Secret Iranian war plan captured by Kurds

NEWSDESK, Aug 23 (DozaMe.org) - An alleged secret Iranian war plan outlines aggressive military operations in coordination with the Turkish army to capture Kurdish land in northern Iraq to create a buffer zone, Kurdish sources close to the PKK says. The primary objective is to sabotage a possible blitz by American ground troops into Iran. The information was disclosed by a dissident Iranian military official. The Iranian pretext for the offensive into southern Kurdistan will be to root out and destroy PKK forces along the border with eastern [Iranian] Kurdistan. “Iran has since last year tested the territorial integrity of Iraq and the KRG with incursions into south Kurdistan. The areas along Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq bordering Iran have been shelled by Iranian artillery and raiders have conducted one-day operations several kilometers into what is officially Iraqi territory. The Iraqi and American silence has encouraged them and they’re continuing to push the limits,” a PKK-source told DozaMe.org. The Iraqi and American silence has embroiled KRG who has sent Iran several diplomatic notes warning them against any military adventure in southern Kurdistan [northern Iraq].

THE PLAN

The operations will start with an offensive against PKK’s military units, but the real aim will be to capture border areas to push a possible American front further from the official Iranian border. Turkey will give air support to Iranian ground troops with attack helicopters. The Turkish helicopters will lift and land in Urmiye. A small number of Turkish special forces consisting of privates and NCO’s will act as tactical support, advising invading Iranian troops. Turkish officers will remain in Operational HQ’s on Iranian soil coordinating the Turkish troops embedded into the Iranian army. Turkish troops will wear Iranian uniforms or Kurdish pro-Iranian paramilitary uniforms. Any support to Iranian troops, open or covert, by the Kurdish PUK will be rewarded by Iran. Iran will then hand over PKK-controlled areas such as Asos, Martyr Harun, Martyr Ayhan and Qandil to the PUK. It is not known whether PUK has accepted or declined the offer. Coinciding with the Iranian incursion, Turkey will conduct enormous military operations against PKK forces in the border provinces of Hakkari, Van and Sirnak.

Tehran denies distributing warning pamphlets in Kurdish villages
Aug 23, 2007, 9:52 GMT
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var PageContent= ' Tehran - Tehran denied reports of distributing pamphlets in Kurdish villages in northern Iraq warning inhabitants of Iranian military operations in the area, Tehran media reported Thursday. ISNA news agency quoted government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham as saying that Tehran did not know about existence of such flyers. If such pamphlets did indeed exist, Elham said, they \'would just be another propaganda and psychological war tactic against Iran with the aim of creating panic in Iran\'s neighbourhood.\' Local sources in northern Iraq said the purported flyers, written in Kurdish, instructed civilians to relocate in order to avoid either ground or airborne military operations against anti-Iranian fighters.

LIER LIER >>>>PANTS ON FIRE..................
Tehran - Tehran denied reports of distributing pamphlets in Kurdish villages in northern Iraq warning inhabitants of Iranian military operations in the area, Tehran media reported Thursday.
ISNA news agency quoted government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham as saying that Tehran did not know about existence of such flyers. If such pamphlets did indeed exist, Elham said, they 'would just be another propaganda and psychological war tactic against Iran with
the aim of creating panic in Iran's neighbourhood.' Local sources in northern Iraq said the purported flyers, written in Kurdish, instructed civilians to relocate in order to avoid either ground or airborne military operations against anti-Iranian fighters.

Bolton: I ‘Absolutely’ Hope The U.S. Will Attack Iran In The Next ‘Six Months’
Yesterday, Raw Story pointed out that former CIA operative Bob Baer told Fox News that the Bush administration will likely attack Iran in the coming months. “Iran policy is on close hold, but the feeling is we will hit the Islamic Revolutionary Guard corps sometime next six months or so,” said Baer. Today, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton appeared on Fox News and responded. He said that while he couldn’t confirm Baer’s statements, he “absolutely” hoped they were true: HEMMER: One final step here, too, that I want to take with you. You told one of our producers earlier today that you don’t know if it’s true — and you’ve made that clear in our interview here, that you don’t know what the odds are or are not against that — but you hope it’s true. Why do you hope it’s true?BOLTON: Absolutely. I hope Iran understands that we are very serious, that we are determined they are not going to get a nuclear weapon capability, and unless they change the strategic decision they’ve been pursuing for close to 20 years, that that’s something they better factor into their calculations.
Watch it: http://thinkprogress.org/2007/08/22/bolton-iran-six-months

