Don’t Bomb Iran

Iraqis, Iranians trade accusations of border violations

Compiled by Daily Star staff
Saturday, September 09, 2006

Iraqi border guards accused Iran Friday of shelling their territory and taking six soldiers prisoner after a clash on the border northeast of Baghdad. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government said that more than 1,500 people died violently in Baghdad in August - nearly the same number as in July.

Iran’s state news agency said Thursday seven Iraqi security personnel were detained crossing into Iranian territory in Ilam Province. An investigation was under way, IRNA said.

A senior officer in Iraq’s US-backed border guards service said Iranian artillery had fired on to Iraqi soil near the town of Mandali, 100 kilometers from Baghdad, Wednesday.

Clashes Thursday following the discovery by an Iraqi patrol of an Iranian outpost inside Iraq led to the capture of Lieutenant Walid Abdel-Hussein and five of his men by Iranians, the senior officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“They took the officer and five soldiers, along with their Humvee at midday yesterday [Thursday],” the officer said, referring to a US-built military vehicle used by the Iraqi forces.

A senior official at the Iraqi Defense Ministry in Baghdad said the incident was still being investigated but a statement from Baghdad was expected.

In other domestic violence, insurgents killed eight people in Iraq Friday, including three civilian bystanders who died in a roadside bomb targeting the convoy of a police chief in Baghdad, security officials said.

The deaths came as the Iraqi Health Ministry put its final August tally of violent deaths in Baghdad at 1,536. That is nearly three times the preliminary estimate last week.

“The Baghdad morgue received 1,584 bodies of people killed in violent attacks,” Hakim al-Zamily, director general at the ministry told AFP. The ministry reported 1,850 killings in the war-torn capital in July.

The figures fly in the face of Thursday’s statement by the US-led forces chief spokesman Major General William Caldwell that August’s “murder rate in Baghdad dropped 52 percent  from the daily rate for July.”

In an unrelated development, the Iraqi government Friday defended Thursday’s decision to close the Baghdad bureau of Al-Arabiyya TV for “sectarian” reporting, despite criticism from media bodies which called the ban an assault on press freedom.

“If Al-Qaeda wanted reporters to work for it, it could do no better than the reporters for Al-Arabiyya,” Yassin Majid, media advisor to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said.

Al-Arabiyya rejected the charges. Spokesman Nasser al-Sarami said that Iraq had not yet informed the channel which story had prompted the ban. - Agencies

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