BRIT SAILORS WERE TRAPPED IN SHADOWY WAR

Evidence is emerging that the capture of the 15 British sailors by Iranian Revolutionary Guards was part of a shadowy war being waged by the US against Iran.
The Iranians were particularly incensed by an ongoing US operation to seize Iranian diplomats traveling outside Iran, especially within the borders of Iraq. In the early hours of January 11, US Special Forces, supported by Black Hawk helicopters, swooped into an Iranian liaison compound in Arbil within Kurdish northern Iraq. Within minutes they had seized five Iranians and whisked them off to a secret location to be interrogated. When news of the operation broke, US authorities in Iraq, as well as Pentagon officials, admitted responsibility and heralded it as a major success. Journalists were told the five Iranians were members of Iran’s Revolution Guard and were in Iraq to meet with members of the insurgency.
The Iraqi government was angered by the arrests and so were leaders of the Kurdistan Regional Government who had invited the Iranians to visit them. But there was a controversial aspect of the story that only came to light in a report on April 3 by Patrick Cockburn, the London Independent’s correspondent in the region. He discovered that the Arbil operation was botched because the intended targets were not the five who were arrested but two senior Iranian generals. One was Mohammed Jafari, deputy head of Iran’s National Security Council, with special responsibility for internal security. He was a prominent critic of the US and had charged that the US and Britain were fomenting civil strife within Iran to destabilize the country. The other target was General Minojahar Frouzanda, chief of intelligence of the Revolutionary Guard, probably the most powerful and independent military grouping within Iran.
Both men were in Iraq on a sanctioned diplomatic trip and prior going to Arbil had met senior Iraqi government officials. In Kurdistan they met Iran’s Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani and Mazoud Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Regional Government. Kurdish leaders were livid when they learned of the US operation and complained that it was setting a dangerous precedent.
From a US perspective, the prospect of annoying the Kurds or the Iraqi government was a small price to pay for getting their hands on two Iranian generals with intimate knowledge of the workings of the military, political, nuclear and intelligence structures within Iran. As for Iran, it made no comment about the attempt to abduct the generals but complained about the arrests of the five other Iranians. Some time later, a senior Iranian figure referred to the true nature of the American operation when he remarked that the US objective had been to arrest Iranian “security officials” who had gone to Iraq to discuss security issues affecting both countries.”
On February 4, yet another Iranian, Jalal Sharafi, a second secretary at the Iranian embassy in Baghdad was snatched off the streets of the Iraqi capital by members of Iraq’s 36 Commando Unit. It quickly transpired, from statements made by members of the Iraqi Government, that the arrest had been ordered by the US and that Sharafi was transferred to US custody for interrogation. Members of the Iraqi government and Iranian leaders called for Shafari’s release but to no avail. The US insisted in was not involved in his seizure and blamed it on elements within Iraq’s military. A month later, Revolutionary Guard Brigadier General, Alireza Ashgari, disappeared while traveling abroad. He was on a state-sanctioned mission to meet the Syrian Defense Minister to finalize an arms deal between the two countries. But, on a stopover in Istanbul, Turkey, he vanished. Days later, leaks to the media suggested he had defected to the US and was willing to divulge a lot of Iran’s nuclear and military secrets. Iran angrily claimed he had been abducted and some sources said the Israeli Secret Service, Mossad, had seized him on behalf of the US.
In light of all those episodes, it was inevitable that Iran would respond in a tit-for-tat way and it did so with the arrest of the 15 British sailors on March 24. That brought the British into the shadowy war and set in motion three-way negotiations for the release of the sailors in return for the freeing of Sharafi and the five seized in Arbil. The first sign that the British had pressured the US into giving up some of its Iranian captives in return for the release of the sailors came on April 3 with the freeing of Sharafi, who immediately returned to Iran.
Some observers warn that this shadowy war could easily spiral out of control. They point to the fact that if the US is going to seize Iranian diplomats or security figures in Iraq or Turkey, then Iraq may well feel it is entitled to retaliate by snatching US or British diplomats in other Middle east nations, including neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The US continues to deny all knowledge of Shafari’s arrest, preferring to blame it on Iraqis. The Pentagon and US military figures in Iraq have yet to acknowledge that the operation in Arbil was botched.