Authors: Struan Stevenson
The storm clouds over Ashraf were gathering. The seeds of tragedy were being sown. The US military had begun to make preparations to leave Iraq, and the 3,400 Iranian dissidents who now remained in Camp Ashraf were fearful of their fate once US military protection was withdrawn. In the EU, we were working feverishly to ensure their continued safety.
Now a senior White House official had confirmed that talks were under way between the US and Iraqi governments about the US withdrawing its protection and transferring control of Camp Ashraf to the Iraqi government. I was in no doubt that this action would constitute a grave betrayal by the US government. It was all horribly reminiscent of other great acts of betrayal in contemporary
history, like the massacre of 2,700 Cossacks by the Soviets after they had been betrayed by the British military in Lienz, Austria, in 1945. Senior British military officials assured the Cossacks that they were being taken to a conference and would return to Lienz that same evening. Instead, they were driven under guard to a Soviet prison, where they were promptly accused of being Nazi collaborators and executed.
In the Balkans conflict, in July 1995, after the United Nations had declared Srebrenica a UN-protected ‘safe area’, 400 UN Dutch ‘blue-helmet’ peacekeepers stepped aside and allowed units of the Army of Republika Srpska, under the command of General Ratko Mladic, to massacre an estimated 8,000 Bosnian men and boys. In an urgent letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on 4 April 2009 I said: ‘As you are aware, the situation of Iranian opposition exiles in Ashraf Camp in Iraq has become an international issue since the beginning of January this year, when US forces handed over the security of Ashraf to the Iraqi government. Since then we have witnessed several threatening comments by senior Iraqi officials against these Iranian refugees.’
I told the Secretary of State that the scene was being set for another epic betrayal and massacre in Ashraf, and asked the question, why do we treat our friends so badly and play into the hands of our enemies? PMOI supporters inside Iran have risked their lives repeatedly to provide the West with top-level secret intelligence about the activities of the Mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It was the PMOI who first disclosed the existence of a nuclear weapons programme in Iran. But now we seemed set to abandon them to their fate. Handing over control of Camp Ashraf to the Iraqis would be like putting King Herod in charge of the nursery, but that was the scenario we were now facing.
The US forces who had been stationed at Ashraf since 2003, finally packed up and left on 1 January 2009, reneging on their safety guarantees to the 3,400 residents and abandoning them to their fate. Only a handful of USF-I (US Forces-Iraq) military observers were left behind to monitor the camp. The Mullahs in Tehran had been waiting for this opportunity. Now they could pounce. However a large group of US forces was based in the northern part of Ashraf, called
FOB Grizzly, monitoring the region. They knew what was going on around Ashraf but did nothing.
In late July 2009, the massacre that we had all predicted took place. The Iraqi military sent five Divisions of heavily armed troops with tanks and armoured vehicles to mow down unarmed men and women in a brutal assault that shocked the civilized world. On 28 July Colonel Saadi, the commanding officer of the Iraqi forces surrounding Ashraf, entered the camp to speak to the residents’ leadership. He said that it was his intention to erect a police station in the camp near to the water-pumping station. The residents were wholly opposed to the plan, and around 2 pm, Colonel Saadi stormed off in anger. Two hours later, he returned leading hundreds of troops and police and stormed the camp, using Humvees and bulldozers to flatten perimeter fences and walls.
The Ashraf residents quickly formed a human chain to try to defend their territory, and they were mown down by troops opening fire with live ammunition and throwing stun grenades. Unarmed men and women were beaten with nail-spiked clubs and batons. The Iraqis claimed that they had come under attack from knives, stones and sharp tools wielded by the residents, which was completely untrue. The violent assault lasted for at least four hours until nightfall. The following morning, 29 July, the Iraqis returned to Ashraf around 10.15 am. This time there were an estimated 1,000 troops, police and members of the notorious 56th Brigade under the direct command of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. They resumed the violence on the same scale as the evening before, firing live rounds at the fleeing men and women and hunting them down and crushing them under the wheels of speeding Humvees and armoured vehicles. Witnesses claimed that many of the attackers, although dressed in Iraqi uniforms, spoke perfect Farsi, indicating that they were Iranian or at least had been trained in Iran.
