of Hormozgan, state media reported.

The two men, identified as Ali D. and Karim T., were hanged in the port city of Bandar Abbas, the provincial capital, the state-owned news agency Fars reported.

They were accused of drug trafficking.

On Wednesday, authorities hanged 21 people, including two women, in north-eastern and southern Iran.

The New York Times

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Published: September 5, 2007

TEHRAN, Sept. 4 — Rents are soaring, inflation hovers around 17 percent, and 10 million Iranians live below the poverty line. The police said they shut 20 barbershops for men in Tehran last week because they offered inappropriate hairstyles, and women have been banned from riding bicycles in many places, as a crackdown on social freedoms presses on.

For months now, average Iranians have endured economic hardships, political repression and international isolation as the nation’s top officials remained defiant over Iran’s nuclear program. But in a country whose leaders see national security, government stability and Islamic values as inextricably entwined, problems that usually would constitute threats to the leadership are instead viewed as an opportunity to secure its rule.

Paradoxically, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s economic missteps and the animosity generated in the West by his aggressive posture on the nuclear issue have helped Iran’s leaders hold back what they see as corrupting foreign influences, by increasing the country’s economic and political isolation, said economists, diplomats, political analysts, businessmen and clerics interviewed over the past two weeks.

Pressure from the West, including biting economic sanctions, over Iran’s nuclear program and its role in Iraq have also empowered those pushing the harder line.

“The leader is concerned that any effort to make the country more manageable will lead to reform and will undermine his authority,” said Saeed Leylaz, an economist and former government official of the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The effort to keep Iran’s doors to the West sealed tight was on display on Sunday, when Mr. Ahmadinejad announced that Iran had developed 3,000 centrifuges and mocked the West for trying to press Iran to stop uranium enrichment and slow its nuclear program.

On Monday, Ayatollah Khamenei used Western pressure to rally public sentiment. “Iran will defeat these drunken and arrogant powers using its artful and wise ways,” he told a group of students, according to state-run television.

The caustic remarks were seen here by Western diplomats and political analysts as an attempt by the president, through the supreme leader, to undermine months of careful negotiations between more pragmatic conservatives in the leadership and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which only days earlier had insisted Iran was being more cooperative. The message was clear, a Western diplomat said.

“They are convinced the rest of the world is trying to put pressure on Iran to keep Iran down,” said the diplomat, insisting on anonymity so as not to compromise his ability to work in Iran. “They believe if Iran makes a concession to the West on the nuclear issue, it will be the first step toward regime change.”

The economic component of Iran’s go-it-alone approach began with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s election two years ago. He laid down a series of erratic economic decrees that he said were aimed at helping the poor, but instead have often made their lives harder.

Recently, the head of the central bank and the ministers of oil and industry resigned, warning that the country was heading toward trouble. The president’s decisions have frightened away investors, derailing efforts to open Iran to world markets, analysts said.

The leadership has been able to ease some of the pain because of unprecedented income from the sale of crude oil. Ultimately, those interviewed agreed, the president has continued unimpeded because he has the support of Ayatollah Khamenei, who has the final say in all state matters.

“The only thing that has kept Ahmadinejad in power is the support of the leadership,” said Muhammad Atrianfar, publisher of two newspapers that have been closed and an ally of a former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. “As soon as the leader stops supporting him, he can easily be impeached and dismissed.”

No one accuses the leadership of deliberately fostering economic chaos; instead, economists here say Mr. Ahmadinejad fails to understand the effect of his policies. “He feels the pain of the poor, but doesn’t have any solution,” said Ali Rashadi, an independent economist. “He is wrecking a system that was patched together over 25 years.”

Many journalists, academics, and former government officials said they thought Mr. Ahmadinejad had been more active and reckless with the economy than Ayatollah Khamenei had expected. But he is comfortable with Mr. Ahmadinejad because he can count on him to preserve the system and to roll back political, economic and social changes that conservatives feared were insidious steps toward a velvet revolution, those interviewed here said.

A Western-allied ambassador here said the supreme leader and the security services decided to arrest Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American scholar, partly as a warning to Iranian insiders who have expressed dismay over the direction of the country.

“They think little by little we have moved away from Islamic values.” said Mohsen Kadivar, a cleric who recently was removed from his teaching position at Tehran University. “They see Ahmadinejad as the man to return Iran to these values.”

He added, “What’s important for them is being in power.”

When Mr. Ahmadinejad was elected, he campaigned as a sort of Islamic Robin Hood, promising to redistribute the country’s oil wealth from the rich to the poor. One of his first edicts was to order banks to lower interest rates to 12 percent from as high as 17 percent. The order, like others, backfired, making loans harder to secure.

In another case, Mr. Ahmadinejad decided that the price of cement was too high, so he ordered that reduced, too. Mr. Rashadi, the economist, said the decree frightened away investors who had planned to build cement factories around the country. Mr. Rashadi said the president’s constant insults aimed at the stock market had undermined investor confidence, which he said encouraged people with money to invest in real estate, driving up property values.

“My income does not match my cost of living,” said Hassan Khalili, 37, who rents a small apartment in the village of Vadan, a meandering hillside community of about 9,000 people an hour outside of Tehran. “I thought it was going to get better under Ahmadinejad, but it didn’t.”

But with its oil revenues, the government has, in the short term, been able to buy itself out of an economic meltdown with $60 billion spent on subsidies and a huge increase in imports — though that has undermined local manufacturing, Iranian economists said.

Oil revenue has also helped shore up the government by enriching a new ruling class made up of Revolutionary Guard members and members and alumni of the Basij militia who have their hand in nearly every aspect of the economy, and now the government, people here said.

The president’s economic policies have also cushioned many homeowners, because property values have skyrocketed. Three years ago, for example, a four-bedroom apartment in a good Tehran neighborhood sold for $200,000; today it is worth over $1 million.

Mehdi Panahi lives in central Tehran and runs a small snack shop in the mountains just north of the city, where many people hike and relax on the weekends. He has had to raise his prices 20 percent since March, he said, because his rent doubled in the last year. The cost of cooking oil shot up 50 percent, tomato paste rose 70 percent, and prices of dairy products increased by 70 percent.

However, despite the current environment of fear and caution, he insisted: “Of course I am optimistic. What is there not to be optimistic about?”

The economic upheaval has been coupled with a far-reaching security clampdown over recent months. The authorities have arrested prominent Iranian-American intellectuals, suppressed the student movement, rolled back social freedoms, purged university faculties, closed newspapers and moved to marginalize once-powerful political figures, like the former president, Mr. Rafsanjani, who are out of step with the current trend.

The arrests include a once-prominent insider and former nuclear negotiator, Hossein Mousavian, on spying charges in May.

The repression is calibrated. Students and female activists have been encouraged to leave the country or face stepped-up pressure. The idea is to send a message without spreading the pain too widely.

As a result, the streets are calm, but there is an undercurrent of unease and confusion. People routinely say that life is good, better even under this president — then rattle off a litany of complaints.

Last week, Mr. Ahmadinejad attended a conference of religious leaders in the north of Tehran. Ali Akhbar Akhbari, his wife and two young daughters live in a tent a block from the convention center where the conference took place. They said they were homeless and collected bottles to earn money for food. Marziah, 13, and Roziah, 9, slept in their own small tent decorated with Looney Tunes characters.

“No one will help them,” shouted Valioalah Ghiyasi, 60, as he walked down the street, his hands deep in the pockets of his sport coat. He pulled a pay stub from his pocket, showing his government salary, the equivalent of $131 a month.

