Jewish World Review April 19, 2004 / 29 Nissan, 5764
Jack Kelly
Who is behind the Iraq insurgency?
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
Much more is happening in Iraq right now than most of us realize. The peril
is greater than most of us imagine. Things are likely to get very much
better or very much worse very soon.
Iran and Syria have committed acts of war against the United States, even if
their aggression isn't acknowledged by the Bush administration, or noticed
by the news media.
Ralph Peters, a retired military intelligence officer, reported from
northern Iraq that on April 10, Iranian agents ambushed an American convoy
on the road between Mosul and Akre.
"The attack did not go as planned," Peters noted. "Our troops responded
sharply, killing two Iranians, wounding a third and capturing two more.
They were carrying their identity documents."
The revolt by radical Shi'ia cleric Muqtada al Sadr was largely financed by
Iran. An Iranian defector told the London-based Arabic language daily al
Sharq al-Awsat that Iran has been spending $70 million a month on activities
in Iraq, and has set up three training camps just across the border from
Iraq for members of al Sadr's militia, the "Mehdi Army."
"Haj Sa'idi (allegedly the Iranian intelligence officer in charge of
activities in Iraq) told al Sharq al Awsat that the Iranian presence in Iraq
is not limited to the cities," the newspaper said. "Rather, it is spread
throughout Iraq, from Zakho in the north to Um Qasr in the south. and the
infiltration of Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the al Quds Army began long
before the war, through hundreds of Iranian intelligence agents, amongst
them Iraqi refugees who were expelled by Saddam Hussein in the 1970s and
1980s to Iran, allegedly because of their Iranian origin, and who
infiltrated back into Iraq through the Kurdish areas that were out of Baath
government control. After the war, Iranian intelligence sent its agents
through the Iraq-Iran border; some of them as students and clerics, and
others as belonging to the Shi'ite militias," the newspaper said in a story
April 3.
"Haj Saidi also mentioned that more than 300 reporters and technicians who
are working now in Iraq for television and radio networks, newspapers, and
other media agencies are in fact members of the al Quds Army and
Revolutionary Guards intelligence units," al Sharq al Awsat said.
"The direct Iranian presence in the Shi'ite areas of Iraq in the political,
security and economic affairs cannot be ignored any more," said another
British based Arabic language daily, al-Hayat, in a story April 6. "This
presence is accompanied by a vigorous Iranian effort to create bridges with
different forces in Iraq." (Translations courtesy of MEMRI, the Middle East
Media Research Institute.)
"For months, Iran has been building a secret underground network of miltary
and intelligence cells that has put it in a position not only to challenge
the U.S. and others, but also gradually to gain control over the reins of
power after the June 30th hand over," said Alireza Jafazadeh, an Iranian
exile who is president of Strategic Policy Consulting, Inc.
Many of the tens of thousands of pilgrims who traveled from Iran to the holy
city of Najaf in southern Iraq for Arbaeen last weekend were in fact Iranian
intelligence operatives, Jafazadeh said.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Marines report that many of the "insurgents" they have
killed in Fallujah are in fact Syrian. Though Iran's mullahs are militant
Shi'ites, and Syria's Baathist regime is secular in a predominantly Sunni
country, there has long been strategic cooperation between them. They
jointly sponsor and succor the terrorist group Hezbollah, which operates
primarily out of (Syrian controlled) southern Lebanon.
The recent rash of kidnappings in Iraq are eerily similar to the kidnappings
orchestrated by Hezbollah in Lebanon in the 1980s.
Iran is working as fast as it can to build a nuclear bomb, and the world
community, in the form of the International Atomic Energy Agency, isn't
doing much to restrain it.
As the web logger "Wretchard" of the Belmont Club put it: "What we are
witnessing is not a confrontation between the United States and some
nationalist insurgents, but possibly the opening acts of a confrontation
with a nuclear armed terrorist state."
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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a
deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan
administration. Comment by clicking here.
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