Under heavy American pressure, the Iraqi government ordered two Iranians who had been detained in an American military raid to leave the country, Iraqi officials said Friday, ending a bitter, nine-day political standoff.
The detention brought the increasingly strained relationship between the Iraqis who run this country and their American backers to one of its lowest ebbs.
The Americans had insisted that the Iranians had been running guns and planning sectarian attacks and had pressed the Iraqis to expel them as intruders.
Iraqi officials said Friday that it was clear that the men, who were not publicly identified but were described as Iranian military officials by the Bush administration, had not been entirely forthcoming about what they were doing in Iraq.
Even so, the Iraqis said they believed that the evidence against the men was mostly circumstantial and not as damning as the Americans had portrayed. For that reason, the Iraqis said, the government decided to release them.
“There was some suspicions on their activities, but not in a red-handed way,” Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, said in an interview. Still, he conceded, “the things they were doing were not consistent with their mission.”
While the outcome was constructed to satisfy all sides, the episode, which began with an Iranian Embassy Mercedes being pulled over and led to a raid on the compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a powerful Shiite leader, deeply upset many Iraqi officials, who had been carefully building relations with Iran.
Mr. Zebari said that the men were visitors, not accredited diplomats as some officials had initially asserted, but that they had entered the country legally. It remained unclear on Friday night whether they had come at the invitation of Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani. A spokesman has said the invitation was been extended during a visit to Tehran by Mr. Talabani this month.
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American officials have long asserted that Iran is sending weapons and money into Iraq to fuel violence here, but the episode last week was the first one in which they made such high-level arrests. A number of Iranians have been arrested here but most entered the country illegally and none had been directly tied to the government.
The American military did not publicly present the evidence it said was found in the raid. Some of it was believed to have included receipts for sniper rifles and sophisticated bombs as well as maps of Baghdad identifying neighborhoods as Sunni, Shiite or mixed — the primary preoccupation of militias in Iraq’s deepening sectarian war.
But the Iraqis said that the arrest had been more of a blunder and that if the suspected crimes had been serious, the Americans would never have released them.
The politician said that the men were supposed to be let go on Thursday morning, but that the release had been delayed over the American insistence on declaring the men intruders. “There was nothing to hold them on,” the Iraqi politician familiar with the case said. “It speaks to the general confusion.”
American officials have released people its military ground commanders believe have committed crimes. This fall, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. intervened in the arrest of a sheik from the northern neighborhood of Shuala. The military believed that the man, known as Sheik Mazin, was involved in death squads and kidnapping rings. But he was a close ally of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who exerts vast influence over the Iraqi government, and General Casey said later that the political gain from releasing him outweighed the military loss.
NYT: U.S. Says Captured Iranians Can Be Linked to Attacks
Originally Posted by tequila
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