Presidents Jalal Talabani of Iraq and Mahmud Ahmadi-nejad of Iran met in Tehran and announced the new committee afterward.
Talabani said of Camp Ashraf, “The camp will be shut down by the end of this year.” He did not mention that Iraqi officials previously announced in 2009 that the camp would be closed by the end of 2009 and in 2010 that the camp would be closed by the end of 2010.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said, “We have asked international organizations and European parliaments to encourage the members [of the Mojahedin-e Khalq] to leave Iraq and to facilitate those members who seek to go to those countries.” He neglected to mention that Iraq has been asking that for years and that the United States started seeking foreign refuges for the Mojahedin members in 2003 right after the US Army captured Camp Ashraf. But other countries have accepted only a mere handful of Mojahedin members and there is little reason to expect that further appeals will have any impact.
Talabani said that to expedite the closure of Camp Ashraf and the dispersal of the group’s members, “a tripartite committee has been set up by Iraq, Iran and the International Committee of the Red Cross to make decisions and follow up on necessary measures to shut down the camp of this terrorist group.”
In Baghdad, Claire Kaplan of the ICRC said the organization had been approached by Iraq to join but had declined to do so. “We will not take part in this committee,” she said flatly.
The ICRC has helped and will continue to help people who are in Camp Ashraf and who are accepted by other countries to move to those other countries. But it apparently saw the Iraqi invitation as an effort to subvert the ICRC into forcibly moving Camp Ashraf residents. The ICRC policy is firmly opposed to forcible movements.
The ICRC has helped about 300 Camp Ashraf residents who wished to return to Iran to do so over the last eight years.
The Islamic Republic says that 17,000 Iranians have been killed in terrorist attacks since the revolutioin, of which 12,000 were killed by the Mojahedin-e Khalq.
