Congress, State spar over Iran exile group

Congress, State spar over Iran exile group
The Washington Times
By Tom Carter
April 4, 2003

A long-simmering dispute between the State Department and dozens of members of Congress broke into the open this week after a report that an Iranian exile group was fighting in Iraq on behalf of Saddam Hussein.

Officials at State have long distrusted the Mujahideen Khalq, which has military camps in eastern Iraq near the Iranian border and a sophisticated lobbying operation in Washington and Paris. The department added the group to its list of terrorist organizations in 1997.

But more than 100 members of Congress, who have signed letters in support of the group, believe the department's position is politically motivated to curry favor with the Tehran government of President Mohammed Khatami.

A wire-service report, vigorously denied by the exiles, stated last week that the group's base had come under attack from coalition forces battling Saddam's regime.

That appeared to be confirmed this week when the Hill, a newspaper focused on congressional affairs, quoted a State Department official saying the group was indeed a target of U.S. forces and believed to be fighting with the irregular Fedayeen forces.

"They're a combatant. They are being targeted. Targeting data is being provided to the Pentagon," the paper quoted Greg Sullivan, spokesman for the State Department's Near East affairs desk, as saying.

"We believe they are undertaking some action in the south [of Iraq] where enemy combatants have disguised themselves as civilians."

A State Department spokesman declined to confirm or deny the report yesterday, referring the question to Mr. Sullivan. Repeated calls to Mr. Sullivan over two days were not returned; neither were calls on the issue to the White House, the Pentagon and U.S. Command Central in Doha, Qatar.

That came as no surprise to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, one of the leading supporters in Congress of the Mujahideen Khalq, more commonly known in Washington as the People's Mujahideen.

"They won't return your calls because the State Department weasel is a gutless bureaucrat who won't come out of his cave," the Florida Republican said yesterday.

"Based on the daily information available to us from the Defense Department, it does not correspond to what Greg Sullivan was quoted as saying," said Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen, who describes the exile group as freedom fighters.

She said the group has been a vigorous ally in the U.S. war on terrorism, supplying information to the Bush administration on Iran's expanding nuclear program, evidence that Iran was behind the Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 Americans in Saudi Arabia in 1996, and of Iranian-sponsored terrorism in Argentina.

Despite being on the terrorist list, the group is also listed by the State Department as the only credible opposition to the government in Iran, where their members are regularly executed. The group has been publicly credited at the State Department and the White House for helping.

Mujahideen Khalq spokesmen in Paris and Washington rejected last week's report by Reuters news agency that their bases had been bombed as "preposterous lies."

"The source of these fabrications is [Iranian] intelligence. ... The report that U.S. warplanes bombed [our] positions near the city of Khanequin is totally false and only reflects the wishes of the mullahs ruling Iran," the group said in a statement.

In December Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen sponsored a letter supporting the exiles, which was signed by more than 100 lawmakers. "This has never been a tough sell," she said.

The State Department says the Mujahideen Khalq began as a communist-Muslim opposition group to the Shah Reza Pahlavi's regime and that it supported capturing the American hostages in Iran in 1979. The name itself - Khalq - means people in the sense of masses. The name of the communist movement that took over Afghanistan in the 1970s had "Khalq" as a component.

The department says the Iranian exile group has been implicated in numerous bombings and assassinations of Iranian officials over the years, and fought on the side of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war.

In recent years, however, it has been fighting the Islamist "mullahs' regime" in Tehran.