“It was a better situation before,” he said. “My wife has cancer and I can’t afford the medicine. I haven’t been able to pay my rent in five months. My rent is $250 a month. I don’t know what to do. I am begging.”

The net effect of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s policies can be seen in the village of Vadan. Suddenly, property values have gone up so much that a local man, Ghalan Abbas Mahmoodi, opened a real estate office. Farmers are selling off land, and wealthy people from Tehran are building villas on scenic hills overlooking the rolling countryside. For those who do not own land and have seen their rents soar, such as Mr. Khalili, it is a near catastrophe.

Mr. Mahmoodi, the real estate agent, had a different view. “As my income increases, my purchase power increases,” he said.

While Mr. Ahmadinejad has lost a great deal of political support within the system, he has not shown any signs of being deterred. “There is an honorable butcher in our neighborhood who is aware of all the problems of the people,” the president said, “and I also get important economic information from him.”

FrontPageMagazine.com
Kenneth R. Timmerman

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been waging war against America in Iraq from the very first days of U.S. military operations against Saddam Hussein. And yet, until just recently, no one in the U.S. government has been willing to acknowledge this openly.

Iran began planning operations to undermine an eventual U.S. invasion of Iraq many months before U.S. military forces arrived in the region in late 2002.

As I will reveal in my upcoming book, Shadow Warriors, one aspect of this forward-looking Iranian planning became apparent as U.S. troops were rolling toward Baghdad.

Whereas the United States was still relying on a Commando Solo aircraft to beam crude Arabic-language radio programming into Iraq, the Iranians unrolled a whole series of slick, Arabic language television stations that blanketed the entire country with anti-U.S. propaganda.

The effect on Iraqi public opinion was devastating. At one point, Iran had 42 radio and TV stations in Arabic beaming into Iraq, whereas the U.S.-led coalition had just one.

A new report jointly sponsored by the Weekly Standard and the Institute for the Study of War, released last week, provides extraordinary new details of Iran’s propaganda, intelligence, and military offensive against the U.S. presence in Iraq since those early days of the war.

Kimberly Kagan has done yeoman’s work in pulling together information released in dribs and drabs in recent months by U.S. military spokesmen in Iraq.

Here are just a few of the main points she covers in great detail in this dense 32 page report:

• Iran is using Hezbollah to train Iraqi terrorists, sending top Hezbollah operatives into Iraq periodically to ensure hands-on management of their terror protégés;

• Iran has set up training camps near Tehran where they regularly graduate classes of between 20-70 terrorists, who then return to Iraq as a self-contained network to carry out terrorist operations against U.S. military and Iraqi targets;

• The Revolutionary Guards “Qods Force” is running operations in Iraq through a network of ‘secret cells” within Shia militias, whose agents assassinate key Iraqi leaders, run death squads, infiltrate government ministries, and distribute weaponry to other insurgents.

• Iran is also working with Sunni terrorist groups, include al Qaeda in Iraq and an Ansar al Islam, and has been terrorists from both groups at special camps inside Iran.

This deadly litany of Iranian actions leaves no doubt about the intentions of Iran’s leaders.

They aim to defeat us in Iraq. It’s as simple as that.

They have declared war, and intend to continue waging war until we defeat them, or they defeat us.

Judging by recent statements from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he and his fellow Revolutionary Guards officers have little doubt who is winning.

At a Tehran press conference on Tuesday, the Mighty Midget said that U.S. political influence in Iraq is “collapsing rapidly,” and he kindly offered to take our place.

"Soon, we will see a huge power vacuum in the region,” he said. “Of course, we are prepared to fill the gap, with the help of neighbors and regional friends like Saudi Arabia, and with the help of the Iraqi nation.”

Over the past nine months, U.S. military leaders in Iraq have gradually started to wake up to the enormity of Iran’s offensive operations inside Iraq, and to target Iranian networks.

The first major U.S. counter-strike took place last December, when the U.S. arrested a top Revolutionary Guards officer in Baghdad and started to learn of Iran’s extensive intelligence and terrorist networks in Iraq during bedside chats with the gentle Iranian.

Already then, I noted on this page that “Victory in Iraq cannot come until the United States makes it clear to Iran – even more than Syria, since the Syrians will take their lead from Tehran – that we will no longer tolerate their intervention in Iraqi affairs.”

That remains true today, and our failure to send a tough message to Tehran and utterly smash their networks in Iraq and their support structures in Iran has only encouraged them to step up attacks on U.S. forces.

U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker has acknowledged that since the U.S. agreed to talk with Iran about Iraq, Iranian operations in Iraq have gone “up and not down.” The more we talk, the quicker they shoot.

Since the spring, when Sunni tribal leaders started coming over to the coalition and deserting al Qaeda, we have had significant successes against these Iranian terror networts. But they have received little attention in the press – and for good reason: the State Department has been desperate to hush up Iran’s deadly war against America, in the vain hope they can still negotiate an end of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Kimberly Kagan notes that since March 2007, the U.S. has detained, captured, or killed a significant number of Iranian agents and their proxies in Iraq.

These included:

• Qayis Khazali, an Iraqi promoted by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to head their “special groups” inside Iraq. Khazali and his brother, Laith, were captured in March.

• Ali Musa Daqduq, a top Lebanese Hezbollah operative sent by Iran to organize and train secret Iranian cells in Iraq. He was captured by the U.S. on March 20, 2007.

• Abu Yaser al Shibani, the deputy commander of an Iranian network that supplied money, access to the IRGC, and Iranian-made Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFP). He was captured on April 20, 2007.

• Azhar Dulaymi, the mastermind of the Jan. 20 raid in Karbala that killed five U.S. soldiers. He was killed by U.S. Special Forces on May 19, 2007;

Since May, more than a dozen additional “high-value” individuals trained in Iran and used by Iran to run their “secret cells” inside Iraq have been killed or detained.

And yet, despite these successes by the U.S. military, the Iranians keep sending more agents, more explosives, and training new Iraqi terrorists.

Mr. President, it’s time to call this by its name.

We are at war. And it’s not just the abstract War on Terror.

We are at war with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In Tehran, they know this. And they gloat when we refuse to recognize it and continue to say how eager we are to talk to them.

In his talk with conservative bloggers last week, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol argued that President Bush and the Pentagon need to do a better job of selling the war, especially now that our generals in Iraq believe they are on the way to utterly destroying the insurgency.

But the first step toward “selling” the war is acknowledging the simple fact that we are at war. With Iran.

In his column last Thursday, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius revealed that the State Department and Democrats in Congress conspired in the fall of 2004 to block a secret CIA program to defeat Iranian efforts to influence the Iraqi elections.

It seems that House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was briefed on the top secret Presidential finding as Minority Leader at the time, was more concerned with defeating President Bush than in defeating Iran.

We should not be surprised by this news.

As last week’s United Press International/Zogby poll showed, the national security glue that used to unite the two parties against foreign threats has been burned away by the Baghdad sun.

Despite all the facts now being reported out of Iraq of U.S. military victories, the poll found that 66% of Democrats believed the Iraq war is “lost,” as compared to just 9% of Republicans.

So now it’s official. Republicans are the Party of Victory, and Democrats the Party of Surrender.

Mr. President: it’s time to stop pandering to the Party of Surrender, unless it’s your own rendition you are seeking to negotiate.

We are at war, and Americans are not quitters, despite what Nancy Pelosi believes.

So let’s roll.

Iran hanged 21 convicted drug smugglers and other criminals on Wednesday, Iranian media said, the latest of a series of executions that have been criticised by rights groups and European governments.

