Word: raiding
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...Iranian dissidents living in a camp in central Iraq that was taken over by Iraqi police once U.S. troops had handed over control of the area. Their message to the U.S. is clear: protect their relatives and make Iraq release the 36 prisoners they took after a bloody raid of the camp at the end of July...
...With Baghdad and Tehran getting increasingly close, some observers think the raid was an attempt to appease Iran's ayatullahs, who consider MEK members terrorists. "This situation was predictable the day Saddam's regime fell," says Karim Pakzad, a Middle East expert at Paris' Institute of Strategic and International Relations (IRIS). "It's understandable that the Iraqis want to extend their sovereignty to a camp of former militants, whose presence they can no longer stand. But it's also become a humanitarian question: what to do with these people...
Since the raid, women from the camp have written letters to the U.N. claiming the Iraqi forces threatened them with rape. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called for an investigation of excessive use of force, while an Iraqi court has ordered the prisoners' release. But the Iraqi government has kept them locked up, saying the violence only broke out after the dissidents refused to let the police establish a base at the camp...
...that the Iraqi government is recovering sovereignty," says Pakzad of the IRIS. "The best they and other humanitarian-minded nations could do would be to accept [the camp dwellers] as refugees." A small patrol of U.S. troops is still stationed at Camp Ashraf, but video footage of the July raid shows they did not interfere - some even withdrew into an SUV and rolled up their windows as Iranians begged them for help...
...were under way to free the two reporters and any rescue attempt would imperil them. But according to the source close to the negotiations, a decision was made "at ministerial levels" in London to mount the operation. Neither the Times nor Farrell's family were warned of the impending raid. The British are partners of the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan and have 8,000 troops in the country. (See pictures of British soldiers in Afghanistan...