Tehran Robs Iraq’s Oil to Fund Terror
Fox News, February 8, 2008
Groundbreaking revelations about
the Iranian ayatollahs’ secret nuclear weapons program are
not the only contributions the National Council of
Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the democratic opposition’s
parliament-in-exile, has made to peace and stability in the
world.
Since 2003, the NCRI, relying on the information provided by
the personnel of its pivotal member organization, the
Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) — currently in Ashraf City in Iraq —
has revealed many dimensions of Tehran’s destabilizing
campaign in Iraq. Acknowledged by many independent and
democratic Iraqi political figures and tribal leaders, as
well as U.S. military commanders, these revelations have
saved countless Iraqi and American lives and have hugely
contributed to putting in place appropriate counter-measures
to deal with these threats.
Among these revelations were warnings about an elaborate
scheme by the clerics in Tehran to rob Iraqis of their oil
resources and use the revenue to fund their nefarious
meddling in Iraq.
As I detailed in my book,
The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming
Nuclear Crisis, (updated edition to be released in
paperback in February 2008), in one of the biggest heists of
the current century, Tehran has smuggled billions of
dollars’ worth of Iraqi oil to Iran through Iraq's southern
borders. The stolen oil has provided for the huge
expenditures of Iran's meddling in Iraq. Many of the
smuggling operations involve the exchange of Iraqi petroleum
for Iranian weapons or narcotics.
Now, there are reports from Iraq that the Foreign Ministry
has dispatched an official letter of warning to Tehran
demanding immediate cessation of these activities following
statements by Iraqi officials detailing how the ayatollahs’
regime is stealing the Iraqi oil.
According to the London-based Al-Hayat daily, Faraj Moussa,
deputy head of the Iraq Commission on Public Integrity, has
evidence indicating that the Tehran regime has "seized" at
least 15 oil wells in southern provinces neighboring Iran.
Moussa told the newspaper that "Iraqi reports have
documented the Iranian violations of the Iraqi wells, by
diagonal digging" — also known as slant drilling —
"exceeding the borders and seizing the oil wells after
expelling the Iraqi engineering cadres and workers."
These revelations coincide with reports coming from Iraq
about how the ayatollahs’ terrorist arm, the Qods Force, has
expanded its terror campaign in Iraq by methodically
targeting the leaders and personnel of the Awakening
Council. This group, in partnership with the US-led
Coalition forces, is fighting back extremist militia of
various kinds, particularly in the Diyala Province where the
Ashraf City is situated.
According to the New York Times, “citizen guardsmen and
Iraqi intelligence officials say they have also captured
Iranians with hit lists and orders to attack Awakening
members. American military officials say they suspect that
Iran’s paramilitary force, Al Qods, is directing the Shiite
militias’ attacks against the Awakening movement.”
Specifically, some of both the Shiite and Sunni Iraqi
officials point the finger at Abdel Aziz al-Hakim’s Badr
Organization and the Mahdi Army, both of which are tightly
linked with the Qods Force and have been implicated in
death-squad operations against moderate Shiite and Sunni
Iraqis.
An Iraqi intelligence official told the The New York Times
that “two weeks ago, we captured one Iraqi and two Iranians
meeting in a house in Baghdad ... When we capture these
Shiite militiamen, they tell us they have orders from Iran.”
Although the common perception is that the Awakening Council
is a Sunni entity, many of the Awakening branches are made
up of both Shiite and Sunnis, particularly in the Diyala
Province north of Baghdad. The religiously mixed Awakening
Councils have indeed displayed a higher degree of potency in
their efforts to push back the terrorist militias. For
example, “in contrast to community-based volunteer squads,
their tribal forces thwart terrorist infiltrators more
effectively because relatives vouch for one another,” The
New York Times reported. This is again another fact on the
ground that shows that not only is a non-sectarian
counter-measure against Tehran and its Iraqi proxies
achievable, it is also more effective.
It is true that given the length of Diyala’s border with
Iran and its ethnically and religiously mixed demography, it
has been a major area of operation for the Qods Force. The
presence of the Iranian opposition in Ashraf City and the
invaluable contribution Ashraf is making to exposing
Tehran’s menacing campaign in Iraq has also made Diyala
Province a roaming ground for Qods operatives. Over the
weekend several thousand Iraqis in Baquba, the provincial
capital of Diyala, staged a protest rally and demanded the
removal of the city’s police chief, Ghanim Abbas Al-Qoreishi,
who is closely linked with the Badr organization and the
Qods Force.
Of the three main conflicts fought by coalition forces in
Iraq, “the third conflict, and perhaps the most vexing for
U.S. commanders, is with Shiite extremist militias”
organized in units called "Special Groups" by the U.S.
military, The Washington Post reported on February 3, 2008.
These units have shown a remarkable proficiency in using
highly lethal explosively formed projectiles (EFPs). In an
oblique reference to the high-level training and the EFPs
provided by Tehran, Col. James Rainey, the 4th Infantry
Division's director of operations, told the Washington Post
that "it's high-end technology. It's not four dudes making
them in a basement."
Last week in his State of the Union Address, President Bush
stressed that “a failed Iraq would embolden the extremists,
strengthen Iran, and give terrorists a base from which to
launch new attacks.” He added that “we're also standing
against the forces of extremism embodied by the regime in
Tehran, which is funding and training militia groups in
Iraq.”
He called on Iran’s despotic rulers to “come clean about
your nuclear intentions and past actions, stop your
oppression at home, [and] cease your support for terror
abroad,” and warned that “America will confront those who
threaten our troops.” To effectively put these statements in
practice, the administration must side with the nonsectarian
and independent Iraqi leaders to politically undermine
ayatollahs’ agenda directed through its surrogates in the
Nuri al-Maliki government.
Many members of the United States Congress believe that the
administration must also strengthen the strategic and
irreplaceable contribution the anti-fundamentalist Iranian
opposition residents of Ashraf City in Iraq are making to
Iraqi safety and security by ending any restriction on their
ability to operate inside Iraq. This would make Tehran
unhappy, which is what it would take to solve the Iraqi
problem.
Alireza Jafarzadeh is a FOX News Channel Foreign Affairs
Analyst and the author of "The
Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear
Crisis" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Jafarzadeh has revealed Iran's terrorist network in Iraq and
its terror training camps since 2003. He first disclosed the
existence of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and the
Arak heavy water facility in August 2002.
