Kurdish leader denies Israeli agents operating in Iraqi Kurdistan

Jordan Times, Wednesday, June 23, 2004

ANKARA (AFP) — One of the main leaders of Iraqi Kurds, Jalal Talabani, has denied a report in the prestigious New Yorker magazine alleging that Israeli intelligence agents had infiltrated Iraq's Kurdistan and slipped across into Iran to monitor nuclear facilities, Anatolia news agency said. "These reports are total fabrications," said Talabani in comments quoted late Monday on his arrival in the Turkish capital.

Talabani, a member of the Iraqi interim Governing Council and head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan Party (PUK), was to meet Tuesday with Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, whose country has been trying to ease tension with its own restive Kurdish minority. "I invite those who did this reporting to come take a look with their own eyes" in northern Iraq, where Iraq's Kurdish minority is concentrated.

The area, which suffered repression under the old Saddam Hussein dictatorship and has been used as a rear base for Turkish Kurdish insurgents, is controlled by Talabani's PUK along with the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

An article written by US journalist Seymour Hersh in Sunday's edition of The New Yorker asserted that Israeli intelligence and military agents were operating undercover in the Kurdish region in northern Iraq from where they had made incursions into Iran to monitor Tehran's nuclear installations — which have a stated civilian aim though Washington charges they are a cover for nuclear weapons development, a charge the Islamic Republic vehemently denies.

The Israeli agents, which the report said includes members of Israel's Mossad secret service, some posing as businessmen, are training Kurdish commandos in the north of the country, according to the report.

Israel's embassy in Washington has denied the claim, but the magazine said a senior official at the US Central Intelligence Agency confirmed that Israelis are working for Iraq.

In working with Kurds, Israel has its eyes and ears on Iran, Iraq and Syria, the magazine said. After a June 30 handover to an interim Iraqi government, Israel wants to have Kurdish commandos trained as a counterbalance to Shi'i militias, it said.

Israeli agents and Kurdish commandos have already crossed Iraq's border into Iran, where they have set up sensors and other devices to monitor Iranian nuclear facilities.

Front pages of the Turkish press were plastered with accounts of The New Yorker article, saying reports along these lines have been circulating for several months now.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python (Alquds, 1/25/03.

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