Kurd official denies US trains rebels

Wed May 20, 3:16 PM ET Previous 216 of 438 Next

A PKK fighter takes position with his rifle during a training session in 2007 in northern Iraq, 10 kms near the Turkish border. A senior Iraqi Kurd official on Wednesday joined the United States in rejecting Iranian accusations that the US military trains separatist Kurdish rebels for undercover work in Iran.

(AFP/File/Mustafa Ozer)

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Wed May 20, 3:16 pm ET

ARBIL, Iraq (AFP) – A senior Iraqi Kurd official on Wednesday joined the United States in rejecting Iranian accusations that the US military trains separatist Kurdish rebels for undercover work in Iran.

“With all due to respect to Mr Khamenei, it appears that he has received incorrect information,” said Jabbar Yawar, about the accusations made by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“The United States has no military base in Kurdistan to train the PJAK (Party of Free Life of Kurdistan),” said Yawar, the spokesman for the Peshmerga ministry, the Kurdish equivalent of the Iraqi defence ministry.

“The United States put the PJAK and the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party) on their list of terrorist groups, so how can they support these groups they regard as terrorists.”

Khamenei said on Tuesday that the United States was trying to make mercenaries out of young Kurds.

“Behind our western border, the US is training terrorists. It is spending money and handing out weapons to be used against the Islamic republic” of Iran, he said.

“Americans have dangerous plans for (Iraqi) Kurdistan … Their plans are not aimed at defending the Kurdish people, but they want to control them,” Khamenei said in a televised speech.

The US Defence Department on Tuesday dismissed the accusations and countered that Tehran was meddling in Iraq.

“I find it ironic that the Iranians would be accusing us of meddling, when in fact over the last six, seven years in Iraq they have consistently been trying to undermine the peace and stability that we are trying to bring to the Iraqi people there,” Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said.

The border region with Iraq has often seen deadly clashes between Iran’s armed forces and the Kurdish separatists.

Iranians have targeted PJAK, an Iranian Kurdish separatist group which has launched attacks on Iran from rear-supply bases in the Kurdish mountains of northern Iraq.