by Bill_Thompson » Tue Feb 27, 2007 12:12 am
New US covert operations helping Sunni Muslim radicals
02-25-2007, 20h47
WASHINGTON (AFP)
photo
US military helicopters wait on a landing pad as another flies overhead at Fort Tarik, located in Wasit province along the Iran-Iraq border 175 kms east of Baghdad, in 2006. The United States is stepping up covert operations in Iran in a new strategy that risks sparking an "open confrontation" and benefits Sunni radicals, a US magazine reported Sunday.
(AFP/File)
The United States is stepping up covert operations in Iran in a new strategy that risks sparking an "open confrontation" and benefits Sunni radicals, a US magazine reported Sunday.
In The New Yorker magazine, Seymour Hersh reports that US military and special-operations teams have increased their activities inside Iran, entering from Iraq to gather intelligence and to pursue Iranians who operate inside Iraq.
Hersh also reports, citing unnamed sources, that the US Defense Department recently formed a special planning group to plan possible attacks on Iran "that can be implemented, upon orders from the president, within 24 hours."
The planning group, though, has in the past month turned its focus from targeting Iran's nuclear sites and attempting to oust the current Tehran leadership to hitting targets "involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq."
Hersh said US clandestine operations in Iran, Lebanon and Syria aim at strengthening Saudi-supported Sunni Islam groups and weakening Iran-backed Shiites.
He said that since last August US-led forces in Iraq have been rounding up Iranians there to be interrogated, and were at one point holding 500 -- though some were just humanitarian and aid workers.
The operations under the new tack have been guided by Vice President Dick Cheney and rely heavily on Saudi Arabia's national security advisor Prince Bandar bin Sultan, according to the report.
However, Hersh said, "a by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al-Qaeda."
"The 'redirection,' as some inside the White House call the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims."
Some US aid distributed to Sunni groups in Lebanon falls into the hands of radical groups, US, European and Arab officials told Hersh, who named Fatah al-Islam, based in a refugee camp in northern Lebanon, and Asbat al-Answar in a Palestinian refugee camp in the country as beneficiaries.
The article also suggested the US policy was benefiting the radical Sunni Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and that influential Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt had encouraged US support for the group in a meeting late last year with Cheney.
But unnamed officials told Hersh that the approach was dangerous, enhancing radical groups which also consider the United States an enemy.
"We're spreading the money around as much as we can," a former senior intelligence official said.
"In this process, we're financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. ... It's a very high-risk venture."
In some cases, the clandestine operations rely on Saudi Arabia and Bandar, who was the ambassador to Washington for two decades, to provide the funding so that operations remain secret.
Hersh wrote that, according to one source, a government consultant, Bandar and the Saudi government have assured Washington that they will keep any dangerous Sunni groups potentially strengthened by the new policy under control.
Hersh said, however, that one of the key Shiite targets of US policy in the Middle East, Lebanon's powerful Hezbollah -- which Washington says is directed by Tehran -- said it opposed a sectarian Islamic conflict and was willing to talk with the United States.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah told Hersh in an interview that he believed the US, together with Israel, was trying to split Islam, and to partition Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
However, he said: "If the United States says that discussions with the likes of us can be useful and influential in determining American policy in the region, we have no objection to talks or meetings."
