Iran sponsors assassination of Sunni pilots who bombed Teheran By Toby Harnden in Suleimaniya, Aqeel Hussein in Baghdad and Colin Freeman (Filed: 29/10/2005)
Daily Telegraph Iran is backing a Shia insurgent campaign of systematically assassinating former elite Iraqi air force pilots as part of a covert sectarian war against Sunnis, according to senior politicians in Baghdad. The spate of murders of pilots has prompted an intervention from Jalal Talabani, Iraq's president, who has offered them safe haven in his native Kurdistan even though some of them were involved in dropping chemical weapons there. Alleged Iranian involvement in the killings has heightened sectarian tensions in Iraq and could increase diplomatic pressure on Tehran, already accused by Tony Blair of involvement in killing British soldiers and facing isolation over its nuclear ambitions. Former senior military officers, overwhelmingly from Saddam Hussein's favoured Sunni sect, are among the most alienated groups in Iraq and form a key element of the Arab nationalist section of the insurgency. In an effort to woo these officers away from their alliance of convenience with Islamist foreign fighters, Mr Talabani, a Kurd, held a meeting with more than 1,000 in Baghdad. Afterwards, according to coalition sources, several Kurdish officials entered the room and set briefcases down on tables. The briefcases were opened to reveal wads of new $100 bills. Each officer was then given $1,000 as compensation for the loss of his pension. Mr Talabani told The Sunday Telegraph: "I openly called in a meeting I had with 1,000 Arab Sunni former high-ranking officers for them to come to Kurdistan and live in peace." He said he was unsure who was behind the murders of the pilots but suggested they were reprisals for war crimes. "I don't know whether it is revenge for bombing civilians, for bombing Iran, for bombing Kurdistan." An estimated 300,000 Kurds died in the Anfal campaign of 1988 in which chemical weapons were dropped on Kurdistan and mass executions carried out. Among the atrocities was the massacre at Halabja, on the Iranian border, in which Iraqi pilots killed around 5,000 Kurds with poison gas bombs. But in an extraordinary expression of mercy, Mr Talabani has forgiven the perpetrators, though not those who planned the genocide. "They [the pilots] were ordered by military commanders," he said. "During the time of Saddam, anyone who refused orders was killed. And not everyone was ready to take his aircraft and fly to London or some other place and ask to be a refugee because Saddam would have killed their family." One of the pilots assassinated was Ismael Saeed Fares, 48, known as "the Hawk of Baghdad" because of his legendary exploits. A series of daring raids at the end of the eight-year war with Iran earned him a string of medals and the admiration of millions. They also earned him 24 bullets in his chest, fired at point-blank range by a gunman who struck as he sat with a neighbour in the garden of his home in north Baghdad earlier this year. Scores of others are believed to have been murdered, although precise figures are not available. There is no suggestion that Mr Fares was involved in the anti-Kurdish atrocities of the Anfal campaign. The organised manner in which the murders have been carried out, each with multiple shots fired from an AK47, has fuelled suspicions that elements within Iraq's Iranian-linked government are behind them. "Many of my father's friends have already left Iraq for Jordan because they received written death threats warning them to leave," said Mr Fares' son, Wisam, 21. Victim's families suspect their names and addresses have been taken from old records at Iraq's ministry of defence. They claim that the killings are the work of the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the two main Shi-ite parties that dominate Iraq's new government. Although the brigade has officially disarmed, it has recently been blamed for the killing of scores of Sunni clerics in revenge for massacres of Shias carried out by Sunni-backed insurgents. In another sinister development in Iran, tens of thousands of ethnic Ahwazi Arabs, who populate the area bordering southern Iraq, are expected to be displaced to make way for an expanded military-industrial complex in an area known as the Arvand Free Zone. The zone will cover 60 square miles, including land around the border cities of Abadan and Khorramshahr. The British Ahwazi Friendship Society, a British-Iranian human rights group, claims it will help Iran's Revolutionary Guard militias to influence Shia areas of Iraq. A BAFS spokesman said: "Apart from being a serious human rights issue, any development that involves people being displaced by force obviously has a security element to it as they clearly do not want people being too near. "The fact that they are deciding to put this huge complex right up against the border is significant. We think this is to enable them to train and send militias over the border." [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Fair play? Video games influencing politics. Click and talk back! http://us.click.yahoo.com/VpgUKB/pzNLAA/cUmLAA/TySplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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