You can literally go read about it online. I have seen iraqis online back up that Palestinians were killed in Iraq by Iranian allies. This is a long report but I'll copy and paste two paragraphs, you can read the rest yourself.
This 42-page report documents the drastic deterioration in the security of the estimated 34,000 Palestinian refugees in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad in April 2003.
www.hrw.org
So I read all relevant segments of the report. It contains no incriminating element against Iran. Really none.
The gist of the report boils down to three points relevant to this discussion:
1) Sporadic acts of violence against Palestinian refugees in Iraq between 2003 and 2006.
These initial assaults were committed by private persons, not by any political organization.
And in fact, the underlying motivation for the assailants was a direct consequence of mindless policies by Saddam's regime. Indeed, we have only the mentioned regime to thank for specific measures which actually managed to turn some Iraqi citizens against Palestinian refugees - although collective, disproportionate and extra-judicial punishment remains wrong, of course.
Quote from the report: "
the Iraqi government froze the rents it was paying to the landlords of homes occupied by the Palestinians, as it did with many other government payments. By the end of the 1990s, the mostly Shi`a landlords were receiving next to nothing for the homes occupied by Palestinians. Many of the Palestinians interviewed by Human Rights Watch in 2003 stated that their rent (paid by the government) amounted to the equivalent of less than U.S.$1 a month. Iraqi law prohibited landlords from breaking rental agreements.[7] Landlords forced to rent to Palestinians for inconsequential sums were, in effect, deprived of their property. In 1999, a group of Shi`a landlords from al-Tubji neighborhood of Baghdad tried to challenge the unfair agreements in court. They lost their case.[8]"
Hence, Iraqi landlords were practically expropriated for the benefit of Palestinian refugees. In other terms, the regime in Baghdad subjected some of its own citizens to a treatment similar to what Palestinians are suffering at the hands of zionist settlers in Occupied Palestine, and quite awkwardly Palestinian refugees found themselves in a position comparable to zionist settlers. It is of course highly honorable to accept refugees from Palestine and to grant them near free housing. To do so at the direct expense of one's own citizens, however, is genuinely absurd and counter-productive.
On a sidenote, Human Rights Watch repeatedly mentions that the landlords in question were mostly Shia Muslims. One wonders whether they really verified this information. Also, in a Shia-majority country such as Iraq, it would be no anomaly if most belonged to that denomination. Yet, here I must seriously take issue with the report, because it's not as if the confessional background of the wronged landlords mattered: when this sort of an injustice is committed against a person, that person will tend to hold grudges regardless of their confession, religion or linguistic affiliation. As if a Sunni Muslim or a Christian or a Shintoist or an animist or... would not resent their property being forcibly rented out for $1 a month - and for all we know, some of the landlords who turned against Palestinian refugees might very well have been Sunni Muslims,
It is as if HRW were keen on adding fuel to the fire of intra-Muslim sectarian division.
But either way, we can clearly see from the report that this was an entirely
local issue, involving only Iraqi nationals and Palestinian refugees, in which Iran played no role whatsoever. These events can therefore impossibly be blamed on Iran.
2) A series of attacks and expulsions of Palestinian refugees consecutive to the
2006 terrorist bombing of the Al-Askari shrine holy to Shia Muslims.
Here again, those responsible, insofar as they are being effectively identified by the HRW report,
were no direct allies of Iran, and they certainly did not act upon orders from Tehran, nor did Iran ever encourage them to engage in any of these actions.
According to the report, a certain Judgment Day Brigade asked Palestinians in al-Hurriyya, al-Dura, al-Za'faraniyya, and al-Baladiyyat neighborhoods of Baghdad to leave these areas, or else they would be killed.
It is not evident whether the paper is referring to the entity commonly known by that designation or rather to some obscure namesake, but the most well known group called Judgment Day Brigade consisted of followers of
Muqtada al-Sadr - the same Muqtada Sadr whom regional and western media regularly praise as a
Shia political alternative to the real Iran-friendly parties and movements in Iraq. The same Muqtada al-Sadr whom
Saudi Arabian crown prince Bin Salman likes to receive.
The visit to Saudi Arabia is his first in 11 years and comes after Iraq’s interior minister and prime minister held meetings in the kingdom in recent weeks
www.thenationalnews.com
In a formerly classified paper from 2015, the Strategic Studies Report of the U.S. Army War College classifies the Judgment Day Brigade as
independent from Iran (verbatim).