Seventeen drug smugglers were executed in the eastern province of Khorasan Razavi, the Web site of state broadcaster IRIB said. Iran's eastern border areas are notorious for clashes between drug traffickers and security forces.

"Seventeen smugglers were hanged this morning after all legal procedures were carried out," Colonel Alipour, a police spokesman, was quoted as saying by IRIB, which gave his last name only.

Four other offenders were put to death in the southern city of Shiraz after being convicted of banditry, smuggling, illegal weapons possession and armed confrontation with security forces, the Fars News Agency said.

A big crowd watched the hangings in Shiraz, Fars reported, adding that onlookers said executions should continue until "all criminal activities had ended" in the area.

A provincial justice department official said one criminal or smuggler had been executed each week in southerly Fars province since the start of the Iranian year on March 21. Shiraz is the capital of Fars province.

"This shows the efforts of the judiciary system in bringing about permanent social security and a serious confrontation with those people who are corrupt," Abdolnabi Najibi was quoted as saying by Fars.

The number of executions in Iran, many in public, has risen since July with the launch of a summer crackdown on "immoral behaviour". Police have arrested dozens of drug addicts, smugglers, rapists and murderers.

Amnesty International has protested to Iran over the number of executions, which it said in an April report had doubled to at least 177 last year.

Asou Saleh, a Kurd journalist sentenced to one year prison by the revolutionary court of the regime. He has to escape from Iran and the court will confiscate the guarantees that his family put in to release him temporarily.

***
The journalists in Azerbaijan are more than often under pressure.

Abolfazl Vesali, director of newspaper “Nedaye Azar Abadegan” who had been sentenced before to prison, has been accused once more again by the revolutionary court of Tabriz because he had exposed the ministry of urban’s defalcations. Human right’s activists are upset because of the pressures on him and his family.

***
The activists of Kurd society are also more and more under pressure.

Nasri, the director and Qazali one of the editors of student journal Roujame are in hunger strike in the jail. These two persons had no connection and visit with their families.

***

Keyvan Ansari the PHD student of Amir Kabir University has been transferred to the section of dangerous prisoners in Evin because he protested the forcedly visit with his family in a closed glassy cabin.

***

128 Bahai’s Students Expelled from Universities

The Baha'i International Community (BIC) said it has obtained a copy of a confidential letter from Iran's Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology that was sent to 81 universities. The letter instructs administrators to expel Baha'i students.

The Iranian government does not officially recognize the Baha'i faith.

***
Many of the Afghan workers for the municipality have been arrested and sent to a center to be deported to Afghanistan.

***

11 thousands arrested in Khuzestan

The Iranian police in Khuzestan announced during the past months more than 11 thousands individuals have been caught because of their voile / dress codes. In total, 1.684 of them have been sent to the court to be fined.

***

The revolutionary court in Mashhad announced a new batch of young men accused to hooliganism will be sentenced to death very soon.

Head of police in Kermanshah told the media a few hooligans have already been executed in public or in the prisons and more young men will be executed in public very soon.

***
Two individuals in Zahedan and another one in Varamin have been executed.

Death sentences for 4 persons in Mashhad, 6 persons in Tehran (including a woman and 3 young men aged 21, 22 and 24) in Tehran have been issued.

12 youngesters under 18 years old are waiting to be executed in the Iranian prisons, Mohammed Mostafaei, their lawyer requested the government to cancel their executions.

***

Summary of the reports from Human Right activists in Iran since starting 2007

1. Execution: 157 individuals
2. Sentenced to death: 181 individuals
3. Stoning: 1 person
4. Women waiting for stoning: 8 persons
5. Body member(s) cut off: 5 cases
6. Arrest, interrogation and sentencing journalists: 190 cases
7. Arrest, interrogation and sentencing women activists: 45 cases
8. Arrest, interrogation and sentencing student activists: 227 cases
9. Violation of workers' rights and their associations: 307 cases
10. Arrest, interrogation and sentencing to prison the activists in fields of politics, education and social: 270 cases

Spiegel
David Gordon Smith

British troops withdrew from Basra Monday just as US President George W. Bush made a surprise visit to Iraq. German commentators are scathing of both the British and American strategy.

Monday was a day of symbols in Iraq. Just as British forces were making their withdrawal from Basra in the south (more...), US President George W. Bush made a surprise visit to Anbar province west of Baghdad.

Bush, who was accompanied by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Steven Hadley, held talks at a US air base with Gen. David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. The Pentagon described the meeting, which was Bush's third secret trip to Iraq in four years, as a "war council."

In an unusual move, Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and President Jalal Talabani also met with Bush at the air base. It was only the third time Maliki, who is Shiite, had visited the Sunni-dominated province, where violence has recently abated after Sunni tribal leaders and former insurgents joined forces with US troops to fight al-Qaida and other extremists.

Addressing troops at the base, Bush insisted any decision to withdraw troops would be "based on a calm assessment by our military commanders on the conditions on the ground, not a nervous reaction by Washington politicians to poll results in the media. ... When we begin to draw down troops from Iraq, it will be from a position of strength and success, not from a position of fear and failure."

Bush said that Petraeus and Crocker had told him that "if the kind of success we are now seeing continues, it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces." He did not specify how many troops might be withdrawn or any possible timetable for withdrawal.

Monday's visit came just days before Petraeus and Crocker are due to deliver a much-anticipated report to Congress on the situation in Iraq and the success of Bush's "surge" strategy. It also coincided with the withdrawal of British troops from the southern city of Basra, which has caused tension between the UK and US.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown insisted Monday that the pullout was not a defeat. He told the BBC that the withdrawal was "pre-planned and organized" and UK forces would take an "overwatch" role -- in other words, troops would not go out unless requested by Iraqi authorities, but they would still train and mentor Iraqi security forces. Brown said the number of British troops in Iraq would remain roughly the same, and that they could "re-intervene" if necessary.

On Monday, 550 British soldiers handed Basra palace, their former base, over to Iraqi control and joined 5,000 troops at the UK's last base near Basra airport. The pullout comes at a time when the US and UK are engaged in a war of words over Iraq. US media commentators have been critical of the British withdrawal in recent weeks, while senior British soldiers criticized the American strategy in Iraq in much-publicised remarks over the weekend.

Commentators writing in Germany main newspapers Tuesday had little positive to say about either the American or the British strategy.

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"Bush's trip to the front is meant as a signal, directed partly toward to the troops fighting in the desert, but mainly toward home. It is there, on Washington's Capitol Hill, that the decisive battle over this war will begin in just a few days: Almost all the Democrats and a couple of unfaithful Republicans intend to try to put an end to the US's military deployment."

"The majority of Americans lost faith a long time ago that their GIs could use armed force to impose peace in the torn-apart country, especially since Iraq's overwhelmingly Shiite government does more or less nothing to bring about the drastically needed reconciliation with the Sunnis and the Kurds. Bush is now reacting in his own way: He avoids Baghdad, absconds to the provinces and even lures Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki out of his government bunker. In western Iraq's Anbar province, which last year was still a deadly al-Qaida stronghold, the US marines have finally achieved some success. They armed the Sunni tribal leaders, forced the terrorists back and now announce: 'Mission accomplished' -- at least for the time being."

"The only thing is that even this victory won't help Bush much in his battle at home. No one can seriously claim that Anbar is a model for all of Iraq. One thing is for sure: Bush won't give up. But for a long time now he has lacked the allies -- both in Baghdad and Washington -- that he needs to persist in his mission for much longer. There's not much time left for a fourth presidential trip to Iraq."

