Why the West Moves Closer to Bombing Iran

May 09, 2008
Telegraph
Con Coughlin

Another week, another British fatality - and yet more evidence of Iran's lethal meddling on the battlefields of the war on terror. Whether Revolutionary Guards were directly responsible for the massive roadside bomb that killed 29-year-old Trooper Ratu Babakobau in Afghanistan's Helmand province last weekend may never be proved.

In their long history of involvement in terrorism, the Revolutionary Guards have become highly adept at covering their tracks. Even though the first Western hostages kidnapped in Lebanon in the 1980s were put in crates and shipped back to Tehran, Iranian officials persisted with the fiction that they were blameless.

Today, the Iranian government continues to maintain its innocence of any involvement in supporting the bloody insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan; this despite the fact that coalition forces regularly discover large arms caches containing powerful weapons clearly marked "made in Tehran".

The recent upsurge of meddling in Afghanistan is particularly troubling. Thanks in part to the determined action of the Army, the Taliban is a shadow of its former self as a major fighting force.

After two years of sustained military pressure, it can no longer mount conventional assaults. Instead it has been forced to revert to asymmetric warfare - terrorism, to you and me - and concentrates on attacking coalition forces with powerful roadside bombs.

These devices have accounted for the last three British fatalities. In April, two members of the Royal Air Force Regiment were killed while on patrol outside the main Nato air base at Kandahar; a similar device claimed the life of Trooper Babakobau, a rugby-playing Fijian serving with the Household Cavalry, who was based at the same remote location where Prince Harry served as a forward air controller.

Trooper Babakobau was travelling in a Spartan armoured personnel carrier, which provides reasonable protection, but was not able to withstand the force of the blast that killed the soldier and injured the four other occupants.

Coalition vehicles are increasingly susceptible to this type of attack because Revolutionary Guards have provided insurgent groups with the technological expertise to construct the bombs that are capable of taking out tanks, let alone armoured personnel carriers, which afford less protection.

This technology was developed by Hizbollah, the Iranian-backed Shia Muslim militia in southern Lebanon, to disable Israel's Merkava tank, reputed to be the best protected tank in the world.

Recent British and American intelligence suggests that Iran has exported Hizbollah's technology to Iraq and Afghanistan, where it has been responsible for the upsurge in roadside bombs. (Most of the 51 American fatalities in Iraq last month were victims of such devices.)

Last year, British special forces intercepted two lorries crossing from Iran into Afghanistan that contained 50 such bombs and timers; last week a senior US military official said that the Revolutionary Guards' elite Quds Force had recruited Hizbollah experts to train Iraq's Shia militias at camps inside Iran.

Intelligence estimates suggest as much as 90 per cent of the hardware being used by insurgents in southern Iraq originates from Iran. Iran's escalating involvement in confronting coalition forces has prompted John Bolton, America's former UN ambassador, to call for US air strikes on Iranian camps training and equipping insurgent groups.

With American troops now fighting alongside British forces based in southern Iraq, the prospect of the coalition becoming involved in direct military confrontation with Iran becomes more likely by the day. The Iranians are terrified the US-led coalition might turn Iraq into a success story, and are doing everything in their power to prevent it. Coalition commanders are convinced the only way to prevent the Iranians from undermining the coalition's hard-won gains is through direct military confrontation.

All of which makes the Government's decision to maintain its ban on the most effective pro-Western Iranian opposition group all the more surprising. Were it not for the People's Mujahideen of Iran (PMOI), we would never have known that Iran had concealed the development of its uranium enrichment facility at Natanz from UN nuclear inspectors who regularly visit the country.

Having started life as a militant group dedicated to the overthrow of the Shah, the PMOI transformed itself into the most effective resistance movement against Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution after it realised Khomeini had no intention of allowing Iran to become a democratic republic.

And yet the British Foreign Office has put the group on its list of banned terrorist organisations, together with al-Qa'eda. The initial decision was taken by former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, as part of his attempt to promote cordial relations with Tehran. This perverse situation is unlikely to pertain for much longer after the PMOI this week won its appeal to be taken off the proscribed list, which bans the group from raising funds in the UK.

Dr Mariam Rajavi, the PMOI leader who lives in exile in France, warned in an interview with The Telegraph, that the West would be "sleep-walking to disaster" if it didn't wake up to the threat Iran posed not just to the Middle East, but to the wider world. "Iran is being run by a religious dictatorship that wants to export its ideals throughout the world," she said. "This religious fascism has similar aims to the fascism of Adolf Hitler - world domination. Western governments are deliberately turning a blind eye to what is going on, but I fear that one day very soon they will wake up to the grim reality of what is really going on."