In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the senior Democrat on the panel expressed frustration with the Obama administration’s delay in resettling Iranian dissidents in Iraq, reported the Washington Times in Embassy Row on May 24, 2012.
The letter from Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida Republican, and Rep. Brad Sherman, California Democrat, follows a committee hearing last week in which a State Department adviser insisted that the administration cannot confirm whether the 3,000 former rebels have been disarmed.
The claim by Daniel Fried contradicts repeated testimony from retired U.S. generals who were responsible for overseeing the dissidents in Camp Ashraf, north of Baghdad. Retired Army Brig. Gen. David Phillips and other top military officers have said they supervised the disarmament of the dissidents after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
“We are deeply concerned about recent claims … by the Department of State that the department is not able to confirm whether Camp Ashraf in Iraq is fully disarmed,” Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen and Mr. Sherman said in their letter.
The State Department has been under a federal court order since 2010 to review the legal status of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, which has been on a U.S. terrorist list since 1997.
U.S. military commanders have interviewed all of the camp residents and determined they posed no terror threat to the United States, but the State Department has refused to remove them from the blacklist.
The Iraqi government, in moves to improve relations with Iran, has used the U.S. terrorist designation to intimidate the dissidents and invade the camp several times.
Most Camp Ashraf residents have been relocated to another base near Baghdad International Airport.

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