The conservative Die Welt, in a piece headlined "Brown Versus Bush," laments the British decision to withdraw its troops from Basra:

"Britain could have waited another 10 days (until Petraeus officially hands over his Iraq report to Bush) before withdrawing to their base at the Basra airport. Instead, Brown chose to follow his own British way in order to boost his own popularity at the cost of trans-Atlantic relations. His defensive maneuver came as quite a contrast to that which took place on Monday in Anbar province. The province's capital Ramadi was, until recently, an al-Qaida-infested hole for the Americans and for any peace-loving Iraqi. But since springtime, this city in the 'Sunni Triangle' has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis thanks to the ... local sheiks and civilian leaders who have banded together with the Americans to rid the city of al-Qaida."

"They have been so thorough that President Bush could risk landing there on Monday. Ramadi is a huge plus for the 'surge' strategy. By acting on his own in Iraq, Gordon Brown refocused the Iraq debate on withdrawal, when perseverance is actually called for."

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

"The end of the physical presence of British troops in Shiite Basra has great symbolism, which makes Prime Minister Gordon Brown's justification for the withdrawal look like nothing more than an embarrassing rhetorical contortion. The withdrawal may have been planned and organized. But it does not look much like a success story, happening as it did during the night while a curfew prevailed. That makes the supposed withdrawal seem more like a retreat, if not an actual defeat."

"Such a verdict would more accurately reflect the situation in southern Iraq, the mood in the United Kingdom and the debate of the past months, which ended up this weekend in a bitter British-American reckoning. London has failed, and completely -- this is the verdict that Brown now has to hear, from the British opposition and from the ranks of his American ally. The assessment is partially justified, but it is also partially wrong: Washington is certainly more 'responsible' for the situation in Iraq than London."

The left-leaning Die Tageszeitung writes:

"Even when the British were right in the center of (Basra), they couldn't prevent the open struggle between the Shiite militias for control of the oil-rich province. The British have handed over the city to an Iraqi administration and security forces that have long become an instrument of the militia. They are now waiting in the wings to fill the vacuum."

"With all of these Shiite militias, Iran's influence is growing in the region. It remains to be seen how big a mistake it was not to include Tehran in the search for a political solution in Iraq .... Tehran will certainly be delighted to accept the gift of Basra. But whether the mullahs will become a force for order or chaos in future, depends on the US attitude to Iran."

"The British diversionary tactics of recent days have been bizarre, with the former commander of British forces in Iraq Mike Jackson describing Washington's Iraq policy as 'intellectually bankrupt' -- as if Tony Blair were dragged into the Iraq War against his will."

Asia Times Online
Kaveh L Afrasiabi

In his surprise visit to al-Anbar province in Iraq on Monday, US President George W Bush boasted of coalition troops' accomplishments in bringing stability and uprooting the al-Qaeda menace with the help of Sunni tribes. At the same time, the last British soldiers were vacating Basra in the south in what a British paper described as "ignominious defeat".

The British withdrawal to the safety of their one remaining bunkered base at the airport "will bring perils for US troops", according to a US commentator. This is why the US military and the White House - "at the highest echelon" - have been lobbying London over new Prime Minister Gordon Brown's decision to phase out the British presence in Iraq.

Brown, inheriting an explosive legacy from his predecessor, Tony Blair, has delivered on his promises and the big issue now is whether or not the same forces which constantly harassed the British forces in Basra will remain operating on the outskirts of the city.

An even more important question is about the security vacuum that has been created, in light of the inter-Shi'ite power struggle in Basra and, indeed, the entire southern section of Iraq, which is overwhelmingly Shi'ite and within the purview of Iran's regional politics.

Recalling Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's recent statement that Iran can easily "fill the vacuum" of US forces, the situation in Basra may mean that Tehran may be forced to play that role sooner than expected, depending on the evolution or devolution of Basra's current state of emergency.

The ability of Iraqis to ensure a peaceful transfer of power, instead of a nosedive toward anarchy-driven factional strife, should not be underestimated however, particularly since Basra poses a litmus test of Shi'ite politics in the broader context of Iraqi national politics.

For Iran, the British withdrawal from Basra represents a conundrum. On the one hand Tehran counts it as a strategic gain that weakens the US's position with regard to Iran, given the greater vulnerability of the land supply route from Kuwait. But at the same time, the mere prospect of a security collapse in Basra spells major new and unwanted headaches for Iran, which has always insisted on an "orderly and timely" exit of foreign troops - in other words, no hasty and ill-planned withdrawal.

Yet, that is exactly what has happened in Basra, and a security meltdown there could easily translate into waves of Iran-bound refugees, thus warranting Iran's preemptive mediation in the ongoing inter-Shi'ite power struggle. This is mainly between and among the three dominant groups, Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and its sub-factions, the Fadhila Party presently running the city, and the Supreme Iraq Islamic Council and its Badr militias.

Iran's already enormous influence in southern Iraq will likely grow more powerful in the near future, although this will be determined to some extent by political developments in Baghdad. For instance, a failure of the central government to maintain national unity will exacerbate the centrifugal tendencies that have primed southern Iraq as an Iranian sphere of influence.

"There are so many different scenarios in Basra and southern Iraq now, all tied to the US-Iran rivalry and it is a sure bet that short of a US military occupation [of southern Iraq] that is not feasible for the overstretched US Army, the scenario of Iran's rising influence will predominate, in other words, Iran is a sure winner of the British retreat," a Tehran analyst told the author.

And that means that the US now needs to engage Iran more than in the past to play a constructive role in Iraq.

The US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, has renewed the US's interest in a follow-up discussion with Iran on Iraq's security, perhaps as a sign of recognition of Tehran's growing clout and responsibility in oil-rich southern Iraq.

Contrary to some Western analysts, Iran is not interested in turning southern Iraq into its satellite and harvesting the benefits of a de facto partition of the country. Rather, Iran still hopes that a strong, Iran-friendly national government in Baghdad will triumph over the odds piled up against it so that the two neighboring states can eventually remap the region's security calculus.

That expectation may have been compromised by the slew of difficulties facing the Shi'ite-led government of Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad, yet it is still the luminous light that directs Iran's Iraq policy.

Thus, the Basra microcosm, conceived as threatened with further yet ultimately manageable instability, fits into Iran's larger political map that connects Iraqi provincial politics to the national and even regional politics on a long-term basis, instead of looking for short-term gains.

Still, few analysts in Tehran are able to hide their rather euphoric reaction to the news of the British withdrawal from Basra, which potentially spells more trouble for those who are rattling sabers at Iran these days.

A US military option against Iran is now even less likely in light of the power vacuum in southern Iraq that, if need be, could be utilized by Tehran to undermine the stability of the US's presence in the rest of Iraq.

With Iran sensing both opportunity and crisis in southern Iraq, the stage is now set for a new depth to Iran's purely Shi'ite or Islamist politics that traverses narrow national(ist) considerations. After all, the ethos of Islamic revolution has always focused on Islamist solidarity and kinship, transcending limited territorial gains or considerations.

That is precisely why any fears of Iran's machinations to carve out southern Iraq into its sphere of influence are at bottom baseless. Iran will do so only as a last resort when and if a nightmare scenario of collapse of the center and irreversible regional autonomy appears inescapable.

That is not Iran's reading of the situation right now, even though policymakers have been toying with scenario-building in Iraq. Their threat analyses of Iraq do not envisage panic, partly as a result of Iran's thorough familiarity and rapport with the various Shi'ite factions, including the Mahdi militia, irrespective of Muqtada's occasional public misgivings about Iran's influence.

