Kidnapped Iranian Diplomat Freed, Iraqi Says (nytimes.com)
BAGHDAD, April 3 — An Iranian diplomat kidnapped by armed men wearing uniforms of the Iraqi Security forces was freed here Tuesday, Iraq’s foreign minister said, adding that he was continuing to work to free five other Iranians held by American forces and was optimistic that they would be released soon.
The freeing of the diplomat is unrelated to the negotiations over the British sailors and marines seized by Iran for trespassing into their waters, the foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, said in an interview.
“People are trying to link this to the British sailors’ case. Really, it has no connection whatsoever. Even for the other Iranian detainees, we’ve been repeatedly asking the M.N.F.I. to release them,” Mr. Zebari said, referring to the American-led coalition, the Multi-National Force-Iraq.
He added, “We have a sense they are going to be released; we some good pledges that they will be released after the investigation is finished.”
Separately, an official spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani said that reports published Monday and Tuesday were “completely untrue” that said the highest Shiite clerics disagreed with a plan to liberalize Iraq’s de-Baathification law, which currently puts sharp restrictions on former Baathists holding to government positions.
Since Ayatollah Sistani rarely speaks for himself, but makes his views known through written statements and clerics affiliated with him, it can be difficult to determine his true views. But Tuesday’s comments suggested he was backing away from wholesale criticism of the de-Baathification overhaul proposed jointly by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and President Jalal Talabani.
The proposed measure has the support of the United States government, and that makes it more difficult for some Iraqis, including the senior Shiite clerics, to embrace it.
The American involvement in the detention of at least some of the Iranian diplomats has forced Iraq to undertake delicate and difficult negotiations with two powerful countries on which it relies for support: the United States and Iran. Mr. Zebari said the seizure of the accredited diplomat who was freed Tuesday had been “embarrassing for my government.”
“We are treading a very thin line,” he said. “We are in a very difficult position to balance these two conflicting interest.”
The kidnapping and detention incidents have not helped Iraq’s efforts to persuade officials in Tehran to stop Iranian forces who appear to be arming and financing the insurgency in Iraq. But the diplomat’s release “paves the way for some good will gestures,” Mr. Zebari said.
Other politicians thought the timing of the diplomat’s release was difficult to separate entirely from the negotiations over the British sailors. “It’s a curious coincidence,” said Ahmad Chalabi, the former Pentagon favorite who has ties to Iran and is in charge of the government’s de-Baathification commission.
The released Iranian diplomat, Jalal Sharafi, second secretary at Tehran’s mission in Baghdad, walked into the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday morning, Mr. Zebari said. He added that he remained uncertain who had kidnapped Mr. Sharafi.
Mr. Sharafi was seized more than eight weeks ago as he emerged from a bank in the middle-class, predominantly Shiite Baghdad neighborhood of Karada. The Iraqi police stopped a car with four passengers that was following the car in which the kidnappers had placed Mr. Sharafi. The four men were taken to the police station. They said they worked for an Iraqi security service, but when pressed, the security services denied that the men worked for them in any official capacity, Mr. Zebari said.
“We went to our security services and said, ‘Do they work for you, do you have him?’ They denied it,” Mr. Zebari said. “We went to the American military, the intelligence services — they all denied they had him. But my advice to my government was to keep the four in detention, until the diplomat was released,” Mr. Zebari said.
The four men remain detained in a Ministry of Interior facility, Mr. Zebari said. Although Mr. Zebari was uncertain who kidnapped the man, others familiar with the case said they believe those responsible work for the Iraqi Intelligence Service, which is affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency.
Mr. Zebari said that he was similarly frustrated by the case of the five Iranians seized by American troops in January in a raid in Erbil in northern Iraq, but that at least in that case he knew where they were held. He said because of the detention of the six Iranians (the five in Erbil and the diplomat in Karada), Iran very nearly refused to come to a regional meeting on Iraq held in Baghdad on March 17. That meeting included representatives of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council as well as neighboring countries and international organizations.
The unhappiness over plans to east the de-Baathification law looked unlikely to ease anytime soon.
Hamid al-Khafaf, a spokesman for Ayatollah Sistani in Beirut, Lebanon, and one of the few who is authorized to speak in his name, said: “We have warned all media not to use any statement attributed to Sistani without having it written or approved by his office.”
News reports on Monday about Ayatollah Sistani’s view of the de-Baathification law was “absolutely untrue,” Mr. Khafaf said.
Three Shiite politicians reached Tuesday said that Ayatollah Sistani and other senior Shiite clerics known as the marjaia expressed in private conversations differing concerns about changes to the de-Baathification law, but that they agreed a compromise had to be reached among the different drafts, some of which take a far less liberal approach to former Baathists than the one submitted by Mr. Maliki and Mr. Talabani.
“The marjaia know there are different drafts, they want this to be up to parliament,” said Jaber Habeeb, a professor of political science at Baghdad University and a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, the main Shiite bloc in the Iraqi Parliament.
The de-Baathification overhaul is far more complicated than it appears at first. One of the worries of the senior Shiite clerics is that in areas of southern Iraq where Saddam Hussein’s regime was especially despised, a law that is perceived as too generous to former Baathists could set off a sectarian backlash that would worsen the country’s security situation, said several Shiites who had talked to the senior Shiite clerics and their representatives.
At the same time, however, the senior Shiite clerics want a change in the law that helps lower-level Baathists, many of whom are Shiites, who joined the party as a prerequisite to getting government jobs.
Seventeen people were killed in violence around Iraq on Tuesday and 10 bodies were found in Baghdad and one in Diyala Province.
Still, the Iraqi government announced late Tuesday that the curfew in Baghdad would change to allow people to stay out until 10 p.m. local time. Previously, the curfew was at 8 p.m.
The United States military announced that a marine was killed Monday in Anbar Province.
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