Kidnapping could be traced back to arrests by US forces

[Flabbergasted]

Richard Beeston: Analysis
When US forces burst into a villa and arrested five Iranian men in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil this year, they may have set in motion a chain of events that led directly to the abduction of 15 British servicemen in the northern Gulf last week.

While the British and Iranian governments argue about whether the sailors and Marines were in Iraqi or Iranian waters at the time of their capture, privately there is acknowledgement that their fate is bound closely to that of the Iranian captives.

As part of a campaign to crack down on Iranian influence in Iraq, President Bush ordered US forces to root out Iranian agents suspected of arming and funding Iraqi Shia militias. The Iranian liaison office in the Iraqi Kurdish region was an obvious choice. When US troops stormed the building they found Iranians trying to flush fake documents down the lavatory. All five were allegedly members of the al-Quds unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. The unit is responsible for promoting the Iranian revolution abroad by assisting militant groups with funding, training and arms.

Iranian officials speculated that the way to win the freedom of their comrades was to capture American or British soldiers and arrange a prisoner swap. Reza Faker, a writer for the Revolutionary Guards’ newspaper Subhi Sadek, said: “We have the ability to capture a nice bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers and feed them to our fighting cocks.” Reza Zakeri, of President Ahmadinejad’s office, said that capturing a Western soldier was easier than acquiring a cheaply made Chinese product.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article1572776.ece

[uppityperson]

1. Well, I , um, am at a loss for words.

[Kagemusha]

2. Didn't they get the memo? Blair completely, vehemently denied this

because the Brits are in Iraq with UN permission and they were never in Iranian waters, and the Iranians captured were breaking UN resolutions and causing trouble. So there.

[doc03]

3. So if we do it it is an arrest and when they do

it it is a kidnapping, interesting. What if the Iranians were snooping around the shores of Britain or the US, what would we call that, and what would we do??

[frylock]

5. yep. kinda like how black people loot, while white people are just more resourceful

[IndianaGreen]

4. The British sailors are detained, not kidnapped!

Murdoch's rag The Times can't get their language straight, anymore than Tony Blair can explain why the Royal Navy was operating in disputed waters. We already established that Britain does not respect Iraqi sovereignty, and they appear not to respect Iranian sovereignty either.