The Iranians' largely upbeat prognosis is in sharp contrast with the doomsday scenario seen in the US press, which depicts Basra as "plagued" with corruption, violence and gangsterism. There is a chance that the Iraqi army and police in and around Basra, deeply connected to various Shi'ite factions, might turn against each other, in which case Basra will disintegrate as a unified political unit.

Iran may well provide the glue that keeps that from happening - all the more reason for the US and its allies not to view every Iranian involvement in Iraq negatively, or as an act of subversion. Iran's vested interest in Iraq's national unity and territorial integrity translates into a calming influence in southern Iraq that can turn volatile only if other parts of Iraq break loose and set in motion southern Iraq's partition.

But, as stated above, Iran is not particularly worried about such a prospect at the moment and considers the other regional players, such as Syria and Turkey, sufficiently in sync with its Iraq policy to stave off the "nightmare scenario".

Yet, simultaneously there is another "nightmare scenario", that is, the possibility of a US strike against Iran's nuclear facilities that has been preoccupying Iran's leaders, which raises in turn the matter of linkage with Iraq. That possibility has now been dealt an indirect blow by developments in Basra.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.

Iran Focus

Tehran, Iran, Sep. 04 – A senior cleric was appointed as the new head of a key Iranian constitutional supervisory body on Tuesday, state media announced.

Iran’s former President Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was elected as the new chairman of the Assembly of Experts (AE).

The Assembly of Experts, an 86-member exclusively clerical body entrusted with the task of selecting the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, had been without a chairman following the death of Ayatollah Ali Meshkini on July 30.

Rafsanjani was elected as chairman with 41 votes, according to the official news agency IRNA. The head of the Guardians Council Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati came second with 34 votes.

In February, Meshkini had been re-appointed as head of the AE amid speculation that he would forego the position to Rafsanjani.

Rafsanjani along with another hard-line cleric Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, were both until now the constitutional body’s vice-chairmen.

NCRI – The Interior Minister of the Iraqi Kurdistan local government told the Kurdish Parliament that bombing of the Kurdish area by the Iranian regime has continued leaving 450 families homeless in 20 villages. He was quoted by the Associated Press on September 1 saying that in addition to collateral damages, there have been many civilian injuries.

Hushyar Zebari, the Iraqi Foreign Minister condemned bombings by the Iranian regime warning that if it continued, it may have adverse effect on sensitive relations between two countries.

The local Kurdish TV reported that while an Iraqi delegation was on a visit to the area, it witnessed shelling by the Iranian regime’s artillery for an hour. The Erbil governor told the TV network that there was no reason or justification for the bombardment and added that people have suffered heavy damages and terrorized by the prevailing situation.

The local governor described Iranian regime’s aggression as an open violation of international treaties and conventions as well as violation of Iraqi sovereignty and independence targeting local residents and refugees and oppressed people.

On September 1, President-elect of the Iranian Resistance, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi condemned shelling by the regime and called on the international community to adopt urgent measures to stop mullahs’ aggressions.

NCRI – Fars Province judiciary announced that four men are going to be hanged tomorrow in Shiraz, provincial capital of Fars, southern Iran, state-run news agency ISNA reported today.

The men were identified as Mohammad Q., Alireza B., Gazav M. and Abdulrasoul Q. The revolutionary court in Shiraz sentenced them to death for causing public disorder. Their sentences are going to be carried out in public at a major entry point to the city at 9:00 am tomorrow.

Deputy head of Fars judiciary also announced that since the beginning of current Iranian year [starting on March 21] between one to two people have been hanged every week for causing public disorder. One can assume that some 40 people have so far been executed in this province alone in the first half of the Iranian year. This is an official admission to the high number of executions across Iran.

TEHRAN (AFP) — Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei pledged on Monday that Iran would never yield to Western pressure over its nuclear programme, and it would outsmart "drunken and arrogant" Western opponents in the standoff. The renewed expression of defiance from Iran's undisputed number one came after US President George W. Bush said last week that allowing Tehran's nuclear drive to continue unabated could spark a "nuclear holocaust." "The Iranian nation has withstood and it will withstand intimidation. It will never bow to any intimidation in the nuclear issue and in other matters," state broadcasting quoted Khamenei as telling a group of elite students. "Iran will defeat these drunken and arrogant powers using its artful and wise ways," he added. Washington accuses Tehran of seeking to acquire nuclear weapons -- an allegation vehemently denied by the Islamic republic -- and has never ruled out taking military action against it. "Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust," Bush said on August 28. Khamenei slammed Bush's latest verbal attack, calling it "hateful, arrogant and violent." The sharpening rhetoric between the two arch-foes comes amid renewed cooperation between Iran and the UN atomic energy agency to answer outstanding questions on the nature of Tehran's nuclear ambitions. While the Vienna-based watchdog has described the agreement with Tehran as a significant step forward, Washington has expressed serious reservations that it does not go far enough. In any case, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general Mohamed ElBaradei was quoted as telling Der Spiegel on Saturday that the agreement could be Iran's "last chance" to resolve the crisis. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, reaffirmed his view that the IAEA deal meant that Iran's nuclear case was "closed" and there was no danger of it facing military action. "With the help of God and the resistance of the supreme leader and the nation of Iran, we think that the nuclear case is closed," Ahmadinejad told a meeting of Non-Aligned Movement countries in Tehran on Monday. In a speech the day earlier he sought to justify his confidence that the United States would not attack Iran, saying the proof comes from his mathematical skills as an engineer and his faith in God. He said he told people who believed otherwise: "I am an engineer and I am a master in calculation and tabulation. "I draw up tables. For hours, I write out different hypotheses. I reject, I reason. I reason with planning and I make a conclusion. They cannot make problems for Iran." Ahmadinejad has long expressed pride in his academic prowess. He has a PhD in transport engineering and planning from Tehran's Science and Technology University and is the author of several scientific papers. The deeply religious president said his second reason was: "I believe in what God says. "God says that those who walk in the path of righteousness will be victorious. What reason can you have for believing God will not keep this promise?" French President Nicolas Sarkozy has already warned that Iran risks being bombed if the nuclear crisis is not resolved. But Ahmadinejad brushed off the comments which he said were due to his French counterpart's inexperience.

President Bush made an unannounced visit to Iraq on Labor Day and was greeted by Gen. David Petraeus, left, and Adm. William Fallon, right

BAGHDAD (CNN) — President Bush arrived Monday at a U.S. military base in Iraq's Anbar province on an unannounced visit, less than two weeks before his administration is scheduled to report to Congress on progress in Iraq.

Among those accompanying Bush Monday were Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

It is Bush's third visit to Iraq, and the first time he landed outside the Iraqi capital.

Bush chose to land at Al Asad Air Base in Anbar because the administration believes the Sunni province west of Baghdad is symbolic of what can be done elsewhere in Iraq.

Bush has repeatedly hailed the U.S. military's alliance with Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar as the reason that fighting against al Qaeda militants has lessened there.

White House advisers said Bush also came to Al Asad to gauge firsthand the challenges faced by the 7,000 Marines and 3,000 soldiers stationed at the base between Baghdad and the Syrian border, prior to the release of the White House's report on Iraq

Full story: Bush makes surprise visit to Iraq

TEHERAN - Iran’s Revolutionary Guards killed and seized the equipment of three Kurdish rebels who had entered Iran, state television reported late on Sunday.