Now let us examine how a major Shia spiritual leader who happens to be much
closer to Iran, such as grand ayatollah Ali Sistani, reacted to the violence against Palestinian refugees, as per the very same report (Sistani has Iranian citizenship, his surname is that of a region in Iran, he was born in Iran, has resided in Iran for decades and is politically speaking on good terms with the Islamic Republic):
"
Iraq's leading Shi`a religious authority, the Grand Ayatollah `Ali al-Sistani, on April 30 issued a religious fatwa (edict) prohibiting attacks against Palestinians and their property, stating, "You should not harm the Palestinians, even those accused of crimes. The civilian authorities should protect the Palestinians and prevent attacks against them.[67]"
Other than the Judgment Day Brigade,
no other group responsible for such attacks is cited by name in the report. The document simply mentions "
unidentified militant groups" attacking "buildings in al-Baladiyyat neighborhood of Baghdad with mortars and gunfire", for example. Sorry, but
one cannot attribute the actions of unknown entities to Iran. That's just not how it works.
The report goes on to state: "
One person interviewed by Human Rights Watch at the Trebil refugee camp described how on the day of the Samarra bombing "and the next day, men wearing black clothes [a dress code associated with radical Shi`a militias] came to known Palestinian locations and threatened violence. These men in black outfits came to our housing unit, and we held them off with guns.""
Actually, black clothes are not a dress code characteristic of Shia paramilitary groups only, insofar as every Shia Muslim, whether part of such an organization or not, may dress in black on a number of occasions, from the month of Ashura to days marking the martyrdom of other Imams, as well on more circumstantial occasions such as the destruction of the Al-Askari holy shrine.
Once again, when it comes to the attacks suffered by Palestinian refugees after the 2006 terrorist bombing of Al-Askari, there is still
no evidence whatsoever in the report that allies of Iran committed these acts, let alone that Tehran assigned them to do so.
All this being said, bear in mind that
any and all inter-communal violence in Iraq was triggered by the so-called "Islamic" State's 2006 bombing of the Al-Askari shrine. It was actually a stated goal of "I"S to target Shia Muslim Iraqis first, including civilians, and to put the struggle against US occupiers on the back burner.
Prior to this calamitous event, no Iraqi Shia organization or armed group had engaged in killing civilians. As for
Iran, she
never directed nor ordered her allies to commit revenge killings, even after the 2006 attack.
It's just that when you have a terrorist organization explicitly declaring war on your community (elderly, women and children included), bombing holy sites as well as civilian places (especially busy markets) on a near daily basis, revenge killings will be inevitable to some extent, whether carried out by pro-Iranian or other Shia Iraqis not necessarily linked to Iran. Under such chaotic and exceptional circumstances, one could hardly expect Iran to be able to control the actions of each and every Shia Iraqi citizen. If anything,
leading Shia religious authorities close to Iran, such as the aforementioned grand ayatollah Sistani, or grand ayatollah Haeri,
went out of their way issuing fatwas to have Iraqi Shia Muslims refrain from random acts of revenge against their Sunni Muslim compatriots.
One needs to understand that the
burial places of Imams are almost as important and dear to Shia Muslims as Masjid al-Haram is to every Muslim. Try sending a community of people to Mecca, among whom you would proceed to recruit a handful of terrorists; have these terrorists first blow up the Kaaba (nauzubIllah), followed by daily attacks on civilian locations for several years in a row, then see what will happen not just to the terrorists in question but unfortunately also to some innocent members of the community they stem from, and whether or not Arabian rulers will then be able to fully control their subjects in such a horrible situation (especially if the Arabian central state authority were just to have been dissolved and refounded by a foreign occupying force...).
3) Finally, the HRW report denounces Iraq's Ministry of Interior for administrative harassment, arbitrary arrests and killings of Palestinian refugees.
But the
Iraqi Ministry of Interior is not under Iranian control. Nor is its staff necessarily composed of Iranian allies. In fact, ever since the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003, institutions such as this one have been known to be
under heavy American influence
I would also like to highlight a general fact:
conflicts between Palestinian immigrants and local citizens and/or governments have not been a rarity in the Muslim world, i.e. they have taken place
in various Sunni-ruled countries too. As an example, the
Black September clashes of 1971 in Jordan, which saw the Jordanian army battle the Palestinian PLO of Yasser Arafat. Scores of Palestinians, including ordinary refugees, lost their lives. And, it was none other than the Pakistani training mission in Jordan led by general Zia ul-Haqq which assisted the regime in Amman. As a result of this, one may argue that Pakistan killed more Palestinians than Isra"el"is. Yet, nobody here will use this as a justification to conclude that Pakistan's aid to Arab armies during the Arab-Isra"el"i wars was "insincere" or a mere "PR ploy".
So why should Iran be exempted from the same treatment? And this is while Iran was actually not even involved in any sort of persecution against Palestinian refugees in Iraq or elsewhere to begin with.
