Fate of Five Detained Iranians Unknown
by Khody Akhavi
WASHINGTON - As the Western media turns its attention
to the fate of 15 Britons detained for allegedly
trespassing into Iranian waters over the weekend, the
status of five Iranian officials captured in a U.S.
military raid on a liaison office in northern Iraq on
Jan. 11 remains a mystery.

Even though high-level Iraqi officials have publicly
called for their release, for all practical purposes,
the Iranians have disappeared into the U.S.-sanctioned
“coalition detention” system that has been criticized
as arbitrary and even illegal by many experts on
international law.

Hours before President George W. Bush declared that
they would “seek out and destroy the [Iranian]
networks providing advanced weaponry and training to
our enemies in Iraq,” U.S. forces raided what has been
described as a diplomatic liaison office in the
northern city of Arbil, the capital of Iraqi
Kurdistan, and detained six Iranians, infuriating
Kurdish officials in the process.

The troops took office files and computers, ostensibly
to find evidence regarding the alleged role of Iranian
agents in anti-coalition attacks and sectarian
violence in Iraq. One diplomat was released, but the
other five men remain in U.S. custody and have not
been formally charged with a crime.

“They have disappeared. I don’t know if they’ve gone
into the enemy combatant system,” said Gary Sick, an
Iran expert at Columbia University who served in the
White House under former President Jimmy Carter.
“Nobody on the outside knows.”

A spokesman for the Multinational Forces Iraq (MFI),
Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, told IPS this week from
his office in Baghdad, “They are still in ‘coalition
detention’ in accordance with the U.N. Security
Council Resolution 1546, 1637 and 1723.” He provided
no further information regarding their status or
treatment.

The resolutions endorse the transitional government of
Iraq and extend the mandate of the U.S.-led coalition
force into 2007.

The continued detention of the Iranians has escalated
tensions between the U.S. and Iran and may even have
set the stage for the seizure by Iranian forces of 15
British sailors and marines who allegedly crossed into
Iranian waters over the weekend.

“The Iranian group in Iraq was arrested by American
forces, and we have been asking continuously for their
release,” Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told
the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh this week, “but this is
something different from the British sailors.”

A State Department official with knowledge of the
situation said the Iranians were informed of the
status of the diplomats after their detention through
the Swiss government, which represents U.S. interests
in Iran in the absence of any U.S. diplomatic
presence. He referred all additional questions to MFI
in Baghdad.

Washington severed diplomatic ties with Iran in 1979,
after Iranian students sympathetic to the Islamic
Revolution took 52 staffers hostage at the U.S.
Embassy in Tehran.

During this month’s regional meeting in Baghdad in
which U.S. officials also participated, the Iranian
delegation requested the release of the five men,
according to a State Department spokeswoman. In
response, the Iraqi government asked the U.S.-led
coalition to investigate the circumstances involving
their detention, she told IPS, adding that “the
investigation is not complete, and we don’t comment
publicly with respect to ongoing investigations.”

The U.N. Security Council resolution that officially
marked the end of the U.S. occupation and transferred
sovereignty to the Iraqi government retains the U.S.
military’s right to implement “security detentions”.
However, any such detentions should be subject to
Iraqi law, according to Scott Horton, who teaches
international law at Columbia University School of
Law.

“The Iranians who are being held as ’security
detainees’ are not being charged with anything, and so
are being held unlawfully,” he told IPS.

Under Iraqi law, detainees identified as insurgents
who are “actively engaged in hostilities” — those
implicated in attacks on coalition forces and innocent
Iraqi civilians — are supposed to be charged in
civilian courts. They may be held up to 14 days before
being brought before a magistrate and either charged
with a crime or released. In order to hold detainees
longer without charging them, detention authorities
must provide justification for doing so, according to
Horton.

That such requirements appear to be systematically
ignored by U.S. forces not only in Iraq, but also in
Afghanistan and the broader “war on terror”, has
fueled criticism of Washington’s detention policies
and practices by human rights groups and legal experts
around the world.

“The U.S. hasn’t articulated the legal grounds under
which it detains ‘combatants’,” said John Sifton, a
researcher with Human Rights Watch. “They regularly
conflate criminal terrorism, innocent civilians, and
real combatants on the ground, and throw them all into
the same pot.”

“The vagueness of the war on terror has supplied the
soil under which all this has flourished,” said
Sifton.

U.S. detention camps in Iraq currently hold more than
15,000 prisoners, most of whom, like the Iranians,
have been held without charge or access to tribunals
for months, even years, in some cases, according to a
recent New York Times investigative report.

“It’s an exercise of raw power by the U.S. that’s not
backed by any legal justification,” said Horton.
“Legally, it doesn’t pass the ‘ha ha’ test.”

The U.N. secretary-general’s office has not commented
on the detained Iranians or Iran’s detention of the 15
British sailors, describing both incidents as
“disputes between individual states”.

“We’ve left it to the respective countries to work it
out among themselves,” said Farhan Haq, a U.N.
spokesman. “Ultimately it’s up to Security Council
members themselves to determine how its resolutions
get implemented.”

The legal fate of the captured Iranians turns in part
on the issue of whether the two-story building in
Arbil that was the target of the Jan. 11 raid was, as
Iran claims, an official consulate, in which case its
premises and staff are entitled to diplomatic immunity
under the Vienna Convention, or rather a liaison
office, as U.S. officials contend, which would not be
entitled to the same protections.

Both Iran and the Kurdish regional government have
agreed that consular activities — such as the issuance
of visas — had been carried out by office staff since
1992.

But the U.S. State Department insists that it was not
an accredited consulate and that the five detainees
are members of the Quds force, an elite unit of Iran’s
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) described by
spokesman Sean McCormack as specialising in “training
terrorists and those sorts of activities”.

According to a knowledgeable source at the Iraqi
Embassy here, the five were not accredited diplomats,
although they had submitted documents for
accreditation before the raid was carried out. Their
applications were being processed at the time, said
the source, who asked not to be identified. The source
also said that the Kurdish regional government had
treated them as if they were indeed accredited.

The raid on the Arbil liaison office was the third in
a series of episodes that targeted Iranian officials
operating in Iraq. On Dec. 20, U.S. forces stopped a
car carrying two Iranian diplomats and their guards.
The next morning, soldiers raided the compound of
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the largest
political party in Iraq, and detained two Iranians who
turned out to have been members of the Revolutionary
Guard.

After a tense nine-day political standoff, the
Iranians were released from U.S. custody and were
ordered by the Iraqi government to leave the country.

As part of extensive review of its diplomatic
relations with Iran, the Iraqi foreign ministry plans
to turn all liaison offices in Iraq into consulates,
giving them official diplomatic status, according to
the New York Times.

There are 36 Iranian diplomats currently based at
Iran’s embassy in Baghdad, as well as 11 at its
consulate in Karbala and nine more at another
consulate in the southern city of Basra.

 http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/03/30/192/