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Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (archive photo)
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NYT: Iran says plans to expand role in Iraq

Islamic Republic’s ambassador to Baghdad tells New York Times Tehran prepared to offer Iraqi government forces training, equipment and advisers for ‘security fight’; senior Iraqi banking says Iran received license to open national bank in country

Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad told the New York Times on Sunday that Tehran plans to expand its economic and military ties with Iraq.

 

According to the Times, the plan carries the potential to bring Iran into further conflict with the United States, which has detained a number of Iranian operatives in recent weeks and says it has proof of Iranian complicity in attacks on American and Iraqi forces.

 

The ambassador, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, was quoted by the American newspaper as saying that Iran was prepared to offer Iraqi government forces training, equipment and advisers for “the security fight.”

 

According to the report, Qumi said that Iran was ready to assume major responsibility for the reconstruction of Iraq.

 

During the 90-minute interview at the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad, Qumi told the Times that “We have experience of reconstruction after war,” referring to the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

 

“We are ready to transfer this experience in terms of reconstruction to the Iraqis.”

 

According to the Times, Qumi also acknowledged, for the first time, that two Iranians seized and later released by American forces last month were security officials, as the United States had claimed.

 

However, the report said, he added that they were engaged in legitimate discussions with the Iraqi government and should not have been detained,

 

President George W. Bush has said the American military is authorized to take whatever action necessary against Iranians in Iraq found to be engaged in actions deemed hostile, according to the Times.

 

The political and diplomatic standoff that followed the Dec. 21 raid until the Iranians were released nine days later has contributed, along with a dispute over the Iranian nuclear program, to greatly increased tensions between the United States and Iran.

 

This month, American forces detained five more Iranians in a raid on a diplomatic office in the northern city of Erbil.

 

While providing few details, the United States has said that evidence gleaned in the Baghdad raid, made on an Iraqi Shiite leader’s residential compound, proves the Iranians were involved in planning attacks.

 

He ridiculed the evidence that the American military has said it collected, including maps of Baghdad delineating Sunni, Shiite and mixed neighborhoods — the kind of maps, American officials have said, that would be useful for militias engaged in ethnic slaughter. Qumi said the maps were so common and easily obtainable that they proved nothing.

 

'Iran tied to sectarian attacks'

Qumi also told the Times that Iran would soon open a national bank in Iraq. The report said a senior Iraqi banking official, Hussein al-Uzri, confirmed that Iran had received a license to open the bank, which he said would apparently be the first “wholly owned subsidiary bank” of a foreign country in Iraq.

 

“This will enhance trade between the two countries,” Uzri was quoted by the Times as saying.

Qumi said during the interview that the bank was just the first of what he said would be several in Iraq — an agricultural bank and three private banks also intend to open branches.

 

Other elements of new economic cooperation, he told the Times, include plans for Iranian shipments of kerosene and electricity to Iraq and a new agricultural cooperative involving both countries.

 

According to the Times, the Iranian ambassodor would not provide specifics on Iran’s offer of military assistance to Iraq, but said it included increased border patrols and a proposed new “joint security committee.”

 

Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, said Sunday that the United States had a significant body of evidence tying Iran to sectarian attacks inside Iraq, the Times said.

 

“There is a high degree of confidence in the information that we already have, and we are constantly accumulating more,” McCormack was quoted by the Times as saying.

 

The Times report said Qumi also warned the United States against playing out tensions in what he called “the nuclear file” in Iraq.

 

“We don’t need Iraq to pay the cost of our animosity with the Americans,” the Times quoted Qumi as saying.

 


פרסום ראשון: 01.29.07, 11:13
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