In conclusion,
the report by HRW does not implicate the Islamic Republic of Iran in any act of violence against Palestinians refugees in Iraq. Neither does it provide evidence of Iranian allies or pro-Iranian organizations partaking in such actions. Even if some of the culprits should turn out to be members of pro-Iranian groups, they will have acted on their own initiative and not on orders from Iran. Therefore the claim that these events somehow compromise
the sincerity, the significance and the crucial value of Iran's backing of the Palestinian Resistance against zionist occupation, is decidedly baseless. Even more outlandish and disconnected from reality would be any suggestion that Iran had some sort of an agenda to harm Palestinian refugees in Iraq.
Actually, the Iranian government admitted that the IRGC tried to bomb hajj after the Saudis found the bombs. There was even an apology given. Although they tried to point the blame to a rogue guy. Whereas the side of the guy who was punished said it wasn't him.
The Iranian government made no such claim. What it declared right from the outset, is that
Mehdi Hashemi, a subversive element and infiltrator
working against the Islamic Republic and the IRGC, was responsible. Hashemi publicly advocated a more aggressive foreign policy and called for more attacks against enemies. Those familiar with Iran's modern history will confirm. In fact, he wanted Iran to conduct counter-productive, short-sighted radical operations, and held public speeches to that effect.
Mehdi Hashemi was arrested, trialed, found guilty and
executed. Of course his supporters, namely ayatollah Montazeri, father-in-law of Mehdi Hashemi's brother, would contend that he was innocent. But the mere fact that they protested does not prove their claim. Montazeri ended up being politically sidelined due to this affair, and he therefore started opposing the Islamic Republic.
Here we can witness judiciary officials searching the residence of an associate of Hashemi and discovering a buried stock of weapons and ammunition (scenes included in an Iranian-made documentary about ayatollah Montazeri):
This link obviously provides no evidence to the contrary. All it does is to propose some flawed and erroneous speculation.
No wonder, really, since this is actually a CIA-linked source and as such, is anything but objective or trustworthy when it comes to Iranian affairs. Indeed the source here is Radio Farda, i.e. the Iranian branch of the infamous
US regime's Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) external broadcast service.
Of which we know since the times of the Cold War, that it is not just working in close cooperation with US intelligence services, but also that it represents first and foremost a propaganda and psy-ops tool against Washington's adversaries (the USSR back in the day; Iran, China, Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela or Cuba nowadays).
You guys just blame everything on zionists, it's silly..
That the Islamic Republic has had infiltrators in its political and military ranks since the beginning of the 1979 Revolution is an established historic fact. Some of the brazen sabotage attacks and assassinations we witnessed in recent years are a testament to this.
What's more, in the early years of the Islamic Revolution
major targeted attacks were carried out or facilitated by
insiders who used to be trusted by the authorities but then turned out to be agents working for hostile entities. One example being
Mohammad-Reza Kolahi, who was involved in the bombing of the Islamic Republican Party's headquarters in June 1981, which martyred several dozen individuals including important key figures of the Islamic Revolution such as shahid ayatollah Beheshti. Another example is
Massoud Kashmiri, responsible for the killing of a former President of the Islamic Republic, Mohammad-Ali Rajai in August 1981.
And it is
neither surprising nor anything out of the ordinary that these types of infiltrators have connections to and are ultimately handled by hostile intelligence services, namely CIA, Mossad and the likes. Indeed,
before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran used to be a prototypical US client state. And imperial masters are known to place their footmen at every level of a client state - that's how they operate. When the client state is of greater strategic importance, such as Iran, they even install
stay-behind networks in its midst, similar to NATO's sinister covert organization going by the name
Gladio, which was exposed in the media many years ago. This they do in order to be able to conduct operation against any adversarial successor state in the event of a regime change.
The shah regime's secret police,
SAVAK, was basically established by the Americans, British and zionists. All of SAVAK's founding personnel were trained by the latter imperial powers. Hence CIA, Mossad and MI6 always kept their men inside SAVAK and through them, exerted indirect control over the service. SAVAK was extremely efficient in surveilling and repressing any organized opposition to the shah regime. Among other things, it
recruited turncoats within every major opposition group and movement. This is attested to by multiple internal SAVAK documents seized and even published after the Revolution (copies of these documents can be bought in book form now as we speak).
When the Revolution took place, these infiltrated agents went unnoticed. Since they had officially been part of groups opposed to the shah, they were welcomed by the newly established, post-revolutionary political order.
Unbeknownst to revolutionary authorities however, these were former SAVAK informants now being used by the ousted shah regime's foreign masters as assets to conduct spying, influence and sabotage operations
against the Islamic Republic, under which Iran turned into a staunch adversary to said foreign powers. It was initially through high-ranking former SAVAK officers such as
Parviz Sabeti, who fled to Tel Aviv after 1979, that western and zionist intelligence agencies handled these infiltrated stay-behind networks.