It said the rebels were members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a Kurdish separatist movement that is fighting Turkey and which has an Iranian offshoot called the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK).
“The terrorists of the PKK group who had entered our country were trapped in the net of the Revolutionary Guards soldiers and were killed,” state television said, adding that the Guards seized cameras used at night, satellite phones and weapons.

It did not give further details.

Clashes between Iranian forces and PJAK militants were reported earlier this year in the region where the borders of Iran, Turkey and Iraq meet. Analysts say PJAK rebels have bases in the remote mountains of northeastern Iraq.

Iraqi officials accused Iran last month of shelling Kurdish villages in Iraq’s northeast, a move Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said threatened ties with Iran.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said the reports of shelling needed more investigation but said ”terrorist groups” were operating in that region and crossing illegally into Iran and bringing in weapons.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are an ideologically motivated force with a separate command structure to the regular military. They were set up to guard the Islamic Republic and its value.

The Guards have units on sensitive borders, such boundaries with Iraq and Afghanistan, and protect vital installations.

Reuters

Iran Focus

London, Sep. 03 – U.S.-led forces arrested seven suspected weapons facilitators during a pre-dawn raid on Sunday in the town of Qasarin, north of Baghdad.

“Coalition forces conducted the raid to capture seven suspected weapons distributors that may be connected to various Special Groups operating in and around Baghdad. Those detained are suspected of being responsible for distributing deadly explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) and other weapons flowing from Iran into Iraq”, the Multi-National Force - Iraq (MNF-I) said in a statement.

“Coalition forces believe information provided by these detainees may lead to more detentions of persons affiliated with weapons smuggling networks”, it said.

“Several structures searched during the raid revealed numerous weapons and associated ammunition, rocket propelled grenade components, and electronic devices suspected to be EFP components. Various documents and photographs were also found and confiscated for further analysis”, it added.

Press Release: Global Peace And Justice Auckland
3 September 2007
Media Release:
Cunliffe abuses democracy
Day 53 of Ali Panah’s hunger strike

It is an abuse of democracy for Minister of Immigration David Cunliffe to claim confidentiality as an excuse for refusing to talk publicly about the case of Iranian hunger striker Ali Panah. Ali is on Day 53 of his “fast” and we understand is now declining to take the liquid mineral supplements strongly recommended by his doctors to prevent long term damage to his body.

Previously the government has tried to discredit Ali by saying he is not a true Christian convert. Ali is a committed Christian as attested by his church vicar, his archbishop and parishioners.

Background
Ali is an Iranian who arrived here several years ago and applied for refugee status. He had converted to Christianity when in South Korea and sent a video of his baptism to his mother. The video was intercepted by Iranian customs and referred to Iranian authorities. In his absence he was sentenced to death for apostasy (conversion from Islam to Christianity). On his return to Iran he will be able to challenge the sentence but at best his life is at threat should Cunliffe force his return to Iran. Ali was arrested 20 months ago and detained at Mt Eden Prison to be deported. However for his own safety he has refused to sign papers applying for an Iranian passport.

Ali has the strong support of his New Zealand employer, his Anglican vicar and fellow parishioners as well as the Iranian community in New Zealand.

Amnesty International says that in cases like this the government should issue a temporary visa until it is safe for Ali to return to Iran. Minister of Immigration David Cunliffe has so far refused to use his discretion under the Immigration Act to do this.

GPJA is planning further protest outside the prison (or hospital) at 1pm next Saturday.

scoop.co.nz

Six members of the same Kurdish family were killed where their private plane attempted to land in an airport in California, USA, KurdishMedia.com learnt from its contacts in CA on Saturday. They were all relatives of Kani Xulam, the KurdishMedia.com regular writer and the director of the Kurdish organisation AKIN in CA.

Adam Pasori, the brother of Kurdish writer and activist Kani Xulam, was giving a tour to his family on Friday August 31, 2007 in his private plane. Few minutes before landing, the plane hit the ground for unclear reasons. Adam, the pilot and a very successful businessman, and all of the five passengers including Adam's wife Sieble, his brother Dara, his sister Muhtarem and her two children Myryam and Nesrin, died immediately in this tragic event. An update on the funeral and memorial ceremony will follow.

Kurdish Community of California is mourning an important loss.

KurdishMedia.com

Iran hanged a man in public on Sunday for killing a judge, Fars News Agency reported, the latest of a series of executions that have been criticised by rights groups and European states.

The 28-year old, named only as Amir-Hossein R., was convicted of the murder in July of a judge in Gharchak, a town 40 km (25 miles) south of Tehran, the report said.

The number of executions, many in public, has risen since July with the launch of a summer crackdown on "immoral behaviour". During the campaign, police have arrested dozens of drug addicts, smugglers, rapists and murderers.

The clamp down has also included an initiative to confront youths who fail to adhere to Iran's strict Islamic dress codes. Youths found flouting the rules may be verbally reprimanded on the spot or briefly detained.

Amnesty International has protested to Iran over the number of executions, which it said in an April report had doubled to at least 177 people last year.

Before the latest series of hangings that began in July, Amnesty said at least 124 people had been put to death in 2007. Based on those figures, Iran has now executed more than 150 people so far this year.

The European Union in May criticised Tehran's human rights record and expressed concern about the use of death penalty in the Islamic state.

Murder, rape, adultery, armed robbery, apostasy and drug trafficking are all punishable by death under Iran's Islamic sharia law, imposed after the 1979 revolution.

Iran routinely dismisses criticism of rights abuses, particularly from Western organisations or countries, saying it is acting on the basis of sharia. It usually responds by citing what it says are abuses in the West.
Reuters
Javno.com

The Sunday Telegraph

Christopher Booker's notebook

By Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph

Recent events have again highlighted the most baffling riddle of our foreign policy. Why, in striking contrast to the new hard line of Washington, is the European Union, led by the British Government, going out of its way to appease the brutal and fanatical regime whose terrorist activities do more than anything else to destabilise the Middle East, from the Lebanon to Afghanistan?

Iran has been stepping up its reign of terror at home, hanging scores of its own people, many in public (corpses dangling from cranes were recently placed outside the Australian and Japanese embassies in Teheran).

And, as President Bush confirmed last week, its Revolutionary Guards are now the chief source of men and materiel to the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have also recently supplied further aid to Hezbollah, to prepare for a new war in Lebanon.

Hence the reports in Washington that the US government is about to proscribe the Revolutionary Guards, with their external Qods assassination squads, as a terrorist organisation.

The Guards act directly under Iran's Supreme, Leader Ali Khamenei, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was formerly a senior Guards commander.

Washington has taken a much more sympathetic line lately to the main Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which for 30 years has campaigned for a democratic, secular state, and more than 100,000 of whose supporters have been killed by the Guards.

After a lengthy investigation, the US authorities found no evidence for placing the largest group in the NCRI, the People's Mujahideen of Iran (PMOI), on its list of terrorist organisations.

All this is in startling contrast to the record of the EU, and our own Government in particular. In 2001, the British Government led the way in proscribing the PMOI (at the bidding of the Teheran regime, as Jack Straw explained last year). When the rest of the EU followed suit, the European Court of Justice last December ruled that it had acted unlawfully.

But in January, at Britain's behest, the EU's Council of Ministers agreed to ignore the judgment. A thousand parliamentarians from all over Europe protested, including more than 100 members of our own Parliament, but the Council of Ministers again agreed, in June, to flout the ECJ's ruling.

