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Iraqi Kurds denounce U.S. detention of
Iranian smuggler
21.9.2007
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September
21, 2007
Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan region 'Iraq', --
U.S. troops
arrested an Iranian man
during an early morning raid on a hotel in the
Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah Thursday and accused
him of helping to smuggle a deadly type of roadside
bomb into Iraq .
But the Kurdistan Regional Government in a statement
called the arrest "illegitimate," said the man was a
member of a trade delegation that had been invited
to Sulaimaniyah by the local government and demanded
that he be released.
"Actions like these serve no one," the statement
said.
The United States has detained several Iranians in
Iraq in the past year and accused them of training
Iraqi insurgents and providing weapons to them. In
January it took five Iranians into custody in Erbil
, the Kurdish regional capital, and accused them of
being members of the Iranian military. They're still
being held. Eight other Iranians who were detained
last month in Baghdad were quickly released,
however.
The U.S. statement didn't identify the man except to
allege that he is an officer in the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corp's elite Quds force. The
statement said intelligence indicated that the man
had trained foreign fighters in Iraq and provided
them with roadside bombs known as explosively formed
penetrators, or EFPs. EFPs fire a molten jet of
metal through vehicles' armor and are much feared by
U.S. troops.
The Kurdish Regional Government said the man was
Aghai Farhadi, a member of an economic and
commercial delegation from the Iranian governorate
of Karmanshah, which borders Iraq's Sulaimaniyah and
Diyala provinces.
Hassan Baqi , the head of the Sulaimaniyah chamber
of commerce, said Farhadi had been in Sulaimaniyah
for a week for discussions on opening a border
crossing near Panjween,68 miles east of Sulaimaniyah
, and other trade-related issues.
It was unknown what evidence, if any, American
troops recovered when they seized the man at the
Sulaimaniyah Palace Hotel . Saifudean Ahmed,
Sulaimaniyah's security director, said 20 U.S.
soldiers took part in the arrest. Witnesses said
helicopters hovered over the scene for two hours.
Kurdish officials were quick to distance themselves
from the detention.
"We had no prior knowledge of the detention of a
member of the Iranian commercial delegation,"
Sulaimaniyah police chief Gen. Zarkar Alia said in a
statement. "We heard of the incident from unofficial
sources. The operation was carried out without
coordination with us, the security forces or the
authorities in Sulaimaniyah ."
Sulaimaniyah is one of the main cities in Iraqi
Kurdistan , which has its own tensions with Iran .
The Iranian military has been bombarding mountain
villages on the Iraqi side of the border, allegedly
to combat Kurdish separatist guerrillas who the
Iranians say have taken refuge there.
Kurdish and Iraqi officials have demanded that Iran
stop the bombardment, saying Iran should fight
Kurdish rebels in Iran.
MCT
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