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Once again, Iraqi foreign minister demands
that Iran stop shelling of Kurdistan region
4.9.2007
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September 4, 2007
TEHRAN,-- Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar
Zebari, delivered a strongly worded demand to Iran's
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and other Iranian
officials here on Monday to halt the shelling of a
mountainous border region in Iraq's Kurdistan
region, where Zebari said the bombardment has driven
as many as 3,000 Kurdish villagers from their homes
and set orchards and fields ablaze.
Zebari said in an interview that the Iranians, who
have refused to acknowledge publicly that the
shelling was taking place, did not dispute his
account.
He said the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr
Mottaki, described the shelling as Iran's response
to guerrilla attacks against it by a group that is
opposed to the Iranian government and is believed to
have bases on the Iraqi side of the border.
Members of that group, PEJAK, have claimed
responsibility for attacks inside Iran, and they are
believed to have shot down at least one Iranian
helicopter in recent months. But Zebari said the
shelling of the villages was indiscriminate and was
achieving little against PEJAK positions, and he
made clear that Iraqi patience was wearing thin with
the bombardment, which has taken place
intermittently for about two weeks.
"In a normal relationship between two countries,
this amounts to an act of aggression," Zebari said.
Although Zebari conceded in the interview that the
conflict in Iraq made this time far from ordinary,
his words were likely to be sobering against the
backdrop of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, during
which millions died.
In a news briefing during President George W. Bush's
visit to Iraq on Monday, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal
al-Maliki also discussed the situation in the north
and suggested that Turkey too was shelling across
the border into Iraq.
Before Turkish elections last month, Turkey's
military staged an enormous troop buildup on its
border and by some accounts was on the verge of a
major attack, citing incursions by Kurdish armed
groups from Iraq into Turkey. Some of those groups
are believed to favor an independent Kurdish nation
that would include parts of Kurd-dominated southern
Turkey. |
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari
Smoke rose from the site of an attack last month 200
miles north of Baghdad. Kurdish Villagers said Iran
had shelled the Iraqi Kurdistan area |
The Iranian Foreign Ministry did not respond to
requests in Tehran on Monday by The New York Times
for comment on the bombardments, and a Times
reporter accompanying the Iraqi foreign minister was
effectively barred from a diplomatic conference
attended by Ahmadinejad and Mottaki.
The Iraqi government had previously sent an official
letter of protest to Iran about the shelling. But
the Iraqi ambassador to Iran, Mohammad Majid
al-Sheikh, said Monday that Iran had ignored that
letter.
"We have not received any sensible response from
them," Sheikh said. "We demand that they respond to
our protest."
As senior government officials discussed the
attacks, poor villagers in the area, which is north
and east of the provincial capitals of Erbil and
Sulaimaniya, were paying the price. On Monday,
Awella Saleem, 62, returned to his largely destroyed
house near the border. He said his family was inside
when bombs started falling several days ago.
"We survived by coincidence, and two of our family
were injured," Saleem said. "Why are we under such a
savage attack by Iran? There is nobody in our
village who would harm Iran."
Officials in the Kurdish Regional Government and the
Iraqi Red Crescent Society, a relief organization,
said that about 500 families had been displaced by
the bombing, figures that were generally consistent
with the estimates by Zebari, who is Kurdish. Othman
Haji Mahmoud, the interior minister for the regional
government, said last week that the government
denounced the bombing and offered to open direct
talks with Iran on the subject.
Members of PEJAK are said to be Iranian Kurds
essentially seeking autonomy for Kurds in Iran. How
long their cross-border incursions have been taking
place is not known.
Senior Iraqi government officials suspect that the
Iranian shelling may be in part a response to
American assertions that Iran is supplying deadly
weaponry to armed groups, particularly Shiite
militias, in Iraq.
The United States has demanded that Iran stop
supporting the armed groups, and now Iran is
demanding that Iraq and the United States stop the
PEJAK attacks. Privately, Iran has said it believes
the United States could be backing the PEJAK group,
an assertion that could not be confirmed late
Monday.
Zebari said that controlling the group should fall
to Iraqi government forces, in particular the
Kurd-dominated national army in the northern region.
But with so many of those troops committed to
security operations in the unstable center of Iraq,
the northern government was short of troops to send
to the border regions, he said.
In an interview near the border on Monday, Hawere
Kareme, who described himself as a PEJAK official,
asserted that Iran was aiming to empty the border
villages of Kurds and fill them with what he called
Islamic extremists.
The sectarian tension between Kurds, who are
generally Sunni, and Arab and Iranian Shiites is
high in the area, adding yet another troubling
dimension to the Iraq conflict.
"Iran wants to destroy what the Kurds of Iraq have
built and destabilize the province," Kareme said.
"Take a look at our headquarters and our fighters in
the Qandeel Mountains; none of them was injured.
These villages are far from our activities and
movements, but Iran shells it fiercely."
nytimes com
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