Rooyesh

The leader of an al Qaeda-linked group in Iraq vowed in an audio tape on Sunday to attack Iranians unless Iran cut off its support for the Iraqi government within two months. “We give the … Persians in general, and leaders of Iran in particular, two months to withdraw their support and presence in Iraq,” Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq, said in the 50-minute audio tape posted on Islamist Web site which has often carried al Qaeda statements.

In the first such threat by his group, Baghdadi said that unless Iran met his demands, the group would wage a “brutal war” against Iranians. “We announce it today, our hands will not stay far from you,” he said. He did not say whether the group would mount attacks inside Iran. Baghdadi said his group’s decision was the result of Iran’s support for its fellow Shi’ite Muslims in Iraq, and accused Tehran of being behind the burning of Sunni Muslim mosques and killings of Sunni leaders. “We have prepared four years for this war, and all that remains is to give the orders,” he said. The Sunni militant group has previously claimed responsibility for killing Iraqi police officers and suicide attacks on Iraqi and U.S. military posts. In May, Iraq’s Interior Ministry said Baghdadi had been killed, but the group denied his death in a Web posting. Baghdadi said the ultimatum covered financial organisations and banks in Iraq that deal with Iran, without elaborating. He warned Sunni businessmen against doing business with Iran and urged Arab states to denounce the Iraqi government. “We give a precious chance to all countries that host the rejectionist Persians to issue a statement of condemnation denouncing the crimes committed by the rejectionist government (of Iraq),” he said. Sunni Islamists often refer to Shi’ites as “rejectionists”. “They will be safe from our attacks if they do so within two months.” Source: Reuters

THE U.S. BILL of complaints against Iran grew longer last week when an American general in Baghdad accused Iran’s Revolutionary Guard of providing armor-piercing weapons to Iraqis and training Iraqi Shiite fighters inside Iran. Although the Bush administration insists that it seeks a peaceful diplomatic resolution to its quarrels with Tehran, the remarks did more than signal growing U.S. frustration with what it views as malicious meddling by Iran in Iraq. They could be construed — particularly by the paranoid regime in Tehran — as a U.S. enumeration of casus belli. Meanwhile, both houses of Congress are considering legislation to beef up sanctions against Iran for its refusal to stop enriching uranium.

The bills follow a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency that Tehran has made faster progress than expected on a technology that could be used to produce a nuclear weapon. This defiance has also prompted the U.N. Security Council to begin discussing a third round of economic sanctions against Iran. This time, the penalties need to be tougher than the mainly symbolic slaps on the wrist that the Security Council has imposed so far. There is little doubt that financial sanctions that punish Iran’s elite and its business class are, over time, more likely to crimp President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nuclear ambitions than any U.S. military action, which would only rally the Iranian people around their unpopular leader. And both bills pending before Congress aim to hit the Iranian leadership financially while explicitly refusing to authorize the use of U.S. military force. The White House will object on the grounds that Congress should not reduce the president’s leverage by taking military force off the table. But given this president’s record of foreign policy blunders, Congress is right to declare sanctions superior to war and to try to enforce that policy. However, the House and the Senate bills contain a number of ill-considered provisions that could have the unintended consequence of thwarting a denuclearization deal with Iran. First, both bills would have the secretary of State designate the Revolutionary Guard as a foreign terrorist organization. This sounds appealing, but it could be a poison pill to any negotiated settlement. The Revolutionary Guard’s leadership is so politically and financially powerful within the country that any Iranian leader is likely to demand that the U.S. repeal that provision as a precondition for negotiations on the nuclear issue. But as the State Department has learned with North Korea, it isn’t easy, either politically or technically, to remove a country from the terrorist list, even as part of a peace deal. Linking the Iranian terrorism issue to the nuclear dispute would vastly reduce the chances of resolving either. Second, both bills aim to punish any countries that supply arms or nuclear components to Iran — and specifically name Russia. This is shortsighted in the extreme. No meaningful Security Council resolution and no meaningful enforcement are possible without Russian cooperation. And multilateral Security Council sanctions would be far more effective than American ones. With campaign season upon them, the Democrats in particular are desperate to look tough on national security, and Tehran is a convenient whipping boy. But Congress must better aim its lash.

Source: The Los Angeles Times

Iranian police and plainclothes security agents broke up a sit-in marking Monday’s anniversary of a bloody raid on a Tehran university dormitory, then stormed the offices of the country’s main pro-democracy student group, student leaders said. Fifteen students and a mother were beaten and detained, they said. There was no confirmation by the government, which rarely comments on such arrests.

Iran had banned street protests to mark the anniversary of July 9, 1999 raid by police and hard-line vigilantes on a Amir Kabir University dormitory that killed one person and injured at least 20. Those attacks triggered six days of nationwide protests, the worst since the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the pro-U.S. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought hard-line clerics to power. Pouya Ifaei, a student leader, said the students organized their sit-in Monday to protest the continued detention of eight students been in custody since May on vague charges and to mark the anniversary of the 1999 attack. “Six students were attacked, beaten up and then detained by police and plainclothes security agents as they staged a sit-in at the main entrance to Amir Kabir University,” Nariman Mostafavi, another student leader, told The Associated Press. Nine other students and the mother of one of them were also attacked and detained later Monday after police and plainclothes security agents broke windows and forced their way into the offices of the student group in central Tehran, said Mostafavi, a leader of the Office for Fostering Unity. The group opposes the strict hard-line interpreations of Islam and seeks greater democratic changes within the ruling Islamic establishments. “Hard-line agents told people in the streets that they attacked a building used by ruffians and drug traffickers, not students. This is the enemy we are dealing with,” Mostafavi said. Student groups were the main supporters of former President Mohammad Khatami, but they were routinely confronted and jailed by hard-line unelected bodies including the judiciary. Students have effectively been silenced after the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. Student activists have been banned from attending classes and reformist professors forced to retire as part of a campaign by hard-liners to silence opposition voices. Students also complain that their families sporadically receive threatening phone calls from unidentified people warning them that the students would be expelled from the university if they continued their pro-democracy activities.

Source: Associated Press