Astonishingly, this leaves us not only prohibiting, in flagrant breach of EU law, the chief body that campaigns peacefully for a democratic Iran, but explicitly doing so to appease a regime which itself orchestrates terrorism, supplying the rockets and roadside bombs that are killing British and other allied troops.

In a statement to this column last week, the NCRI's leader, Maryam Rajavi, who lives in exile in France, in constant fear of assassination by the Revolutionary Guards, said: "The unlawful decision by the EU on June 28, 2007 to maintain the PMOI on its list of terrorist organisations gave a green light to the regime to expedite the killing of prisoners in Iran. By erecting cranes that bring Iran's youth to their death, Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and other criminal leaders of this regime have challenged the dignity of humankind."

Calling on the UN Security Council to take action, Mrs Rajavi went on to say that "conscientious people around the world must blame this policy of appeasement for giving the ruling fascists and their henchmen free reins to put the noose around the necks of young people".

Washington may be getting the message. But when our Government is actually to the forefront in promoting that policy of appeasement, even though this is also leading directly to the deaths of our countrymen, can there be any hope that sanity and decency will prevail?

TEHRAN (AFP) — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Sunday Iran had put into operation over 3,000 uranium-enriching centrifuges at a nuclear plant, reaching a key goal of its atomic drive, state broadcasting reported. "They (world powers) thought that by issuing any resolution Iran would back down," Ahmadinejad told Islamist students, referring to the two sanctions resolutions imposed against Tehran by the UN Security Council. "But after each resolution the Iranian nation took another step along the path of nuclear development," he said. "Now it has put into operation more than 3,000 centrifuges and every week we install a new series." The installation of 3,000 centrifuges has always been earmarked by Iran as the key medium-term goal of its nuclear programme which it had originally hoped to reach by March. A UN atomic energy agency report obtained by AFP last week however said that Iran was still short of 3,000 centrifuges. It said that as of 19 August, 2007 Iran had total of 1,968 centrifuges operating at its uranium enrichment plant in the central town of Natanz. A total of 656 more centrifuges were in development, it said.

The Sunday Times

Sarah Baxter, Washington

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

President George Bush intensified the rhetoric against Iran last week, accusing Tehran of putting the Middle East “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust”. He warned that the US and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late”.

One Washington source said the “temperature was rising” inside the administration. Bush was “sending a message to a number of audiences”, he said – to the Iranians and to members of the United Nations security council who are trying to weaken a tough third resolution on sanctions against Iran for flouting a UN ban on uranium enrichment.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last week reported “significant” cooperation with Iran over its nuclear programme and said that uranium enrichment had slowed. Tehran has promised to answer most questions from the agency by November, but Washington fears it is stalling to prevent further sanctions. Iran continues to maintain it is merely developing civilian nuclear power.

Bush is committed for now to the diplomatic route but thinks Iran is moving towards acquiring a nuclear weapon. According to one well placed source, Washington believes it would be prudent to use rapid, overwhelming force, should military action become necessary.

Israel, which has warned it will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, has made its own preparations for airstrikes and is said to be ready to attack if the Americans back down.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which uncovered the existence of Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, said the IAEA was being strung along. “A number of nuclear sites have not even been visited by the IAEA,” he said. “They’re giving a clean bill of health to a regime that is known to have practised deception.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, irritated the Bush administration last week by vowing to fill a “power vacuum” in Iraq. But Washington believes Iran is already fighting a proxy war with the Americans in Iraq.

The Institute for the Study of War last week released a report by Kimberly Kagan that explicitly uses the term “proxy war” and claims that with the Sunni insurgency and Al-Qaeda in Iraq “increasingly under control”, Iranian intervention is the “next major problem the coalition must tackle”.

Bush noted that the number of attacks on US bases and troops by Iranian-supplied munitions had increased in recent months – “despite pledges by Iran to help stabilise the security situation in Iraq”.

It explains, in part, his lack of faith in diplomacy with the Iranians. But Debat believes the Pentagon’s plans for military action involve the use of so much force that they are unlikely to be used and would seriously stretch resources in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Iran Focus Tehran, Iran– The following are photos of the new Commandant of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Iran’s Supreme Leader in a decree on Saturday appointed a new chief for the IRGC. Brigadier General Mohammad-Ali (Aziz) Jaafari takes over from Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi who in a separate decree was appointed as Supreme Armed Forces Advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Islamic Republic’s Armed Forces. In a letter to General Jaafari, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that he expected him to make daily advancements in all aspects of the IRGC’s work. He also upgraded Jaafari’s rank from Brigadier General to Major General. General Safavi steps down as Commandant of the IRGC after ten years in that post. In August 2005, Jaafari was put in charge of forming the “IRGC Centre for Strategy”. The idea for the creation of the centre for strategy came from Khamenei himself, who regularly receives the top IRGC commanders and closely follows their activities. He had asked Safavi and his commanders to devise a new command structure and military strategy for the IRGC that would give the elite military force unlimited access to national resources and absolute priority over the regular army in case of a foreign military confrontation. The centre was made to draw up the strategy and implement the necessary changes to ensure rapid and efficient transformation of the country’s civilian infrastructure and resources to military footing under the control of the IRGC. The subsequent changes strengthened the radical military institution that now controls many of Iran’s key centres of power. It was reported last month that the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush was contemplating adding the IRGC to its list of Foreign Terrorist Organisations, the first case of a government-affiliated body ending up on the blacklist. In September 2005, Jaafari was confirmed as the head of the Supreme National Security Council’s directorate for internal security. The SNSC is in charge of the country’s nuclear negotiations with the West and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

FOX News

By Lt. Col. Oliver North

LONDON, UK — If September goes as August ended, this is going to be a very interesting month. On Monday, President Bush told the American Legion in Reno, Nev. that two dangerous strands of Islamic extremism are converging in Iraq, “supported and embodied by the regime that sits in Tehran.” He went on to warn that the Iranians “must halt these actions.”

Earlier that same day, French President Nicolas Sarkozy observed that Iran’s nuclear ambitions present “catastrophic” alternatives: “an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran.” Both Messer’s Bush and Sarkozy are correct — though it may shock liberal Democrats to see the French standing side by side with the United States on an issue none of their candidates for president wants to talk about.

Importantly, within hours of the U.S. and French presidents’ remarks, Iranian Head of State, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad observed that U.S. influence in Iraq is “being destroyed rapidly” and that “Iran is willing to fill this void.”

A U.S. State Department spokesman rushed to the microphones to understate the obvious, by forcefully noting that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s threats were “unhelpful.”

And therein lies the problem: for the first time in decades, the French government is allied with a U.S. administration on the threat posed by Iran. For months, Mr. Bush has been trying to build international support for stronger measures against Iran’s nuclear weapons program and Tehran’s proclivity to foment sectarian violence in Iraq. Yet, all the State Department can do is observe that the Iranians are being “unhelpful.”

As the Democrat-led Congress returns to “work” this week, it is likely to be equally passive when it comes to dealing with the real threats facing the United States. Though General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker have yet to deliver their report on the effectiveness of the “surge” in Iraq, Democrat leaders — and their candidates for president — have already staked out what they think is important.

Sen. Barack Obama wants to bomb Pakistan. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton prefers to “honor” our troops by getting them out of Iraq. Sen. John Edwards is ready to raise the white flag immediately. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats are intent on investigating Alberto Gonzales, who resigned this week as attorney general. And, none of them have anything useful to say about the most serious threat we have faced in decades: a nuclear armed Iran.

