Persian Gulf Hostage Crisis Provoked by Failed U.S. Raid

By Scott Horton

London's Independent reports today that the current stand-off between Britain and Iran, arising out of Iran's seizure of 15 British sailors and marines in the Persian Gulf, is a retaliation against a U.S. raid in January in Arbil. That raid netted five official Iranian representatives who were in Iraqi Kurdistan in connection with the upgrading of a representative office to a consulate; their presence was authorized by Iraqi government officials.

Early on the morning of 11 January, helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.

In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment.

. . . The two senior Iranian officers the US sought to capture were Mohammed Jafari, the powerful deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the chief of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, according to Kurdish officials.

The two men were in Kurdistan on an official visit during which they met the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, and later saw Massoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), at his mountain headquarters overlooking Arbil.

The five more junior Iranian officers remain in the custody of U.S. forces in Iraq, notwithstanding complaints from the Iraqi government. The United States has claimed that they were involved in attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, but has refused to either make formal charges or to present any evidence supporting this contention. The Independent portrays the action as a conscious provocation:

For more than a year the US and its allies have been trying to put pressure on Iran. Security sources in Iraqi Kurdistan have long said that the US is backing Iranian Kurdish guerrillas in Iran. The U.S. is also reportedly backing Sunni Arab dissidents in Khuzestan in southern Iran who are opposed to the government in Tehran.