Iranian Troops Attack Kurdish Camps in Iraq

Thousands of Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) troops crossed into northern Iraq over the weekend, bombarding Iraqi Kurdish villages.

The Iraqi government has quietly acknowledged the Iranian military operation on Iraqi soil, but has not called it an invasion.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the prime minister of the Kurdish regional government, Dr. Barham Salih, left for Beijing as the Iranian invasion began, for a long-planned trip aimed at encouraging Chinese investment in Iraq.

The Iranian military offensive is targeting bases controlled by the Free Life Party of Kurdistan (PJAK), the largest and best-organized Iranian opposition group currently operating inside Iran.

Sherzad Kamangar, a PJAK spokesman in northern Iraq, told Newsmax that by Monday evening PJAK forces had pushed the Iranian troops out of Iraqi.

Kamangar said PJAK had confirmed the deaths of 108 Iranian revolutionary guards troops in the clashes, and wounded 200 more, while losing seven PJAK guerilla fighters.

An Iranian Revolutionary Guards spokesman, Delavar Ranjbarzadeh, told Iran’s state run news agency that “a large number" of rebels died in clashes near Sardasht, Iran, where the IRGC claims it has dismantled a PJAK base.

PJAK members claimed they had captured 40 IRGC troops who surrendered when the rebels attacked a Revolutionary Guards base near Sardasht, a Kurdish city and government outpost not far from Iran’s northern border with Iraq.

The IRGC had been building up its forces along the northern border with Iraq for several weeks, reinforcing bases in Sardasht, Piranshahr, and Mariwan in Iranian Kurdistan.

In early July, PJAK fighters clashed with IRGC troops on the Iranian side of the Qandil Mountains where PJAK is based, and killed 18 IRGC officers.

But PJAK never announced the skirmish, or their success. “Our struggle is not a military struggle,” PJAK Secretary General Rahman Haj Ahmadi told Newsmax in an interview. “It is primarily a political struggle to change the culture.”

PJAK sources claim that high-ranking Turkish officers and special forces teams are playing an active role in the Iranian army thrust into Iraq. Turkey and Iran have established a joint operational base to attack the Kurds in Urimyeh, in northwestern Iran, where Turkish anti-insurgency experts have been training their Iranian counterparts.

PJAK seized recently manufactured U.S. weapons from Iranian-backed counterinsurgency fighters in clashes two years ago, which they believe were supplied by the Turks to Iran.

The IRGC deployed heavy weaponry in their assault including tanks, katyusha rocket launchers, artillery, mortars, and U.S.-built Huey Cobra attack helicopters against PJAK guerillas.

PJAK’s secretary general, Rahman Haj Ahmadi, believes that Iran is seeking to push PJAK fighters out of the border regions between Iran and Iraq to replace them with radical Islamic terrorists.

“We have been protecting the border from Iranian infiltration since 2003,” he told Newsmax. “That’s one reason Iran wants to push us out. They want to replace us with al-Qaida or Ansar al Islam,” a radical al-Qaida offshoot that operated in Iraqi Kurdistan before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

“If that happens, Suleymania will become another Fallujah,” he warned. Suleymania is a major city in northeastern Iraq that many Iraqi Kurds consider their second capital.

Ahmadi said that PJAK was pro-Western, secular, and a “natural ally of the United States in the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism.”

Leaked letters from the Kurdistan regional government representative in Tehran, Nazim Debagh, shows Iran repeatedly pressing the government to crack down on PJAK fighters over the past two years, and threatening to take matters in their own hands if it did not act.


Read more on Newsmax.com: Iranian Troops Attack Kurdish Camps in Iraq



hostgator coupon 2011