StopFundamentalism.com
According to reports from Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, directed by the Iranian government, has unleashed the Moqtada Sadr’s hired mobs against the Iranian dissidents in Camp Ashraf.
Faced with increasing opposition from various political circles in Iraq to his stance toward the Iranian opposition Mujahedin-e Khalq whose members reside in Camp Ashraf, Maliki intends to use Moqtada Sadr’s followers who are paid with Iranian money to pressure the camp’s residents.
Since Maliki entered the Iranian-arranged alliance with Moqtada Sadr in order to secure his position as prime minister, he has increasingly used Sadr’s loyalists as street shock troops to attack Iraqis protesting Maliki’s affiliation with Iran rulers. Use of state-sponsored mobs for fulfilling state’s political and suppressive objectives has its roots in the post-1979 Iran where the government unleashed them to attack opposition rallies and storm foreign embassies.
According to a report by the Associated Press from Iraq, several hundred Iraqi followers of Moqtada Sadr (out of seven million strong population of Baghdad) took part in a gathering on Friday, hoisting his large size pictures and shouting slogan against the MEK. They repeated the Iranian government’s demand for the closing of Camp Ashraf and the group’s forcible relocation to an Iraqi-run detention center. Other reports from Baghdad indicate the heavy presence of the Iranian embassy staff in the state-run rally and Farsi speaking individuals who were organizing the mob.
Last September, the Iranian Fars News Agency affiliated with the country’s notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, quoted Moqtada Sadr as calling for closure of Camp Ashraf and expulsion of its residents.
On Saturday, December 16, the main Iraqi radio Aswat al-Iraq quoted the spokesman of the Iraqiya opposition coalition as saying that forcible transfer of Camp Ashraf residents to another place in Iraq is “an Iranian intelligence project” Member of Iraq’s Parliament Haidar al-Mulla told Aswat al-Iraq that there “a well-known political agenda, moved by Iranian intelligence to transfer the residents of the camp, which is rejected by us.” He added that “Iraqiya bloc demanded appointing observers to protect the camp, and to initiate quick actions by the United Nations on this matter.”
Observer fear the sudden emergence of state-sponsored mobs in Baghdad and around Camp Ashraf in recent days, in addition to significant movement of military personnel and vehicles in and around Camp Ashraf, all point to an extensive attack by Maliki against unarmed and defenseless residents of the Camp.
Maliki has so far defied calls by the UN Secretary Genera’s special representative in Iraq, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, European Union, and a bi-partisan group in the US Congress, to postpone the closing of Camp Ashraf so that there is time for the UN refugee agency to process the camp’s 3,400 residents’ applications for political refugee status. His continued defiance of the international community and his countless breach of the human rights of the camp’s residents since 2009, including two large scale massacres in 2009 and 2011, leave no doubt that Maliki’s Iranian-engineered plan to relocate the residents to a so-called safe place is in reality a one-way trip to death chambers for the Iranian dissidents with nearly 1,000 women among them.