Iraanse piraten kapen Brits navy ship

[Chipie]

Iraanse soldaten enterden een Brits navy ship...

Enter zal daar wss geen probleem mee hebben...

[Havana]

2 dingetjes:
- De prijs van de ruwe olie steeg na het incident tot meer dan 62 dollar per vat.
- Als prins Harry richting Iraq vertrekt, zal ook hij in de regio 'Basra' actief zijn.

[sodoirt]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Enter

En waar heb ik dat nu weer gezegd?

Jij niet, maar iedereen weet wie ik bedoelde en dat bleef niet lang uit!

[ministe van agitatie]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door john bell hood

De resolutie die met ernstige gevolgen dreigde was voldoende wat de VS en het VK beteft.

Vreemd dat ze dan toch trachten een nieuwe resolutie door te drukken. Zonder veel succes ten andere. Als ze de resolutie voldoende vonden, waarom hadden ze dan behoefte aan een nieuwe resolutie?
En als de vorige resolutie voldoende vonden, waarom zegt de secretaris-generaal dan dat de inval illegaal was?

[sodoirt]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door ministe van agitatie

Vreemd dat ze dan toch trachten een nieuwe resolutie door te drukken. Zonder veel succes ten andere. Als ze de resolutie voldoende vonden, waarom hadden ze dan behoefte aan een nieuwe resolutie?
En als de vorige resolutie voldoende vonden, waarom zegt de secretaris-generaal dan dat de inval illegaal was?

Hoe komt het dat met jouw positie je nog geen rechtstreekse toegang hebt tot de secretaris-generaal?

[ministe van agitatie]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door sodoirt

Hoe komt het dat met jouw positie je nog geen rechtstreekse toegang hebt tot de secretaris-generaal?

Hoe komt het dat jij *knip* nog niet op mijn negeerlijst staat?

Als je iets aan een discussie toe te voegen hebt door middel van bijvoorbeeld argumenten, feiten, gedachtengangen, ideeën of kritieken, dan wil ik dat graag lezen.

Een beetje de pipo uithangen verrijkt de discussie jammer genoeg niet.

[Chipie]

Ons Kaatdje kan het toch niet laten...

[ministe van agitatie]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Chipie

Ons Kaatdje kan het toch niet laten...

Alweer een hoogstaande bijdrage van Chipie, gelardeerd met staalharde feiten en argumenten die compleet on topic zijn ...

[Chipie]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door ministe van agitatie

Alweer een hoogstaande bijdrage van Chipie, gelardeerd met staalharde feiten en argumenten die compleet on topic zijn ...

[Antoon]

Zijn die Britse gijselaars al vrijgelaten? Of zal men toch moeten overgaan tot militaire acties?

[john bell hood]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door ministe van agitatie

Vreemd dat ze dan toch trachten een nieuwe resolutie door te drukken. Zonder veel succes ten andere. Als ze de resolutie voldoende vonden, waarom hadden ze dan behoefte aan een nieuwe resolutie?
En als de vorige resolutie voldoende vonden, waarom zegt de secretaris-generaal dan dat de inval illegaal was?

Wat mij betreft in ieder geval een discussie zonder voorwerp want ik vond een beroep op de UNO overbodig.In ieder geval heeft naderhand de UNO zijn goedkeuring gehecht aan de aanwezigheid van de geallieerde troepen zolang de te verkiezen regering akkoord was en dus kan men al het gelul over bezetting beter achterwege laten.

[willem1940NLD]

Ik heb toch het vermoeden dat de Engelsen wel degelijk te dicht onder de kust zaten, in territoriaal water; zo'n foutje is gauw gemaakt en heeft zeker in zulk gebied grote politieke gevolgen.

[Havana]

Is het geen toeval?

Ik vond een artikel van 23/2/06...

US Marines Probe Tensions among Iran's Minorities
By Guy Dinmore
The Financial Times

Thursday 23 February 2006

The intelligence wing of the US marines has launched a probe into Iran's ethnic minorities at a time of heightened tensions along the border with Iraq and friction between capitals.

Iranian activists involved in a classified research project for the marines told the FT the Pentagon was examining the depth and nature of grievances against the Islamic government, and appeared to be studying whether Iran would be prone to a violent fragmentation along the same kind of fault lines that are splitting Iraq.

The research effort comes at a critical moment between Iran and the US. Last week the Bush administration asked Congress for $75m to promote democratic change within Iran, having already mustered diplomatic support at the UN to counter Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program.

At the same time, Iran has demanded that the UK withdraw its troops from the southern Iraqi city of Basra which lies close to its border. Iran has repeatedly accused both the US and UK of inciting explosions and sabotage in oil-rich frontier regions where Arab and Kurdish minorities predominate. The US and UK accuse Iran of meddling in Iraq and supplying weapons to insurgents.

