Irak

[Shahab3]

Die 5 iranischen Diplomaten, die vor rund 2 Jahren von den US-Streitkräften mit großem Tamtam (inkl. Verwüstung eines Konsulats) gegen den Widerstand der irakischen Regierung im Irak gekidnapped wurden, sind nun endlich wieder auf freiem Fuß.

Kommentar von Gareth Porter in der Asia Times dazu:

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Jul 14, 2009

Freed Iranians highlight US-Iraq conflict
By Gareth Porter
...
For the Barack Obama administration, as for the George W Bush administration before it, the Iranian detainees had become symbols of what Washington steadfastly insisted was an Iranian effort to use the IRGC to destabilize the Iraqi regime.

But high-ranking Shi'ite and Kurdish officials of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had never shared the US view of the IRGC or of the Iranian role.
...
Three of the five Iranian detainees, who had been grabbed in a January 2007 raid, were working in an Iranian liaison office that had been operating in the Kurdistan capital of Irbil. The US military, hinting that it actually had little information about the Iranians seized, said they were "suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraqi and coalition forces".

Kurdish Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari tried to get the US officials to understand that the Iranians seized in Irbil were not part of a "clandestine network" but were working on visas and other paperwork for travel by Iraqis to Iran. Zebari explained that they were working for the IRGC because that institution is responsible for controlling Iran's borders.

After Mahmoud Farhadi was kidnapped by the US military from a hotel in the Kurdish city of Suleimaniya in September 2007, a US military spokesman made the spectacular claim that Farhadi was an IRGC commander responsible for all Iranian operations inside Iraq.

Kurdish officials acknowledged Farhadi's IRGC affiliation, but Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish president of Iraq, publicly confirmed that Farhadi was a civilian official of the neighboring Iranian province of Kermanshah on a "commercial mission with the knowledge of the federal government in Baghdad and the government of Kurdistan".
...
After Muqtada declared a unilateral ceasefire in late August 2007, the Maliki regime, including Kurdish foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari, argued publicly and privately to Bush administration officials that Iran had used its influence on Sadr to get him to agree to such a ceasefire. They used the argument to urge the Bush administration to release the Iranian detainees.
...