Video evidence filmed by some of the survivors showed how the Iraqi forces used extreme violence, including gunfire, water cannons and batons, killing eleven people and injuring 443, 42 of them seriously; two others died later due to their injuries and the denial of access to proper medical care by the Iraqis, who prevented doctors and ambulances from evacuating the wounded; UNAMI inspectors later
found the Camp Ashraf ambulance riddled with bullets. It had been fired at repeatedly as doctors tried to ferry the wounded to safety. Following the attack, the Iraqi army and police went on a looting spree, stealing 49 vehicles and helping themselves to air-conditioning units, tables, chairs, generators and anything they could carry to furnish their own base on the camp’s perimeter.
Ominously, 36 men had been seized during the attack and were subsequently and ludicrously charged with ‘assaulting officials on duty’. They were detained in a local police station, many of them suffering broken limbs and head-wounds inflicted by the Iraqi forces during their arrests. On 24 August an investigating judge ordered their immediate release due to lack of evidence. The public prosecutor, undoubtedly acting on the orders of the Prime Minister, immediately revoked the release order and set a date for a judicial hearing of the case against the 36 in mid-September. He also lodged further indictments against each, accusing them of being illegal aliens who had entered Iraq without the correct papers. In protest, the 36 started a hunger strike from the day of their arrest.
Amnesty International, in its Iraq Report 2010 regarding the human rights situation in the country, wrote, ‘Following months of rising tension, Iraqi security forces forcibly entered and took control of Camp Ashraf on 28 and 29 July. The camp houses some 3,400 members or supporters of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), an Iranian opposition group that had been under US military control since 2003. Video footage showed Iraqi security forces deliberately driving military vehicles into crowds of protesting camp residents. The security forces also used live ammunition, apparently killing at least nine camp residents, and detained 36 others who they tortured’.
Tahar Boumedra, Chief of the Human Rights Office of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), in his office in Baghdad, had begun to hear sketchy details of the massacre. He immediately applied to the Iraqi government for permission to take a fact-finding team to Ashraf. It took eleven days, despite his repeated protests, for permission to be granted. Pathetically, the Iraqi government argued that it required time for the residents of Ashraf to ‘cool off’ before it would be safe for the UNAMI team to visit the camp.
Tahar Boumedra and his team were finally permitted to visit Ashraf on 10 August. They took evidence from survivors, collected photos and video films of the attack, looked at medical reports and documented statements. They then confronted Colonel Saadi who had commanded the attack, and he admitted that he had been ordered to enter the camp by the office of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. He claimed to have met fierce resistance from the residents, and said this was why he was forced to resort to using weapons. Mr Boumedra stated later that his team received no evidence that supported Colonel Saadi’s version of events. Saadi became evasive, according to Boumedra, and admitted that ‘mistakes had been made’. When questioned about the shooting, he said he had heard shots but had no idea where they had come from. He also claimed that he had seen PMOI residents throwing themselves under the wheels of the military vehicles!
Two days later, on 12 August, UNHCR met in Baghdad with Ali al-Yasseri, Director of Operations from the Prime Minister’s office and head of the so-called ‘Ashraf Committee’. He told the UN team that following the attack on Ashraf, the Iraqi authorities had discovered rockets and rocket launchers in the camp, proving the PMOI were intending to launch terrorist operations. The fact that the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, the Governorate of Diyala Province and the US military and intelligence services had repeatedly searched the camp and discovered no weapons of any kind, exposed the absurdity of this claim. In April 2009, teams of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior with police dogs spent three days searching all parts of Ashraf and officially confirmed that they had found no weapons. Nevertheless, UNHCR decided to keep the ludicrous allegations about weapons being discovered in Ashraf secret and their apparent acceptance of al-Yasseri’s absurd claims perhaps helped to explain their reluctance later to offer tangible help to the residents of Ashraf. Al-Yasseri later told Tahar Boumedra that the MEK had shot their own people during the attack of 28 and 29 July, to try to discredit the Iraqi forces.