US intelligence experts suggested the marines' effort could indicate early stages of contingency plans for a ground assault on Iran. Or it could be an attempt to evaluate the implications of the unrest in Iranian border regions for marines stationed in Iraq, as well as Iranian infiltration.

Other experts affiliated to the Pentagon suggest the investigation merely underlines that diverse intelligence wings of the US military were seeking to justify their existence at a time of plentiful funding.

Lieutenant-Colonel Rick Long, a Marines spokesman, confirmed that the marines had commissioned Hicks and Associates, a defense contractor, to conduct two research projects into Iraqi and Iranian ethnic groups.

The purpose was "so that we and our troops would have a better understanding of and respect for the various aspects of culture in those countries", he said. He would not provide details, saying the projects were for official use only.

Marine Corps Intelligence defines its role as focusing "on crises and pre-deployment support to expeditionary warfare". It also provides threat and technical intelligence assessments for the Marines.

The first study, on Iraq, was completed in late 2003, more than six months after marines spearheaded the US invasion. About 23,000 marines are still in Iraq. The Iran study was finished late last year.

Hicks and Associates is a wholly owned subsidiary of Science Applications International Corp, one of the biggest US defense contractors and deeply involved in the prewar planning for Iraq.

The Strategic Assessment Center of Hicks and Associates advertises one of its current projects as the "Impact of Foreign Cultures on Military Operations". SAIC confirmed it completed the confidential studies for the Marine Corps.

While most analysts would agree that Iran has a far stronger sense of national identity than Iraq, its ethnic mix is even more complex than its neighbor.

Different in language and divided between followers of Sunni and Shia Islam, the ethnic minorities have little coherence. At times tensions among themselves are greater than with Tehran. Iran's strongly centralized government does not release statistics on the ethnic groups that mainly inhabit sensitive border regions with Iraq, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Farsi-speaking Persians who dominate the central government are generally believed to make up a slim majority, followed by Azeris and Kurds in the north and west, Arabs in the oil-rich southwest and Baluch in the southeast.

A patchwork of Turkmen, Christian Armenians and Assyrians, Jews and tribal nomads are among many groups scattered across a country of some 68m people.

Diplomats in Washington expressed shock at the possible implications of the Marine Corps research.

The Financial Times interviewed several Iranians in the US who were invited to help. Some refused, seeing it as part of an effort to break up Iran. However several exiled politicians representing minority groups opposed to the Islamic regime did agree to take part, although they said they wanted a peaceful transition to a democratic, federal Iran and were opposed to any US military action.

Mauri Esfandiari, US representative of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan which ended its armed struggle in 1997 and is based mostly in northern Iraq, said he believed the Pentagon was acting on its long-standing distrust of CIA and State Department analysis. He thought the Pentagon was looking to counter the prevailing administration view that US support for Iran's minorities would create a disastrous backlash.

"They want to study and see if the State Department's chaos theory is a valid hypothesis," he told the FT. The US could not look to the Kurds to support an invasion as they did in Iraq, he said. "Iran will become democratic only if it is built by the Iranians. The democracy movement is strong enough to find its way without military struggle," he said.

Karim Abdian, head of the Ahvaz Human Rights Organization which campaigns on behalf of Iranian Arabs in the south-west, said his meeting with SAIC was video-taped. He was told the report would be made public.

Questions put to him were wide-ranging - on the ethnic breakdown of Khuzestan province on the Iraq border, populations in cities, the level of discontent, the percentage of Arabs working in the oil industry, how they were represented in the central government, and their relations and kinship with Iraqi Arabs next door.

Mr. Abdian said he did not know the motives behind the survey, whether the Marines were seeking a better understanding of the region that directly affects them, or were forming a contingency plan in case they had to "enter" Iran. They were learning from the lessons of Iraq where they had not understood the ethnic dynamics, he suggested.

Mr. Abdian, who says his organization has no government funding, accused Iran of using the threat of a US invasion as a pretext to suppress ethnic grievances rather than address what he called the root causes of land confiscation and discrimination.

Exiled Iranians from various ethnic groups held a "Congress" of nationalities in London a year ago. They issued a "manifesto" for a federal, democratic Iran with separation of mosque and state. Seven organizations included Baluch, Azeris, Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen.

Iran has recently experienced some of the worst unrest and violence among its Kurdish and Arab populations in recent years.

Although the root causes of the unrest - economic and cultural grievances - are long standing, analysts in the US believe that events in Iraq - where the new constitution has embraced the concept of federalism and a Kurd has become president - are serving as a catalyst.