Though Democrat leaders don’t want to talk about it, the intent of the radical theocracy ruling in Tehran can no longer be in doubt. The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency reported last spring that Iran now has sufficient cascades of gas centrifuges on line to produce “commercial quantities” of enriched uranium. Even the most naïve and self-serving politicians in Congress know that this means that Iranian scientists are close to being able to build atomic weapons. That also means that time and options are rapidly running out on how to stop them.

In July, Sen. Joe Lieberman, in a column in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Iran’s Proxy War” tried to wake up his colleagues to Tehran’s new aggressiveness: “In addition to sponsoring insurgents in Iraq, Tehran is training, funding and equipping radical Islamist groups in Lebanon, Palestine and Afghanistan — where the Taliban now appear to be receiving Iranian help in their war against the government of President Hamid Karzai and its NATO defenders.” He accurately noted that, “Iran is acting aggressively and consistently to undermine moderate regimes in the Middle East, establish itself as the dominant regional power, and reshape the region in its own ideological image.” His fellow Democrats shrugged off this sobering assessment.

The unwillingness of the majority party in Congress to even debate or put forward any proposals for how we should deal with the peril we face from Tehran ought to concern all of us; without a consensus in Congress on how we should confront a radical Islamic theocracy armed with atomic weapons places the nation in grave danger. Just six years after 3,000 people died at the hands of suicidal Islamic radicals, we may have to face the prospect of Islamic radicals having the capability of destroying an entire American city. The French have awakened to this peril. Will our Congress?

Associated Press

By TED BRIDIS

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The United Arab Emirates announced a new law Friday permitting it to ban or restrict shipments for national security or foreign policy reasons.

The Bush administration had pressured it to crack down on companies believed to be smuggling equipment to Iran to build explosive devices killing American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

U.S. pressure for tougher trade laws is part of the Bush administration's broader campaign to contain Iran amid tensions over its alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons and support of the Iraqi insurgency. Just this week, President Bush said: "Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere."

The new law permits authorities to ban or restrict imports, exports or passthrough shipments for reasons of health, safety, environmental concerns, national security or foreign affairs. It creates a new commission for setting these rules, and membership will include federal ministries and executives from private companies.

The passage of the law was announced by the country's president, H.H. Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

The White House had expressed concerns publicly and through diplomatic channels in Washington about troubling shipments to Iranian front companies operating in Dubai.

The UAE is among the world's largest shipping hubs for international commerce, and is located just across the narrow Strait of Hormuz from Iran. The countries have been trading partners for centuries. Much of Iran's trade flows through Dubai, which also ranked as the top export destination in the Middle East last year for American companies with $12 billion worth of goods.

Dubai business executives had protested the U.S. pressure.

"The regulation of re-exports should be established by the UAE without the threat from the U.S.," Hamad Buamim, the director general of the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry, wrote in a letter to the Bush administration obtained by the AP. "Only the UAE is able to judge the balance of concerns for re-export relative to national security against the risk of the trade moving to another re-export location."

U.S. intelligence agencies have collected evidence that at least 11 individuals and companies operating in the United Arab Emirates are smuggling electronic components and devices - sometimes through Iran - to build explosive devices used to ambush American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. government effectively banned trade with them. The White House said its proof was based on "specific and articulable facts," which it did not describe publicly.

The companies include microelectronics manufacturers and industrial suppliers.

Partly to pressure the United Arab Emirates, the U.S. has proposed new restrictions on companies doing business in countries the White House would designate as "destinations of diversion concern." Those countries, not identified in the proposal, would include prominent shipping hubs with lax export laws. Companies shipping products through such countries would face tougher reviews for export licenses.

The Dubai chamber, which represents 88,000 companies, has bristled at the idea. It said it would be ineffective and inappropriate.

It was not immediately clear what effect the UAE's new trade law would have on the administration proposal.

Buamim urged the U.S. months ago to withdraw the proposal "while we continue to quietly negotiate in this area." Buamim said the chamber does not believe the UAE would be included under the U.S. proposal, although he complained the criteria was too vague. "Any country could be put into any category at any time," Buamim said.

The dispute highlighted the conflicted relationship between the United States and the UAE. The administration considers the emirates a close ally, especially on military matters in the Middle East. But Dubai was forced last year to abandon plans for Dubai-based DP World to take over significant operations at six major U.S. seaports amid intense national criticism.

The companies and individuals the Bush administration identified as shipping electronic components and devices for explosive devices killing U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are:

-Al-Faris of the UAE;

-Ali Akbar Yahya of Dubai;

-Amir Mohammad Zahedi of the UAE;

-Sayed-Ali Hosseini of Dubai;

-Mayrow General Trading of Dubai;

-Micatic General Trading of Dubai;

-Majidco Micro Electronics of Dubai;

-Atlinx Electronics of Dubai;

-Micro Middle East Electronics of Dubai;

-F.N. Yaghmaei of Dubai; and

-H. Ghasir of Dubai.

By YAHYA BARZANJI
Associated Press Writer

MARDOW, Iraq - As explosions boomed in the distance, a Kurdish woman stood outside her house and pointed to where shells scorched parts of her father's grapes and plum orchards. "It was a bad day when some 20 shells hit our village in a single day last week. We were crying as we prayed to God to protect us from the bombs of the Islamic Republic of Iran," said Serwa Ibrahim, one of the few remaining villagers in Mardow, about 25 miles from the Iranian border.

"Despite the shelling, I will stay in my village until the end," Ibrahim, 33, said Thursday.

Iranian troops have been accused of bombing border areas for weeks against suspected positions of the Free Life Party, or PEJAK, a breakaway faction of the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party. Iran says PEJAK — which seeks autonomy for Kurds in Iran — launches attacks inside Iran from bases in Iraq.

The Iranian shelling has been criticized by Iraqi officials and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari warned it could have negative effects on the crucial relations between Iran and Iraq's Shiite-led government.

Ari Yashir, a PEJAK member, took a reporter in a tour around several deserted villages and claimed the Iranian attacks only serve to harm civilians.

"The bombing is only targeting villages where we have no bases," he said. "After three weeks of Iranian shelling none of our positions was hit and not a single member of our party was wounded."

Most of the people who fled their homes have gathered in an area known as Shewe Hasow, a valley with water springs in the Qandil Mountain area that borders Iran and Turkey. Many of them stay in tents or under covers mostly supplied by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

"We are here because the refugees are in need," said ICRC member Patrick Youssef, standing by a truck with canned food and bottled water. "We are helping them with needed stuff because most of them left their homes leaving their things behind."

The Kurdish region's interior minister, Othman Haji Mahmoud, told the Kurdish regional parliament Tuesday that the Iranian shelling led to the displacement of some 450 families in 20 villages, adding that several people were wounded in addition to material damages.

He said the latest wave of shelling began Aug. 14.

In Baghdad, Zebari said Tuesday that the main areas struck are in the northern provinces of Irbil and Sulaimaniyah. Iranian shelling "has been ongoing and unfortunately has become a daily or a routine practice. Recently, we summoned the Iranian ambassador and handed him a note of protest."

"PEJAK sometimes moves in border area, but this does not permit all this continuous, daily and intensive shelling," said Zebari, a Kurd, who noted that Iraq was prepared to hold negotiations with Iran on the disputes over Kurdish rebel groups.

"We hope that these attacks will stop immediately."

To some Kurds in the region, they have been living the war for decades, including widespread atrocities blamed on Saddam Hussein's regime in the 1980s.

"We are the victims of a continuous struggle. My house was destroyed five times and I rebuilt it. Let this be the sixth time," said Abdullah Wasou Ibrahim, who fled to the refugee camp with 10 family members.