Friday, April 06, 2007
No Iranians in ICRC delegation that visited Iranian detainees
Iran, U.S.
(AP) - The U.S. military issued a statement Friday clarifying that there were no Iranians in an International Committee of the Red Cross team who had visited five Iranians in American detention after they were arrested three months ago in Irbil. On Wednesday, U.S. military spokesman said Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said that an ICRC delegation had visited the captive Iranians and that one of the group was Iranian.
Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman, issued the clarifying statement Friday in an e-mail statement to The Associated Press. "The ICRC committees that visited the five Iranians detained in Irbil on two occasions did not contain an Iranian national. One of the two committees contained an individual who speaks Farsi and lived in Iran, but he is a British citizen by birth," Garver said.
U.S. Embassy spokesman Lou Fintor, meanwhile, said the United States was still considering an Iranian government request to visit the five. Washington has said the five men, who were arrested in Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish semiautonomous region in northern Iraq, were rounded up on suspicion that they were providing aid to militia fighters who are targeting U.S. and Iraqi troops and civilians.
Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman, issued the clarifying statement Friday in an e-mail statement to The Associated Press. "The ICRC committees that visited the five Iranians detained in Irbil on two occasions did not contain an Iranian national. One of the two committees contained an individual who speaks Farsi and lived in Iran, but he is a British citizen by birth," Garver said.
U.S. Embassy spokesman Lou Fintor, meanwhile, said the United States was still considering an Iranian government request to visit the five. Washington has said the five men, who were arrested in Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish semiautonomous region in northern Iraq, were rounded up on suspicion that they were providing aid to militia fighters who are targeting U.S. and Iraqi troops and civilians.
Labels: ICRC, International Committee of the Red Cross, Iranians, Irbil
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Fate of five Iranians captured by U.S. in Arbil unknown
Security, Iran
(IPS) - As the Western media turns its attention to the fate of 15 Britons detained for allegedly trespassing into Iranian waters over the weekend, the status of five Iranian officials captured in a U.S. military raid on a liaison office in northern Iraq on Jan. 11 remains a mystery. Even though high-level Iraqi officials have publicly called for their release, for all practical purposes, the Iranians have disappeared into the U.S.-sanctioned "coalition detention" system that has been criticised as arbitrary and even illegal by many experts on international law.
Hours before President George W. Bush declared that they would "seek out and destroy the [Iranian] networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq," U.S. forces raided what has been described as a diplomatic liaison office in the northern city of Arbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and detained six Iranians, infuriating Kurdish officials in the process.
The troops took office files and computers, ostensibly to find evidence regarding the alleged role of Iranian agents in anti-coalition attacks and sectarian violence in Iraq. One diplomat was released, but the other five men remain in U.S. custody and have not been formally charged with a crime. "They have disappeared. I don't know if they've gone into the enemy combatant system," said Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University who served in the White House under former President Jimmy Carter. "Nobody on the outside knows."
A spokesman for the Multinational Forces Iraq (MFI), Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, told IPS this week from his office in Baghdad, "They are still in 'coalition detention' in accordance with the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1546, 1637 and 1723."
"The Iranian group in Iraq was arrested by American forces, and we have been asking continuously for their release," Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh this week, "but this is something different from the British sailors." A State Department official with knowledge of the situation said the Iranians were informed of the status of the diplomats after their detention through the Swiss government, which represents U.S. interests in Iran in the absence of any U.S. diplomatic presence. He referred all additional questions to MFI in Baghdad.
During this month's regional meeting in Baghdad in which U.S. officials also participated, the Iranian delegation requested the release of the five men, according to a State Department spokeswoman. In response, the Iraqi government asked the U.S.-led coalition to investigate the circumstances involving their detention, The legal fate of the captured Iranians turns in part on the issue of whether the two-storey building in Arbil that was the target of the Jan. 11 raid was, as Iran claims, an official consulate, in which case its premises and staff are entitled to diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention, or rather a liaison office, as U.S. officials contend, which would not be entitled to the same protections. Both Iran and the Kurdish regional government have agreed that consular activities -- such as the issuance of visas -- had been carried out by office staff since 1992. But the U.S. State Department insists that it was not an accredited consulate and that the five detainees are members of the Quds force, an elite unit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) described by spokesman Sean McCormack as specialising in "training terrorists and those sorts of activities".
According to a knowledgeable source at the Iraqi Embassy here, the five were not accredited diplomats, although they had submitted documents for accreditation before the raid was carried out. Their applications were being processed at the time, said the source, who asked not to be identified. The source also said that the Kurdish regional government had treated them as if they were indeed accredited. The raid on the Arbil liaison office was the third in a series of episodes that targeted Iranian officials operating in Iraq.
Labels: Arbil, Hoshyar Zibari, Iranians, Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, prisoners, U.S.