Last month two bombs exploded in Ahvaz, the capital of Khuzestan province close to Iraq. Eight people were killed on the same day that President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad had been due to visit. Six people were killed in bombings last October. Oil installations have been attacked. Iran has repeatedly accused the UK and US of being behind the violence, using separatist Arab groups in southern Iraq to foment instability inside Iran.

"We are very suspicious of British forces' involvement in terrorist activities," Mr. Ahmadi-Nejad was quoted as saying last October. He accused British troops in Iraq of "hiring terrorists for sabotage".

London and Washington have strongly denied Iran's allegations.

Tehran cannot afford to dismiss minority grievances out of hand and seeks to blame the violence on outside forces, says Bill Samii, an Iran analyst with Radio Free Europe.

"The regime can crush dissent when it is localized and relatively small," he commented. "But if sporadic incidents of ethnic unrest occurred across the country simultaneously, or if such troubles coincided with labor troubles and student demonstrations then the regime would have its hands full." Given these developments, the question of Iran's minorities has aroused interest across Washington.

State Department officials met representatives of the London "Congress" in the first such talks between the Bush administration and a coalition claiming to represent Iran's minorities, participants told the FT.

Last October, the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) held a conference chaired by Michael Ledeen, a proponent of regime change in Iran. It triggered uproar among exiled opposition groups, especially Persian nationalists. Mr. Ledeen called the conference "Another case for Federalism?" and denied that AEI was seeking to foment separatism.

Reuel Gerecht, also with AEI and a former CIA specialist on the Middle East, says the State Department under Condoleezza Rice, and not the Pentagon, is running Iran policy. He said State was "several steps removed" from discussing covert action and "nowhere near the point" of trying to use separatist tendencies among minorities as traction against the Tehran regime. No one knew whether that would work, he added.

However, he complimented the Pentagon for "looking down the road".

A former intelligence officer said the Marines' probe reflected the "contingency planning" mindset of the US military. Nonetheless, he said, it was important to note that the ultimate purpose of the intelligence wing was "to support effective ground military operations by the Marine Corps".

-------

BRON

[Havana]

Ook het feit dat dit in 2004 al eens gebeurde, doet me geloven dat dit GEEN toeval is. Toen drongen de marines "per vergissing" Iraanse wateren binnen... Ze werden na enkele dagen vrijgelaten.

[Jazeker]

The Register heeft een redelijk interessant artikel:

MoD: seized personnel were in Iraqi watersHere's the proof

By Lewis Page
The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has released evidence backing up its assertion that the 15 Royal Navy sailors and marines recently seized by Iranian forces were in Iraqi waters at the time.


The naval personnel, a boarding party from HMS Cornwall, had just completed a routine inspection of a merchant ship anchored off the Shatt al' Arab waterway when they were captured last Friday. The dividing line between Iraqi and Iranian territory runs down the centre of the Shatt al' Arab and thence offshore until the international High Seas are reached.
Iran claims that the boarding party were on the Iranian side of the line when they were seized. If this were true, the Royal Navy would indisputably have violated international law by conducting military operations within another nation's territorial sea without permission.
Map showing the position of HMS Cornwall, the merchant vessel and the two positions reported by the Iranian government

On the other hand, Coalition forces can operate in Iraqi territory with the full approval of the UN and the Iraqi government. If the UK's version of the affair is correct, it is the Iranians who have transgressed, effectively invading Iraq and committing piracy. Of course, the UK has only lately invaded Iraq itself, so it doesn't want to get into that kind of debate. The British government will be quite happy here if they can get their servicemen back unharmed – there isn't even any suggestion that the Iranians might admit they have done wrong, let alone that there might be punishment.
The centrepiece of the MoD evidence for now is a pic of a handheld GPS in a helicopter above the merchant ship where the incident took place, said to be still at anchor in the same location. Using Google to plot the GPS readout on a satellite photo (here) certainly seems to bear out the MoD's charted positions.


The MoD also claims that one of the boats was data-linking its GPS track back to the Cornwall throughout, and that Cornwall was monitoring on radar. Furthermore, it seems that the master of the anchored merchantman (which was Indian-flagged) corroborates both the Royal Navy's account of the incident and his ship's position.


Of course, it wouldn't be terribly hard to fake some of this, though the merchant captain would be a highly credible witness in any independent court. The fact is, though, that most people outside Iran and a good few within will have known from the start that this all took place in Iraqi territory (Coalition military forces do routinely violate Iranian territory, according to believeable sources. However, this is done by elite special-ops personnel, not boarding parties from frigates. The Iranians do the same thing in Lebanon and probably Iraq).
The UK probably isn't releasing this info for the benefit of world opinion, however; the idea is to give ammunition to those factions in the Iranian state who are pushing for the servicemen's release. With recent reports suggesting that some in Iran want a show trial of the captured sailors and marines, the UK is anxious to make such an option unattractive. A trial might play well to some audiences, but in the wake of today's revelations it could make the Iranian government look fairly foolish internationally.


