Behind Detainee Release, a U.S.-Iraqi Conflict on Iran

WASHINGTON, Jul 12 (IPS) -- The release Friday of five Iranians held by the U.S. military in Iraq for two and a half years highlights the long-simmering conflict between the U.S. and Iraqi views of Iranian policy in Iraq and of the role of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) there.

For the Barack Obama administration, as for the George W. Bush administration before it, the Iranian detainees had become symbols of what Washington steadfastly insisted was an Iranian effort to use the IRGC to destabilize the Iraqi regime.

But high-ranking Shi'a and Kurdish officials of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had never shared the U.S. view of the IRGC or of the Iranian role. They have acted on the premise that Iran is interested in ensuring that a friendly Shiite regime would remain in power.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly expressed concern that the five Iranian detainees being released were "associated with" the Quds Force of the Iranian and could endanger U.S. troops in Iraq.

The idea that the Quds Force was fighting a "proxy war" against U.S. and Iraqi troops was the justification for the George W. Bush administration's decision in late 2006 to target any Iranian found in Iraq who could plausibly be linked to the IRGC.

Three of the five Iranian detainees, who had been grabbed in a January 2007 raid, were working in an Iranian liaison office that had been operating in the Kurdistan capital of Erbil. The U.S. military, hinting that it actually had little information about the Iranians seized, said they were "suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraqi and coalition forces".

Kurdish Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari tried to get the U.S. officials to understand that the Iranians seized in Erbil were not part of a "clandestine network" but were working on visas and other paperwork for travel by Iraqis to Iran. Zebari explained that they were working for the IRGC because that institution has the responsibility for controlling Iran's borders.

After Mahmoud Farhadi was kidnapped by the U.S. military from a hotel in the Kurdish city of Suleimaniya in September 2007, a U.S. military spokesman made the spectacular claim that Farhadi was an IRGC commander responsible for all Iranian operations inside Iraq.

Kurdish officials acknowledged Farhadi's IRGC affiliation, but the Kurdish president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, publicly confirmed that Farhadi was a civilian official of the neighbouring Iranian province of Kermanshah on a "commercial mission with the knowledge of the federal government in Baghdad and the government of Kurdistan".

Although Farhadi had indeed been a military commander at one time, the Kurds pointed out that he was now carrying out only civilian functions.

Iraqi officials also rejected the idea that the IRGC's Quds Force itself was hostile to the Iraqi regime. They had personal relationships with the Quds Force commander Brig. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, and they acknowledged that he had ties with all the Shi'a factions in Iraq.

They knew that Iran had trained officers of Shi'a nationalist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and provided some financial support to Sadr. But they also believed that the purpose of that relationship was to exert influence on Sadr in the interest of peace and stability.

After Sadr declared a unilateral ceasefire in late August 2007, the Maliki regime, including Kurdish foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari, argued publicly and privately to Bush administration officials that Iran had used its influence on Sadr to get him to agree to such a ceasefire. They used the argument to urge the Bush administration to release the Iranian detainees.

Even the Bush administration itself was divided sharply over the Iraqi government argument that Iranian influence on Sadr was benign. The State Department was inclined to accept the Iraqi argument, and privately urged the release of the five in fall 2007.