December 25 2020
Turkey has arrested 13 Turkish nationals accused of helping the Islamic Republic abduct a regime opponent and smuggle him across the border to Iran, Turkish authorities said December 14.
Habib Asyud, also known as Habib Chaab, is an Iranian, ethnic Arab, separatist leader. He was lured to Turkey, then drugged and kidnapped by a network working “on behalf of Iran’s intelligence service,” a senior Turkish official said.
Iran’s state media said in November that Iranian Intelligence Ministry officers arrested Asyud over suspected involvement in a 2018 attack on a military parade in Ahvaz that killed 25 people, without saying where or how he was detained.
Asyud was based in Sweden and held dual citizenship there. He is the second Swede now detained in Iran. He was the former leader of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA), a group that has long sought to make Khuzestan province an independent country
Revealing details for the first time, a Turkish official described for The Washington Post an elaborate scheme in which Asyud was lured to Turkey by a woman, drugged and kidnaped when he went to meet her, and then smuggled across the border into Iran — all orchestrated by a notorious Iranian-born drug trafficker working at the behest of Iranian intelligence.
The allegations contain echoes of the fatal plot by Saudi Arabia against journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whose disappearance in Istanbul two years ago was one of a string of foreign intelligence operations staged in Turkey, an international travel hub and a magnet for regional dissidents.
Asyud’s disappearance was the third high-profile operation in Turkey in as many years blamed on Iran’s government.
In 2017, an Iranian media mogul, who had been sentenced to prison in absentia in Iran, was killed in a drive-by shooting in Istanbul said to have been carried out by an associate of an Iranian-born drug trafficker, Naji Sharifi Zindashti.
Last year, Masoud Molavi Vardanjani, a former Iranian defense official who had become critical of his government, was also fatally shot in Istanbul, in a killing that Turkish officials said was instigated by intelligence officers working out of the Iranian Consulate there.
The Turkish investigation found that Asyud traveled from Sweden to Istanbul on October 9 to meet a woman they referred to as Saberin S. She was reportedly secretly married to Asyud. She arrived in the city the day before Asyud did, after traveling from Iran on a forged Iranian passport.
The day Asyud arrived, several members of the kidnap team bought plastic handcuffs at a hardware store in Istanbul. Asyud landed that evening and went to meet Saberin at a gas station in the Istanbul district of Beylikduzu, where she was waiting in a van.
Once inside the van, Asyud was subdued, drugged and his hands and feet bound. He was driven to the eastern Turkish province of Van, handed over to a human trafficker and smuggled across the border the next day, the summary said. Saberin also returned to Iran.
Turkish intelligence officers and police have detained 13 men, all Turkish citizens, who have been arraigned on charges that include “using weapons … to deprive an individual of liberty through deceit,” the official said. Zindashti, the drug smuggler who was believed involved in the kidnaping, was still at large and thought to be in Iran, the official told The Washington Post.
Zindashti served prison time in Turkey for a heroin trafficking conviction more than a decade ago, reportedly worked as a government informant, and lost his daughter and a nephew in a fatal shooting in 2014 carried out by gunmen who may have been from a rival gang. When Zindashti was arrested at his house in Istanbul two years ago on murder charges, the authorities also detained two police officers who had apparently been the drug lord’s guests.
Zindashti was imprisoned in April 2018, but served only six months. His early release set off a scandal in Turkey, after allegations that an adviser to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had intervened in the case.
It was not clear when Zindashti started working with Iran’s government. He hailed from Urumiyeh, in western Iran, was imprisoned as a young man on narcotics-related charges and later escaped Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, fleeing the country when he was 20, according to Timur Soykan, author of “Battle of the Barons,” a recently released book in Turkish about a war between drug kingpins, including Zindashti.
ASMLA-linked militants have been blamed for many attacks in Iran, including on banks, oil pipelines and government offices. In 2018, Iran accused the group of organizing a deadly assault by gunmen on a military parade in Ahvaz, killing 25 people, both military and civilian.
The Washington Post quoted experts as saying ASMLA lacks widespread support among ethnic Arabs in Iran. But Tehran clearly still sees it as a threat.
In 2017, a gunman whom Dutch officials say was linked to the Iranian government shot and killed an ASMLA leader, Ahmad Mola Nissi, near his home in The Hague.
Asyud had lived in exile for 14 years, according to a friend, Kabi, who is a spokesman for the Ahwazi Democratic Popular Front, which is related to ASMLA.
Asyud’s colleagues said they had already suspected that the woman identified as Saberin had played a role in his abduction. Kabi said that he knew her by a different name and that she and Asyud, who was separated from his wife, were “secretly married” four years ago.
In addition, Asyud was deeply in debt, and the woman had loaned him about 100,000 euros ($120,000) in the past, Kabi said. After Asyud disappeared, Kabi and other friends learned that the woman had offered him another loan and that was the reason for his trip from Sweden.
Other reports said the woman was Asyud’s ex-wife and that she was not offering a loan of 100,000 euros but had said she would repay that amount that she had borrowed from Asyud.
The initial plan was for the two of them to meet in Qatar. “How she convinced him to go to Turkey, we don’t know,” he said.