After the failed assassination attempt of April the 1st 2007 of Dr. Abdulla Aljubori, the former Governor of Diyala who has been campaigning against the Iranian regime’s state sponsored terrorism in Iraq and the assassination, in April the 12th 2007, of the Iraqi Member of Parliament Mohammad Hossein Awadh in the Iraqi Parliament premises – both of them Iraqi founding members of our dialogue platform "IF – Iraq with A future" – we assisted to the murdering of several leading sheikhs in Anbar, Basra and Diyala provinces known for their position for Iraq and against religious fanaticism.
On November the 9th, Sheikh Fayez Lafta Aliwi – another personal friend of European Parliamentarians, closely associated with our platform and the most prominent leader of the Diyala Awakening Council – and three other tribal leaders from Al-Obeidi tribe were killed in Al Khalis. According to Iraqi sources close to the victims, this assassination involved a bomb-trapped child that exploded by remote control, with a level of terrorist sophistication available only to the core IRGC’s Qods Force.
On December the 31st, a suicide driven car bomb killed several Iraqi members of the Awakening Council in Bakuba. On the same day, around midnight, terrorists kidnapped Sheikh Salman Hamzeh Al-Jabouri and his sons from their residence in Marjaneh village, six kilometers north of Saadieh in Diyala Province. They were machine gunned only four hundred meters away from their home and all of them were killed instantly. Sheikh Salman Hamzeh Al-Jabouri was a close relative of our founding member Dr. Abdullah Aljubori.
On January the 13th the Sunni leader Uday Al-Nedaway was killed and 6 of his bodyguard were injured when his min-bus was involved in an accident caused deliberately by another vehicle.
Already in June 2006, 5.2 million Iraqis signed a statement calling for the eviction of the clerical regime from Iraq. While pointing out some of the regime’s crimes in Iraq including "mass murders; assassination of nationalist personalities and the Iraqi society’s elite; an unremitting wave of arbitrary arrests and countless cases of kidnapping," the 5.2 million Iraqis reiterated that the Iranian regime has targeted "security, life and democracy" and "Iraq was driven to the verge of precipice."
Last week, Dr. Saleh Mutlak, leader of Iraqi National Dialogue Front, also a regular participant in IF initiatives, in an interview with Arabic language channel, al-Rafedin TV, said "Baghdad streets are under the control of the American forces but Iranian invaders have most of the governmental institutions under their control". He added that since the occupation of Iraq many institutions have been created in that country by the Iran’s regime. To prevent a full occupation by Iran, these institutions must be abolished. He warned that if the Multi National Force left Iraq a vacuum would be created paving the way for such an occupation by Iran’s regime.
Several Christian leaders including the Secretary General of the Iraqi Christian Democratic Movement and other leaders of the party together with the Secretariat General of the Chaldeans Party have also denounced the brutal atrocities against the Christian community perpetrated by the Iranian regime and their terrorist agents and associates.
In November, three hundred thousand southern Iraqis – normally identified with the prevailing religious Muslim Shea orientation – produced a manifesto calling for a United Nations mission to investigate the crimes of the Iranian regime and its representatives which occupy almost completely the South of Iraq and asking an end to the occupation.
In spite of the very positive policy developments from the US since the start of 2007, targeting the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and its affiliated and allied terrorist organizations in Iraq and making peace and cooperation with Iraqi nationalists of the Awakening Councils and other nationalist and democratic forces, the situation remains very critical for the Iraqis who survive and resist in Iraq or that were forced to leave their homeland.
IF "Iraq with A Future" recalls that the Iranian regime nuclear strategy relies fundamentally on its action in the Middle East. As we could read in August last year in the daily Kayhan, the mouthpiece of the mullahs’ Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei "The fate of Iran’s nuclear dossier will be determined not at the negotiating table, but in the streets of Baghdad and Beirut". For once, we totally agree with Iranian Supreme leader.
IF "Iraq with A Future", a dialogue platform gathering European parliamentarians and several Iraqi civil society and political leaders, insists that the coalition authorities must strengthen the measures to protect Iraqi citizens from terrorist attacks and expose its culprits and agents, and calls on the United Nations, the Arab League and the international community to assist the Iraqi struggle for survival and dignity, inside and outside the Iraqi borders.
Paulo Casaca
Member of the European Parliament
Strasbourg, 15 January 2008
Picture : Mohammad Hossein Awadh and Paulo Casaca at the European Parliament, 12 September 2006