On Aug. 5, the day of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's inauguration as president, Tehran officials said they could not confirm or deny Iran was holding three American journalists detained on July 31 while crossing from Iraq into Iran on the Kurdistan border. According to DEBKAfile's Iranian sources, Tehran is preparing to claim the three captives, Jewish Americans, are Israeli spies, arousing fears in Washington and Tehran that the newly elected president plans to use his captives as a stick to humiliate the Obama administration and force an apology for the way it treated him.
Ahmadinejad is furious over the White House's refusal to congratulate him on his reelection, although Washington did say that the US recognizes him as the president of Iran. He is plotting to use the three Americans to provoke a new crisis between his government and Washington. Mustafa Najr will therefore not be reappointed defense minister but interior minister instead so as to put a hardliner in charge of the American detainees.
To turn the screw, Tehran will spread a thick smoke screen over their fate after which they will be accused of having been assigned by Israeli and US intelligence to spy on Iran.
They are identified as Shane Bauer from California, who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation and New American Media, his partner Sarah Short, age 30 from California, who writes for “Matador”, and Joshua Steel Petel, age 27 from Oregon, who attended a New York yeshiva and writes for Jewish Week.
The Petel family have their origins in Iraq, and Joshuah told his friends he was going on a roots tour of places from which his family emigrated to the US.
Our Washington sources report that in discussions held over the past few days at the State Department and the National Security Council, an estimate was formed that the capture of the three American journalists by Iran is nothing like the case of the two American journalists Euyna Lee and Laura Ling, whose release Bill Clinton obtained on a mission to North Korea this week. No high-ranking American figure would have a chance of a welcome in Tehran such as the US former president received in Pyongyang. The Iranians will instead demand an exorbitant diplomatic price for the three Americans' freedom, which the US will not want to pay.
If the affair is not handled carefully, US diplomatic sources warn, it has the potential of deteriorating very quickly into Obama's "Irangate" - a repeat of the 1985 episode which bedeviled the Reagan administration for many months after the US and Israel were found sending a high-ranking delegation to Tehran with an offer of weapons in return for the release of US hostages abducted by the Hizballah in Lebanon.
Tehran may well involve Hizballah this time too, adding the Lebanese Shiite organization's demands from Israel on top of its own.
(IsraelNN.com) The three Americans who were arrested in Iran last week are Jewish. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday that the U.S. is concerned about the current status of the three. Their whereabouts are not currently known.
Kurdish authorities identified the three Americans as Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd, and Joshua Fattal. All three are journalists, and were arrested after crossing the border from Iraq to Iran.
 |
BAGHDAD, Aug. 1 -- Iranian television said Saturday that Tehran arrested three Americans who crossed the border from northern Iraq.
The Americans, two men and a woman, were arrested Friday after they entered Iran while hiking in the semiautonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, a Kurdish security official said.
A U.S. official in Baghdad said the United States asked the Swiss, who represent U.S. interests in Iran, to investigate the reports. Iran and the United States broke off diplomatic ties shortly after the Islamic revolution in 1979.
"We've seen the reports, and we are not able to confirm any details," the U.S. official said. "We have asked the Swiss protection power for information about whether they were detained by Iranians."
The Kurdish official said the Americans were tourists who came to the region from Turkey on Tuesday through the Ibrahim Al-Khalil border point in Zakho, Iraq. They visited Irbil, the Kurdish capital, and on Wednesday arrived in Sulaymaniyah, the region's second-largest city, 160 miles northeast of Baghdad.
The Americans went hiking between Halabja and Ahmad Awa, a picturesque tourist attraction 55 miles from Sulaymaniyah.
"We are talking with the Iranian representatives in the region and the U.S. consulate here to try to find a solution for this problem," said Falah Mustafa Bakir, head of the Kurdish foreign relations department. "But we haven't reached anything yet."
Al-Alam, an Iranian television station, said four Americans crossed into the country on Friday, ignoring warnings from border guards that the bounds in the area were not clearly marked. The station said that three were arrested and that the fourth returned to Iraq.
Kurdish officials identified the Americans as Shaun Gabriel Maxwell, Shane Bower, Sara Short and Joshua Steel. They said one of them -- it was unclear which -- remained at a hotel because he was feeling sick. His friends contacted him after they were detained, and he informed the U.S. Embassy of their arrest. He is now at the embassy in Baghdad, Kurdish officials said.
Iranian state television reported earlier Saturday that the Americans were U.S. soldiers. "Three U.S. military personnel went missing in an area bordering Iran-Iraq," a news anchor said. "The reason for the presence of these American soldiers is not known."
A U.S. official rejected the allegation, and a security official in Iraq said the three were merely backpackers who got lost while hiking in a mountainous region where the Iran-Iraq border is not clearly marked.
The case is the latest source of friction with Washington over the detention of Americans, following the espionage trial earlier this year of American-Iranian journalist Roxana Saberi. Such a confrontation could be especially thorny this time around, when Iran is mired in its worst political crisis in 30 years over the disputed June 12 presidential election.
