Via The Independent, we learn that the seizing of 15 British soldiers is really the fault of the U.S.
A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.
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.
Better understanding of the seriousness of the US action in Arbil - and the angry Iranian response to it - should have led Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence to realise that Iran was likely to retaliate against American or British forces such as highly vulnerable Navy search parties in the Gulf. 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.
"They were after Jafari," Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of Massoud Barzani, told The Independent. He confirmed that the Iranian office had been established in Arbil for a long time and was often visited by Kurds obtaining documents to visit Iran. "The Americans thought he [Jafari] was there," said Mr Hussein.
Yes, seizing hostiles within a country one is providing security in looks exactly like crossing a country's borders to capture British soldiers.
As Hot Air points out, the story of the American raid is months old. But don't let that stop the America bashers from participating in their favorite blood sport: blaming the U.S.
Yeah, he told the same thing to NPR back on January 15th, when this story still qualified as “news.” Follow the link to the audio; the interview with Hussein begins at 1:28.
That’s not the only part of that blockquoted passage that’s already been reported, either. The Telegraph broke the news a week ago about the U.S. warning Britain to be on guard for reprisals after the Irbil raid. For reasons known only to them, the Brits evidently didn’t move to a higher state of alert. The Independent doubtless would say that they would have done so if they knew the true targets of the raid were high-ranking Iranian officials, but that’s three times stupid. First, if Jafari was in fact the target of the raid, then we surely shared that information with the British (particularly given their exposure in southern Iraq, where Iranian influence is greatest). Second, as regular readers of this blog well know, high-ranking Iranian officers have been disappearing regularly. So if the Irbil raid wasn’t enough to make the Brits take precautions, the defections/kidnappings of IRGC generals should have been.
Third, as Dan Riehl reminds us, the U.S. actually released two Iranian “diplomats” who were seized in a raid in December, two weeks or so before the Irbil operation. One of them was the number three in the Revolutionary Guard and he didn’t appear to be there on an official visit: according to WaPo’s sources, the two men had on them “detailed weapons lists, documents pertaining to shipments of weapons into Iraq, organizational charts, telephone records and maps, … [and] information about importing modern, specially shaped explosive charges into Iraq, weapons that have been used in roadside bombs to target U.S. military armored vehicles.” Those explosive charges are, of course, EFPs. When we last read about them, it was in the context of a New York Times report about how even some Democrats now accept, based on their own investigations, that Bush is right about Iran supplying them to people who want to kill American soldiers in Iraq.
Allahpundit has more good stuff. Well worth the read.
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