- ZARANJ, AFGHANISTAN - A secret
new US Special Forces mission to hunt down Al Qaeda along Afghanistan's
border with Iran is triggering cross-border accusations of espionage, amid
persistent suspicions that Iran is harboring terrorists.
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- The Green Berets have based themselves in a desert compound
three miles from the Iranian frontier.
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- Surrounded by a maze of barricades to thwart suicide
bombing attacks, the new base is being seen as an affront by Iranian religious
hard-liners, who oppose the US-led "war on terror."
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- Interviews in Zaranj with Afghans expelled - and sometimes
beaten - by Iranian authorities suggest that Tehran is treating the new
US presence as a threat to its national integrity. The Iranian military
is blaming the threat on local Afghans, whom they accuse of spying for
the Americans.
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- While the US soldiers have been probing border areas
where Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan meet, it is unclear if the teams
will cross over into Iran, Western military analysts say. They add that
US special operations commanders in their home bases are still formulating
rules and guidelines for new "snatch squads" to nab Al Qaeda
suspects at large across the globe.
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- Meanwhile, Iranian border troops, their ranks bolstered
since the arrival of the three dozen American soldiers, have been digging
fresh trenches in the sands here and setting up new gun positions.
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- The tensions at the border form the latest chapter in
two decades of bad relations between the US and Iran. Western analysts
in Iran warn that Bush's categorization of Iraq as part of an "axis
of evil" has strengthened the hand of hard-line Islamic forces which
have supported terror in the past.
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- Over the past year, senior US officials, led by Secretary.
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, have repeatedly cast suspicion on Iran as harboring
fugitive Al Qaeda members, but have given few details of the basis for
their suspicions.
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- But top Afghan officials in Nimruz and Kabul say they
have mounting evidence that elements in Iran's armed forces, as well as
the religious police, loyal to the country's conservative clerics, are
actively assisting Al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden's second-in-command,
the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Afghan officials, and Western diplomats
in Kabul, contend that this collaboration is the real reason for the new
US military base.
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- "This is an area where Al Qaeda has managed to maintain
a foothold under the cover of smugglers," says Aman Khan, Afghanistan's
acting military intelligence chief in Kabul. The new focus in the US war
on terror "appears to be the west, rather than the east and Pakistan,
where it has been going on now for most of a year," he says.
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- The remote Nimruz province of Afghanistan has long been
the redoubt of well-armed heroin smugglers, who race through the parched
flatlands in convoys of jacked-up jeeps, past camel carcasses and ancient
adobe ruins, on the way to Iran, where they hand over the drugs to Iranian
smugglers bound for Turkey. But the American soldiers here, straddling
the beds of their pickups in civilian clothes and holding heavy machine
guns, are not after the smugglers, who worked with the Taliban until last
year and now patronize the new regime. Their prey are the terrorists reportedly
plotting nearby.
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- Nimruz security chief Mohammed Naim Khan says he has
passed along intelligence to the US forces that several key Al Qaeda figures,
including Dr. Zawahiri, are attempting to buy new arms from local dealers,
in addition to planning unspecified terrorist operations from just inside
Iran.
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- But an Iranian diplomat in Kabul rejects the suspicions
against his country: "Iran has never had any relations with Al Qaeda
or the Taliban. Indeed, we were the ones to inform the international community
about the danger of these men several years ago, but no one listened to
us at the time." Iranian authorities have detained some Al Qaeda members
and sent them back to their homes in the Middle East, in particular, to
Saudi Arabia.
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- But Iran has voiced concern that the "war on terror"
could unjustly end up at its doorstep. On Saturday, Iran's Supreme Leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a written message to an Iranian students' forum
in London, said a US attack on Iraq would be only the first step in a plan
to bring the entire Middle East under US control.
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- Afghan officials in Zaranj, who have welcomed the new
US forces, say they arrest and expel one or two Iranian spies a day. Meanwhile,
Afghan men recently thrown out of Iran - some of them with a job and
family left behind - say Iranian troops have systematically rounded up
Afghans, and accused them of spying for the US. "The Iranian soldiers
beat us one by one," says Lawang, who was forced out of Iran three
days ago. "They scoffed at me and said I should go back to my own
country and meet my new boss, the Americans," he says.
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- Officials in Zaranj say that the Special Operations soldiers
held an initial meeting with local Baluchi and Pashtun tribal officials
and military commanders three weeks ago and that the commander of the unit,
who gave his name only as "Commander Tony," told the Afghans,
"We are here to fight and hunt the enemies of the world and Afghanistan."
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- The US soldiers here are not permitted to speak with
journalists. US Central Command in Tampa, Fla., declined to confirm the
nature of the special forces mission in Nimruz.
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- Nimruz security chief Khan says a key Al Qaeda military
and religious figure named Abu Hafs, known as "the Mauritanian,"
is working in Iran alongside Zawahiri. Mr. Khan says he bases his conclusions
on reports from the Afghans expelled from the nearby Iranian cities of
Zahedan and by Iran's 110th Brigade, a force loyal to the country's highly
conservative religious clergy. The security chief says, however, that Hafs
and Zawahiri have few armed men they can call their own and even fewer
sympathizers in Zaranj.
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- "The Mauritanian" was first reported to be
in Iran by the Washington Post on Aug. 28. The story cited unnamed Arab
intelligence sources. Previously, US Central Command had alleged that he
had been killed in Afghanistan last January. The Arab sources told the
Post that they believed Hafs was living in a guesthouse in Zabol or in
Mashhad, further to the north.
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- Zawahiri has previously been reported as being in Pakistan,
on the basis of alleged eyewitness sightings by Pakistani and Afghan locals
late last year and early this year. His actual whereabouts, however, have
remained as much of a mystery as bin Laden's.
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- One of the recently expelled Afghans told the Monitor
that the former Taliban governor of Nimruz, Mullah Rasool, has been constantly
accompanied by a group of Arabs in and around the Iranian city of Zahedan,
less than 100 miles from the Afghan border. "We are not so sure about
their activities, but they are under tight Iranian government control,"
he says as he sits against the cracked wall of a boarding house in Zaranj.
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- One official in Zaranj described a US military operation
in which some 10 US soldiers were accompanied by 40 Afghans in a raid on
the border town of Rebate Jali, which is about 120 miles south and which
straddles Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
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- "Along with the governor, we took the US commanders
there because we had reports of the Taliban and Al Qaeda regrouping, but
when we arrived they had already fled," the official says, describing
a sequence familiar across much of Afghanistan in the past year.
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- In Kabul, senior Afghan security officials say that new
raids by US forces on smuggling dens and remote villages around Nimruz
are based on both US and Afghan intelligence reports that have placed senior
Al Qaeda operatives along Afghanistan's western border.
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- Western diplomats in Kabul told the Monitor that the
atmosphere of "intrigue and subterfuge" along Afghanistan's western
border is conducive to the terrorists' planning and movement. "We
have believed that Al Qaeda was basing out of Iran for some time, and these
new US military operations are aimed at cutting off their movements,"
says one Western diplomat.
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