While we’re on the subject of the baffling incoherence of western attitudes towards the uprisings in the Islamic world, we must not overlook the massacre that took place earlier this month of members of the Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI), at their base in Ashraf in Iraq.
Despite the fact that the PMOI are ‘protected persons’ under the 4th Geneva Convention, on April 8 they were the victims of an unprovoked attack which was apparently carried out on the orders of the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki. The unarmed civilian residents of Ashraf were fired at with machine-gun rounds, as a result of which 35 of them were killed and some 350 injured.
According to the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the Iraqi Army used 2,500 troops equipped with armoured vehicles to attack Ashraf in tandem with the feared al Qods force of Iran. The NCRI claims:
According to reliable information from within the clerical regime, the terrorist Qods Force of the IRGC was involved at its highest level in the planning and the execution of this assault. In particular, Brigadier General Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Qods Force, personally supervised the planning of this attack on Ashraf. According to this information, some of the officers of the Qods Force were present at the scene of the attack in Ashraf and took part in the killing of Ashraf residents. A number of elements of the Qods force who speak Arabic well participated in the attack of April 8.
At a press conference today, the British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom showed video footage of the attack. The former British Conservative Home Secretary Lord Waddington demanded a UN investigation to bring the perpetrators to justice. And there are strong fears that the Iraqis are preparing to inflict further violence on the residents of Ashraf — and no less disturbing, claims that both the Iraqis and the Americans have been either actively preventing or doing nothing to provide medical aid for those injured in the attack.
The committee chairman, the Labour peer Lord Corbett, has spoken of a
medical blockade of Ashraf by the Iraqi government to kill the injured and turn Ashraf into a concentration camp.
According to the NCRI Bahman Atighi, 38, a PMOI member who was shot in the back during the April 8 attack, died in Baquba Hospital after being denied medical care for his wounds:
Over the past two weeks, the Ashraf’s doctors and the residents’ representatives discussed Bahman’s condition with the US forces and the UN representatives time and again. They also insisted on his transfer to the US forces hospital. The Iraqi forces prevented his transfer to the hospitals in Baghdad and Irbil either.
And today Lord Carlile – the LibDem peer who is the British government’s independent adviser on terrorism legislation — had exceptionally sharp and disturbing things to say about America’s role in this atrocity.
The actions of Nouri Al-Maliki, who has long made clear his allegiances to Iran’s theocratic leadership, should have surprised few. What is so shocking is the relative silence of the US government. It is hard to believe that they did not know what was about to happen at Ashraf. They did nothing to try to stop it happening. Worst of all, their silence and inaction has made it almost certain that it will happen again. It can be no coincidence that US forces stationed within the Camp withdrew just hours before the Iraqi onslaught began.
Furthermore, top US government official Robert Gates was in Baghdad and met Al-Maliki hours before the attack began, just as he was in Iraq in July 2009 when the other major offensive was conducted against Ashraf by the Iraqi forces. Mr Gates should be brought to account, and tell us what his knowledge was of the recent outrage, and how he proposes to deal with what occurred.
In addition, he should give a truthful account of why US medical aid, which was readily available, was not in Ashraf within minutes of the Iraqi attack, despite requests.
Simply put, the US forces if they so wished and were so ordered to do from their command in Washington and Baghdad could at the flick of a switch airlift all the wounded to the US military hospital situated in the vicinity of the Camp. This now is the minimum that the US authorities must do.
However, such assistance will not suffice in circumstances where the Iraqi authorities have made clear their intention to destroy the Camp and if necessary kill all the residents.
At today’s press conference Lord Maginnis of Drumglass said:
‘Prime Minister Cameron and President Barack Obama must use the appropriate language in describing this attack as a massacre’.
So far, however, no such language has been forthcoming from the British or the Americans — whose tender consciences have taken them to war in Libya to protect innocent civilians from a despotic regime. Could this be because the last thing the British and Americans want to acknowledge is that the Iraqi government of Nuri al Maliki – the country in which so much British and American blood and treasure has been so painfully spent in the cause of making it safe for the west — has merely become (as has been suggested on this blog many times) a puppet of the Iranians, the west’s most lethal foe?
And just what is America’s role in this still unfolding atrocity?