IRAN’S "MASSIVE" ATTACK ON MKO BASES IN RELATIONS WITH ELECTIONS
PARIS 19 Apr. (IPS) Iran fired Wednesday more than 60 middle-range Russian-made Scud-B missiles on military bases of the opposition Mujahedeen Khalq Organisation (MKO) in Iraq, killing several people, the Iraqi-supported, trained and financed MKO and Baghdad reported.
Iraq immediately denounced the attack as "cowardly" and warned that it reserved the right to retaliate for the operation, the largest scale since the end of the bloody 1980-1988 war between the two neighbours.
Mujahedeen leader Mas’oud Rajavi called on the UN Security Council to condemn the Iranian leadership for its use of "weapons of mass destruction, for exporting crises and warmongering"."Iraq condemns this cowardly Iranian act of aggression which constitutes a flagrant violation of the UN charter and the rules of international law," a government spokesman said, quoted by the official INA news agency monitored in Paris.
"Iraq reserves the right to respond with the appropriate means and at the appropriate time," he said.
He said Iranian forces had fired 56 surface-to-surface missiles at Iraqi territory and that Tehran would bear "full responsibility under international law for the human and material losses".
But the Mujahedeen said Iran fired as many as 66 Scud missiles targeting at least seven of the group's camps close to the border as well as nearby Iraqi towns.
13 additional scud missiles have been fired by Iran in a second attack against Mujahedeen camps based in Iraq, with nearby Iraqi towns hit and an unspecified number of people killed, the MKO reported.
Baghdad did not confirm this second attack and at the time to going on the internet, there was no reaction from Tehran.
The pounding followed a report by Tehran on Saturday of clashes in western Iran between Pasdaran revolutionary guards and a seven-man Mujahadeen unit trying "to infiltrate into Kermanshah province to carry out terrorist operations".
The latest attacks "mark a serious escalation on Iran's part against the Mujahadeen inside Iraq", a Western diplomat posted in Baghdad told the French news agency AFP, asking not to be named.
He said it was "bound to have repercussions on relations between Iran and Iraq".
But Iranian political analysts said the attacks could be in relations with the forthcoming presidential elections due next June.
"This massive attack on the MKO bases in Iraq is in the follow up of ruling hard-line conservatives looking for trouble, afraid of a new victory for the reformers", commented Mr. Mehdi Khanbaba-Tehrani, a Frankfurt-based veteran Iranian dissident.
In his view, confirmed by other independent Iranian analysts, "one way or another", the MKO and the Iranian conservatives "co-operate with each other" against the reformists and the reform process in Iran.
"With their mortar latest attacks on building belonging to the Revolutionary guards and the Islamic revolution tribunal, the MKO provided the conservatives the best of the pretexts to arrest tens of moderate Islamist-nationalists and members of the Iran Freedom Movement (IFM) and ban their activities", Mr. Khanbaba-Tehrani noted.
On orders from Ayatollah Ali Khamenehe'i, the leader of the Islamic Republic, more than sixty members of IFM and personalities affiliated to the nationalist-religious groups were arrested in two waves before and after the Iranian New Year, starting 21 March, releasing a few of them latter on heavy bails.
The Islamis revolution tribunal that arrested directly the dissidents independent of the Intelligence Ministry justified the detention, claiming they were plotting to overthrow the regime, including by military means.
It also accused the groups with "intelligence" with the outlawed MKO.
The Mujahadeen presence in Iraq, like the Iraqi opposition based in Iran, is a major stumbling block to the normalisation of ties between Tehran and Baghdad, who have failed to sign a peace treaty since the end of their eight-year conflict.
The attacks killed a Mujahedeen fighter and several Iraqi civilians in and around the southern towns of Jalawla and Basra, said the group's spokesman, Farid Suleimani, identifying the dead man as Reza Zahmatkesh, a 38-year-old from Mashhad, according to the French news agency AFP.
Missiles crashed around bases in southern Iraq at Al-Habib, near Basra, Faeza, near the town of Kut, Al-Amara and Khales, as well as at Ashraf camp, 190 kilometres (115 miles) east of Baghdad, the spokesman said. ENDS IRAN ATTACK MKO BASES 19401