Middle East Times
David Drew
October 24, 2008

As the United States and Iraq struggle to reach a firm agreement over the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq beyond 2011, there are signs that the Iranian regime is working in the shadows to pave the way for a complete U.S. withdrawal and Iranian domination of this fledgling democracy.
Since the 2003 U.S.-led war on Iraq, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Qods Force has been steadily fueling the insurgency by providing arms, funds, and ideological and military training to thousands of young Iraqi Shiites angry with the U.S. presence on their soil.
In recent months, the ayatollahs in Iran have been paying special attention to the situation of some 4,000 of their opponents in Iraq’s Diyala province.
The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), the main group within the democratic coalition working to replace the current theocracy, has been instrumental in mobilizing Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis to recognize the Tehran regime as the main threat to the future of their country. Most of the 95,000 Sunnis who joined the Sons of Iraq movement and are currently providing security to their fellow citizens, pledged allegiance to the establishment of a free and democratic unified Iraq only after being convinced by the PMOI that Tehran – not the United States – is their strategic enemy.
As a Shiite group espousing secularism, the PMOI has managed to win over the hearts and minds of Iraqi Shiites who otherwise risked becoming pawns in Tehran’s strategic conflict with the United States. Some 3 million Shiites endorsed the PMOI’s accomplishments in a petition in June which was made public at the group’s main base Camp Ashraf in Diyala. The petition rattled the regime in Tehran, coming on the back of a June 2006 declaration by 5.2 million Iraqis in support of the PMOI’s presence in Iraq.
In response, Iran’s unelected Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has put immense pressure on the administration of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to expel the PMOI, and on June 17 the Iraqi government ordered the United States to hand over protection of Camp Ashraf so that it could expel all PMOI members from Iraq.
This directive violates the Geneva Conventions and the ’Principle of Non-Refoulement.’
PMOI members have resided in Diyala for over 20 years, and since 2004 the U.S. military determined that they were all ’protected persons’ under the Fourth Geneva Convention. This determination was made after extensive screening of all PMOI personnel by seven different U.S. agencies including the FBI and State Department. The Geneva Conventions prevent the extradition or forced displacement of protected persons.
Regrettably there are reports that the U.S. authorities in Iraq have agreed in principle to hand over security of Ashraf to Iraqi forces despite the Iraqi government’s June 17 announcement. Such a handover would itself violate the ’Principle of Non-Refoulement,’ which is enshrined in international law and international humanitarian law. It would also send all the wrong signals to Tehran which would interpret it as a further sign of U.S. impotence in countering its nefarious outlaw activities in Iraq. Both democratic-minded Sunnis and Shiites would see the handover of Ashraf to the regime’s proxies as a sign of U.S. abandonment of its promises of creating a stable and democratic Iraq in which law and order is observed.
The United Nations has condemned Iran on no less than 54 occasions for flagrant human rights abuses, which include the execution of over 120,000 PMOI sympathizers. Handing over the 4,000 brave men and women of Ashraf to the Iraqi administration as Tehran desires is tantamount to sending them to their slaughter – a stain that no U.S. administration should tolerate on its record.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon should now compel the George W. Bush administration not to succumb to Tehran’s unlawful demand.
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David Drew is a Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom from the Labour and Cooperative Party.