Despite all the lies, excuses and propaganda, UNAMI found the Iraqi forces entirely responsible for the deaths, injuries and looting during the attack. Tahar Boumedra and his UNAMI team conducted interviews with some of the US military observers who had witnessed
and filmed the entire massacre. Unable to intervene because of the US agreement with the government of Iraq over the withdrawal of American troops, they had to watch helplessly from the sidelines. They confirmed UNAMI’s conclusion that the Iraqis were entirely responsible for the brutal assault and they even promised to provide a copy of their film if it wasn’t classified. This film was, in fact, never handed over, presumably in case it upset the Iraqis; the Americans were still determined to back Maliki and to assure the world that, after all the horrendous costs of the Iraq campaign to the West in blood and treasure they had left behind a ‘functioning democracy’.
It was shocking for me to watch a film by Fox News, showing a group of wounded Ashraf residents during the 28-29 July attack, asking American soldiers for help, but the soldiers, who had instructions from their high command, just ignoring them. This was a callous and scandalous attack made worse by the fact that we had predicted it was going to happen. We had urged the Americans to retain responsibility for the protection of the residents, warning that this duty must not to be handed over to the Iraqis.
I had written letters about this to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, to Barack Obama and to the then UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. My pleas fell on deaf ears. No one was prepared to lift a finger. The PMOI were still on the US terrorist list, so there was a reluctance to do anything in Washington, and the FCO in Whitehall was still smarting from their humiliation at the hands of the courts, having been forced to remove the PMOI from the UK and EU terror lists. Ban Ki-moon was fully focused on the bloody insurgency in Iraq and refused to be diverted by what he surely regarded as a minor incident at Ashraf. The signals from the West were being received and understood in Baghdad and Tehran. The message from the West was clear: Do what you like to the PMOI – the West won’t interfere.
UNAMI, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Baroness Ashton, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, lodged strong objections with the Iraqi government and called for a full independent inquiry. Tahar Boumedra advised the Iraqi government that they should identify those responsible for the attack and hold them to account. Later he was shown a document drawn up by al-Yasseri from the Prime Minister’s Office, which consisted of
photos of a table on which were displayed hand grenades, pistols and knives, and an adjoining caption claiming that these were weapons discovered in Ashraf, proving that the PMOI was a terrorist organisation and had mounted a lethal assault on the Iraqi forces. Boumedra advised them not to circulate the document because it was so palpably amateurish and absurd as to be laughable. But as far as the UN and the West were concerned, the matter was now closed; it was already history and the calls for an independent investigation would not be repeated. The Iraqis literally had got away with murder!
PMOI supporters around the world now began hunger strikes in solidarity with the 36 residents detained following the massacre at Ashraf. 136 of the residents of Ashraf had also gone on hunger strike in sympathy. I addressed large protests outside the UN headquarters in Geneva and outside the European Parliament in Brussels. The judge in the Iraqi city of Khalis, where these 36 were detained, had issued three orders for their release, but the office of the Prime Minister blocked it and they were taken to different prisons in Baghdad, although they were each in a terrible physical condition. Finally, on 7 October 2009, the 36 hostages were released thanks to international pressure, but some of them were on their last legs.
Tahar Boumedra went to Ashraf to witness the return of the detainees. Two buses arrived at the gates of Ashraf surrounded by a heavy Iraqi military escort. The 36 had been dangerously weakened by 72 days of hunger strike, and none were able to stand up independently. Nevertheless, Colonel al-Saadi, who had masterminded the original massacre, was determined to prolong their agony. He insisted on the PMOI leadership in Ashraf signing a legal document stating effectively that the 36 were under a form of house arrest and would report instantly to the nearest police station whenever required to do so. This was completely outside the court’s release orders and Tahar Boumedra and representatives from the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) argued that it was illegal.
Meanwhile, with midday temperatures soaring, the 36 were made to suffer inside the buses, with no air conditioning and no water. Finally, in exasperation and to save their colleagues from further suffering, the PMOI leadership signed. But this did not satisfy al-Saadi, who demanded that Tahar Boumedra sign on behalf of UNAMI and
that the Red Cross should also sign. Both argued that the document would have to be rewritten to indicate that they were only signing as ‘observers’ to the agreement and more time passed as al-Saadi sent the document away for revision. Finally, with all of the signatures appended, Boumedra was permitted to board the buses.