High Stakes Game in Northern Iraq

August 23, 2007 FrontPageMagazine.com Kenneth R. Timmerman
Over the past week, with Iranian shells raining down on Iraqi villages in Kurdish areas along the border zone in the north, Iran’s leaders have engaged the United States in a high stakes game that has gone virtually unreported in the elite media. Iran has massed thousands of troops along its northwestern border in preparation for a ground assault against Iranian Kurdish fighters who have sought refuge in the rugged Qanbil mountains in northwestern Iraq. On Tuesday, villagers found leaflets bearing the official Islamic Republic of Iran logo, ordering them to leave the area or face the consequences. “Our enemies, mainly the Americans, are trying to plant security hurdles in our country (Iran),” the leaflets said. “They achieve this through using agents in the areas of Qandil and Khanira inside the Kurdish region. 'The authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran will work on cleansing this area.” Hundreds of Iraqis from the villages of Qandoul and Qal’at Diza, close to the Iranian border in the province of Sulaymanyah, fled as a result of the Iranian shelling, according to wire service accounts. Should Iran be allowed to carry out its planned attack, it would amount to an overt aggression against its neighbor. But the potential damage is far worse, because of the deep U.S. engagement in Iraq. A successful Iranian attack against opposition Kurds from the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (known as PJAK) based in Iraq, will strike a triple blow against America. Not only will the Iranians have violated Iraq’s sovereignty, guaranteed until now by the United States; they will have shown that despite the presence of 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, the United States “can do nothing” against Iran, as the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, liked to say. Even worse: if the United States sits this one out, we will send a terrible message to Iranian opponents of the regime in Tehran that despite all our calls for “freedom” and “democracy” in Iran, we will not intervene to prevent them from being massacred, even when we have the opportunity and the forces in place to save them from certain death. And yet, unless Congress and the White House react immediately, that is precisely what is going to happen. An Iranian victory in northern Iraq will have far-reaching consequences, and will further embolden president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is engaged in political, military, and intelligence hardball with the United States on multiple fronts, including inside Iraq. Just last week, U.S. forces arrested another “high-priority” Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer in Baghdad, and accused him of funneling aid to Iraqi insurgents. U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver announced the arrest on August 15, and said that coalition forces “will continue their focused operations against unhelpful Iranian influence interfering in Iraq.” An unnamed U.S. official said that the Iranian Guardsman was responsible for smuggling explosively-formed penetrators, Katyusha rockets and other weapons into Iraq, and “had direct ties to senior militant leaders and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force.” Another U.S. military spokesman. Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, told reporters in Iraq on Aug. 14 that Iran had recently provided 240 mm long-range rockets to insurgents in Iraq for attacks on U.S. forces. "The 240 mm rocket is a large-caliber projectile that has been provided to militia extremists groups in the past along with a range of other weapons from Iranian sources," Bergner said. Similar Iranian-made rockets I examined last summer in Haifa and in other northern Israel towns and cities had been fired against Israeli civilian targets by Hezbollah with warheads containing thousands of miniature ball-bearings, designed to kill and maim. On May 25, PKK guerillas in Turkey derailed a train bound for Syria for Iran, ostensibly carrying construction materials. When prosecutors went through the wreckage they found an Iranian-made rocket launcher and 300 rockets bound for Hezbollah in Syria, according to Turkish press reports. There is no way those weapons could have transited Turkey on the Turkish national railroad without someone in the Turkish government knowing what was going on. Iran is banking on its secret “entente” with Turkey – to supply Hezbollah through Syria, and to smash the bases of each other’s opposition Kurds in Iraq - to deter the United States from any military intervention in northern Iraq. The Turks have been threatening for months to go after the PKK, who have tens of thousands of fighters training in camps inside Iraq, along the Turkish border. And so the Iranians have spread the rumor, which until now has been accepted at face value, that its own Kurdish dissidents (PJAK) are actually the Iranian branch of the PKK, which the U.S. has designated as an international terrorist organization. The State Department took Turkey’s insistence that PJAK was allied with the PKK seriously enough that it refused to meet earlier this month with visiting PJAK leader, Rahman Haj Ahmadi, despite his open support for the U.S. military presence in Iraq and his identification with U.S. goals in the region. Both the PKK and PJAK have training camps in the Qanbil mountain range in northern Iraq. But because of the difficult geography, and their different needs, they inhabit “different sides of the mountains,” Rahman Ahmadi told me in Washington. “The PKK doesn’t need us,” he said. “They have tens of thousands of fighters, and hundreds of thousands of sympathizers.” But Ahmadi acknowledges that PJAK and the PKK cooperate to a certain degree, if only to prevent clashes between their own fighters. “The president of the Iraqi Kurdish Regional government, Massoud Barzani, also has an agreement with the PKK,” he told me. “Does that make Barzani a supporter of the PKK?” This is not the first time the Turks have played us in Iraq. In 2003, on a flimsy pretext of domestic opposition, they successfully prevented the 4th Infantry Division from crossing Turkey to join coalition forces that liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein. We can sit by and allow Iran to violate Iraq’s sovereignty, defy the U.S. military, and smash a significant Iranian opposition group on the slim pretext that Iran is “merely” seeking to punish its own rebels, just as Turkey. Or we can extend protection to the Iranian Kurds who have established training camps in the rugged mountains of northeastern Iraq, and inflict a double blow on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps. Clearly, the Iranians believe they can thumb their noses at the U.S. military. For more than a week, they have conducted intermittent shelling of Iraqi Kurdish villages in the general vicinity of suspected PJAK bases. My Iranian sources tell me that the Iranians are hoping to expel PJAK from the area and replace them with Ansar al-Islam, the precursor group to al Qaeda in Iraq, “They want to send Saad Bin Laden, who is currently in Iran under Iranian government protection, into a new base inside Iraq,” one source told me. Saad Bin Laden is Osama Bin Laden’s eldest son, who is widely viewed as the heir to his terrorist empire, should his father die. He was given refuge in Iran shortly after al Qaeda evacuated its bases in Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks. PJAK is a natural ally of the United States. They seek to unite Iranians to overthrow the dictatorship of the clergy in Iran, and to work together to build a future secular democracy. We don’t have to provide them weapons, or money, or training. But if we allow Iranian Revolutionary Guards troops to attack PJAK inside Iraq with impunity, we may as well pack up and leave – not just Iraq, but the entire region. Because we will have no credibility left. If instead, if we seize this opportunity to smash an Iranian Revolutionary Guards offensive with massive force, we could send a message that will make Iran’s leaders think twice before messing with us again. It’s about time we made Iran’s leaders pay a price for killing Americans and undermining America’s allies. Here is a terrific opportunity to get that job done.