Curious Coincidences Over Fate of Iranians Kidnapped in Iraq
    By Patrice Claude
    Le Monde

    Thursday 05 April 2007

    According to Hoshyar Zebari, head of Iraqi diplomacy, the three events that follow "are not connected in any way." Tehran's liberation on Wednesday, April 4, of fifteen British sailors has "nothing to do" with the liberation twenty-four hours earlier of an Iranian diplomat who mysteriously disappeared two months ago in Iraq. Neither does it have anything to do with the announcement a few hours later in Tehran that five other Iranian "diplomats," captured by the American Army January 11 in Iraq, will receive a visit by an adviser from their Iraq embassy. "Simple coincidence," says everyone in unison from Baghdad, London, Tehran and Washington, where the very idea of a "goodwill" exchange seems impossible to acknowledge. "No negotiation, no accommodation," they all assert.

    Jalal Sharafi, second secretary of the Iranian Chancellery in Iraq, had been kidnapped February 4 in Baghdad by men wearing the Iraqi army uniform. A banal occurrence these days in the capital. Except that there was no demand for ransom, no credit claimed, no corpse. The man was mysteriously let go Monday and returned to Iran the next day.

    "We have no idea of the identity of his kidnappers," asserted Mr. Zebari. Tehran, however, did. Its diplomat had been held, Tehran maintained, by "an Iraqi intelligence service directly linked to the American CIA," with the intent of making him confess his country's complicity - regularly denounced in Washington - with Shiite militias.

    Nor do we know exactly the objectives behind the American Army's capture of five Iranian diplomats on January 11 in a villa in Iraqi Kurdistan's capital of Erbil. "The investigation concerning them continues," General William Caldwell, American military spokesman in Iraq, told the press on Wednesday. Presented by Tehran as diplomats accredited to the Iranian consulate by the autonomous Kurdish government, the five men are suspected by the Americans of belonging to the Pasdaran, Guardians of the Iranian Islamic revolution, and to have been there to take weapons orders from certain Iraqi groups.

    Problem: Iraq's Kurdish authorities - although very close to the Americans - have not stopped demanding their liberation, as the president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, and Minister Zebari - who are also, and perhaps above all, Kurdish politicians - regularly relay their demand to the American Army. "We have formally requested the liberation of these men for some time already, but without success," deplored Mr. Zebari Wednesday, implicitly admitting the limits of his government's sovereignty over its own soil.

    The American raid in Erbil had coincided with the visit to Kurdistan of two senior Iranian officials linked to the Guardians of the Revolution: Mohammed Jafari Sahroudi and Minojahar Frouzanda.