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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| Iran captures 9 Iraqi border guards at Shatt al-Arab |
| 2006-01-17 |
| Nine Iraqi border guards have been detained by Iranian forces after a clash on the southern river frontier with Iran in which one guard was wounded, a senior Iraqi official said Tuesday. Brigadier-General Abbas Mussawi, the regional border force commander, called on Iran to free the men and their two boats that were also allegedly taken in the incident on the Iraqi side of the border. A spokesman for Iraq's defence ministry, however, said the ministry had not yet received any information about Saturday's clash on the Shatt Al-Arab river, 45 kilometres (27 miles) south of Basra, in southern Iraq. The British-led foreign military contingent in the region was also unaware of the matter so-far, a spokesman said. Mussawi said that the exchange occurred when Iraqi border guards boarded a barge smuggling fuel to Iran. Iranian speedboats arrived on the scene and opened fire, gravely wounding one Iraqi guard. The entire Iraqi patrol, including an officer and the injured man, was then detained and taken across the border to Iran, he said. Mussawi was unable to say whether the wounded guard was alive or dead. The alleged clash was a rare exchange between Iraqi and Iranian forces in southern Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, which saw a marked improvement in the previously difficult relations between the two countries. Mussawi said his guards mounted the Iranian boat, called "Nur 1", on the Iraqi side of the invisible border dividing Iraq and Iran at the deepest point of the waterway. The people on board had been taking fuel from other smuggling boats. "When the guards mounted the boat they saw that the captain was an Iranian. He alerted the Iranian forces by radio," said Mussawi. Upon their arrival, the Iranians took the two coastal guard boats and the nine guards, he said. "We call on the Iranian authorities to free the coastal guards who were captured while conducting legitimate work on the Iraqi side of the Shatt Al-Arab," the general said. The 190-kilometer (120 mile) long waterway, formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the extreme south of the country, marks the border between Iran and Iraq. Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war in the 1980s mainly over control of the Shatt al-Arab, and navigation rights on the river have been in dispute since 1935. In a similar incident, Iranian forces detained eight British servicemen and three boats in June 2004 for three days. At the time, Tehran insisted the boats were intercepted only after they entered Iranian waters on the Shatt al-Arab waterway. But Britain argued that they had been "forcibly escorted" over the maritime border by Iranian troops. |
| Posted by:Sposing Spomong7836 |
| #2 This calls for a little entrapment. |
| Posted by: wxjames 2006-01-17 12:09 |
| #1 How soon will the Iraqi Army be sufficiently trained to defend its borders. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-01-17 09:59 |