One of the operational assets being used by the Defense Department is a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which is being “run” in two southern regional areas of Iran. They are Baluchistan, a Sunni stronghold, and Khuzestan, a Shia region where a series of recent attacks has left many dead and hundreds injured in the last three months.
The Iraqi coalition government headed by Shiite Ebrahim Al Jaafari and Nouri Al Maliki decided to expel MKO members from Iraq and close Camp Ashraf. However, none of these decisions have been implemented.
Camp Ashraf which is occupied by the Iraq-based Iranian opposition group the Mujahedine Khalq Organization (MKO) is sited more than 260km north of Baghdad. This group resettled in Iraq in 1987 during the rule of Saddam Hussain. After Saddam was ousted in 2003, the US army gave protection to this camp which remains today.
This comes while Khalf Al-Ayan and Adnan Al-Dulaimi, who accompanied terrorist MKO member Mohammed Mohaddessin in the conference, are themselves involved in the unrest in Iraq and in creating ethnic clashes. While ago, a number of cars prepared with bombs were found in Dulaimi’s house but the results of investigations were not made public because Americans didn’t want to!
In the not too distant past, Jafarzadeh was happy to proffer scary stories about ayatollahs with nukes. Now, however, as a neocon team player, he has adopted the Iran meddling in Iraq theme, apparently the emerging rationale conjured up as a flimsy excuse to be used in the upcoming effort to shock and awe Iranian school children and grandmothers.
Leaders of Camp Ashraf move with heavy US forces’ protection inside Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. During visits of Iraqi officials to Tehran and their Iranian counterparts to Baghdad, the MKO group file was at the top of bilateral talks. It was said that Iran wants a settlement with Iraqis to end the MKO file in return for full security cooperation that guarantees stopping the infiltration of terrorist elements into Iraq from the Iranian borders.
The Raw Story, Larisa Alexandrova interviewed several former intelligence officials who implicated the U.S. in what appears to be the initial plans for a war with Iran. One of her sources said, “The US army secured a key MEK facility 60 miles northwest of Baghdad shortly after the 2003 invasion, but they did not secure the MEK and let them basically be because [then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz was thinking ahead to Iran.”
The BBC’s January 17, 2007 television program on the Iranian Communist MEK included an interview with Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson revealed that the State Department supported a plan to disband the Iranian communist cult at Camp Ashraf, Iraq. However, Vice President Dick Cheney’s office rejected the plan.
Bush and his team have for long focused on getting out of Iraq in a proper way so as to save the face of the US.This plan has also other dimensions including giving more authority to the Iraqi government and accepting regional policies of President Talabani and Prime Minister Maliki.Some may think that the US wants to start more wars in the region, but the evidence doesn’t support this idea….
This week Mr. Paulo Casaca (Member of the European Parliament for Portugal’s Socialist Party) and André Brie (member of Confederal Group of the European United Left – Nordic Green Left of Germany) both members of the European Parliament paid a 4 day “good will” tour of Camp Ashraf in the outskirts of Baghdad.