The Americans — freelance journalist Shane Bauer, his girlfriend Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal — were hiking in a picturesque region of Iraq's northern Kurdish region near the Iranian border that is known for lush vegetation, pistachio groves and fruit trees.
The Iraqi regional security chief in Sulaimaniyah said the area is poorly marked and the three simply lost their bearings when they crossed into western Iran and were arrested on Friday. He urged Iranian authorities to free them.
"Our investigations proved there was no political or military reason for the border crossing. They simply made a mistake," said the Iraqi official, Hakim Qadir Humat Jan.
"They came as tourists. Nothing about the way they were traveling points to a possibility of spying. Their financial situation was also weak — they traveled in a crowded bus and stayed at a cheap hotel — and they entered Kurdistan legally."
"I call on the Iranians to set them free," Jan said, adding that the mountainous area where the Americans were arrested contains dense foliage and narrow trails, and it's difficult to make out where Iraqi Kurdistan ends and Iran begins.
An Iranian lawmaker and member of parliament's National Security Committee rejected the suggestion the Americans were tourists and said authorities were investigating whether to charge them with espionage.
"Surely we can say that they came as spies," said Mohammad Karim Abedi, a hard-line lawmaker, speaking on Iran's state-run Al-Alam TV. "The concerned authorities will decide whether they were spies or not. If it is proven that they were spies, the necessary legal procedures will be sought against them."
"The U.S. forces are trying to leave some security elements behind, after leaving Iraq," Abedi added. "It's unacceptable to penetrate Iran's borders this way. ... We condemn this."
He sought to compare the matter with a case involving British military personnel seized by Iran in March 2007 after Tehran said they had entered Iranian waters from Iraqi territory. The 15 sailors and marines were held for nearly two weeks, and some were paraded on Iranian television to deliver supposed confessions of trespassing.
State television said the latest case involving the Americans was being used by the West as anti-Iranian propaganda, and questioned whether they were hikers, saying they had been identified in Western reports as journalists.
U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Robert A. Wood dismissed the allegations of espionage and said U.S. officials were still trying to determine the fate of the Americans.
He said the Swiss ambassador in Tehran had met with Iranian officials on Washington's behalf "trying to ascertain the information and location of these individuals, but hasn't been able to do so. He's going to continue to push to try to get that information for us."
Switzerland represents U.S. interests in Iran because the two countries have not had diplomatic relations since the American hostage crisis of 1979.
Earlier, the hard-line Fars news agency, considered close to the elite Revolutionary Guard, quoted the deputy governor of Iran's Kurdistan province as saying the Americans entered Iran at the Malakh-Khor border point, near the town of Marivan, about 370 miles west of the capital Tehran, and were arrested.
The three had Iraqi and Syrian visas, said the official, Iraj Hassanzadeh.
The case against Saberi put new strains on the already rocky U.S.-Iran relationship at a time when President Barack Obama sought to reach out to Tehran for a dialogue over its contentious nuclear program.
Saberi, who had lived in Iran for six years and also had Iranian citizenship, was arrested on Jan. 31 and accused of spying. She denied the charges, but was sentenced to eight years in prison. An appeals court reduced that to a two-year suspended sentence and she was released on May 11.
Bauer, one of the Americans detained last week, identifies himself as a freelance reporter and photographer based in the Middle East and says he has reported from Iraq, Syria, Sudan's Darfur region and Yemen, according to his Web site.
He was in the region to cover the July 25 regional elections in Iraq's self-ruled Kurdish area, according to Pacific News Service Executive Director Sandy Close, who said she does not believe he ever intended to go to neighboring Iran.
In an e-mail, Bauer told Close he wanted to "feel out the situation (in Kurdistan) and get some ideas for deeper stories," she said.
"Kurdistan is the big story in Iraq now," Bauer wrote in the e-mail provided to The Associated Press. "I'm off to Kurdistan ... "
She said Bauer told her he planned to go backpacking with Shourd in a popular tourist area known for its scenery, where the pair met up with Fattal. All three were graduates of the University of California, Berkeley.
Close said Bauer would not have deliberately tried to enter Iran.
"He did not express any interest in going to Iran. He did not speak Farsi, his passion was Arabic," she said.
Bauer has traveled to the Middle East and North Africa and was most recently based in Damascus where he is working on a film about Darfur.
Shourd has written for a number of online publications, including Brave New Traveler. Ross Borden, founder of an online travel magazine that includes Brave New Traveler, described her as "very professional. She wrote a great story for us."
Fattal had been a teaching assistant with the International Honors Program from January to June, visiting Switzerland, India, South Africa and China on a global ecology program, according to program president Joan Tiffany said.
"He's a very thoughtful, caring person, soft-spoken, smart, bright. Has lots of travel experience," Tiffany said.
___
Keyser reported from Cairo. Associated Press writers Yahya Barzanji in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, Jason Dearen in San Francisco, Patrick Condon in Minneapolis, Maryclaire Dale in Philadelphia and Michelle Locke in Berkeley, Calif. contributed to this report.
Posts