That the Iranians were able to seize the sailors and marines in the first place might be seen as something of a lapse. The boarding party were carrying loaded weapons, but they were travelling in fairly ordinary rigid inflatables. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards – usually known as the Pasdaran – brought in heavily armed gunboats as the Britons departed from the merchant vessel. If the boarding party had attempted to resist capture, they would surely have been annihilated by superior Pasdaran firepower.
Of course, HMS Cornwall could have sunk the Iranian vessels before, during, or after the events alongside the anchored merchantman. The British warship mounts a 4.5-inch gun turret and Harpoon ship-killers. She could easily blast gunboat-class opponents to wreckage from beyond the horizon. In fact, her helicopter could do so on its own using Sea Skua missiles. But before the Pasdaran arrived, there would have been no adequate justification for vapourising them; and after, any use of serious firepower would have killed the British boarding party and probably innocent merchant seamen as well. It's easy to see why the Cornwall's captain held his fire, quite apart from the fact that nobody wants a war with Iran just now.


It's less easy to see why the Coalition command had lightly-armed boarding parties operating close to Iranian waters and distant from their ship. This is especially so given that the Iranians have already tried this caper once – successfully, from their point of view – and were known to be smarting after US forces in Iraq recently seized Iranians whom the Americans claimed were members of the Pasdaran's undercover al-Qods force.
Still, it's always easy to be clever with hindsight. Coalition naval forces have been operating in the Shatt al' Arab without trouble for a while now, carrying out boardings as a routine matter. The Royal Navy, indeed, has been doing board-and-search against the smuggling trade into Iraq ever since 1991. This is the first time they've had any serious trouble.
In many ways Iran doesn't seem to have a whole lot to gain here. This move by the Pasdaran isn't going to draw in the investment that the Iranian oil and gas fields deperately need; it isn't going to ease the largely-unseen but very damaging financial stranglehold the US is putting on the Iranian economy. Anybody who would see it as evidence of Iranian military puissance is probably a friend of Iran already.


But this action wasn't necessarily initiated by the Iranian government as a whole. The Pasdaran don't always ask permission for this kind of thing. The operation may have been planned well in advance – Admiral Sir Alan West, former head of the Royal Navy, thinks so. However, the MoD says that when the Iranians were asked just where they had seized the Navy people, the first answer they gave was actually in Iraqi waters. It was only when this was pointed out to them that they offered another position on their own side of the line.


This does suggest that planning and coordination may not have been exactly immaculate, and that the whole caper may have been a bit of a bright idea on the part of the Pasdaran. It should be noted that the Pasdaran have long been reportedly heavily involved in profit-motive smuggling into Iraq, and they might want to back off Coalition coastal patrols for no other reason than protection of their own revenues.
All in all, it may not just be the British government that's pushing for an early release of the imprisoned marines and sailors. There may be quite a lot of Iranians on their side as well.

[Havana]

De amerikaanse marine is gisteren aan een grote militaire oefening begonnen in de Perzische Golf. Er nemen 1000 militairen aan deel op schepen, in vliegtuigen en op de grond, oa 2 vliegdekschepen en 100 vliegtuigen.

bron hbvl 28/3/07

[willem1940NLD]

Uit bericht via Nederlandse Radio-1 vandaag lijkt het tamelijk aannemelijk dat de Britten zich niet in Iraans, doch Iraaks territoriaal water bevonden, pakweg 2 mijl van de watergrens.

2 oorlogen tegelijk daar lijkt mij toch voor niemand aantrekkelijk.

[discuz]

Dit al gelezen?

http://www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=1&id=8425

Tehran Wants to Swap British Sailors for Iranian Officers Detained in Iraq- Iranian Military Source.

25/03/2007 By Ali Nourizadeh

Iraqi coast guards patrol the waters of Shatt al-Arab southern Iraq (AFP)Undated handout picture shows a Royal Marine Boarding Team in front of the HMS Argyll (AFP)

London, Asharq Al-Awsat- A military source close to the command of the Iranian Al-Quds Brigade revealed to Asharq al-Awsat the motives behind detaining 15 British sailors in Shatt al-Arab on Friday. He said the decision to take in the British military elements was taken at an emergency meeting of the Higher Defense Council in the light of a report received by Brigadier Qasim Sulaymani, the commander of Al-Quds Brigade, and communicated on 18 March to General Hasan Fayruz Abadi, the armed forces Chief-of-staff.

Asharq al-Awsat learns that the report contained a warning that the operations undertaken by Al-Quds Brigade and the Revolutionary Guards have become exposed to American and British military intelligence after the arrest by American forces of Brigadier Tayshizri, the commander of Al-Quds Brigade operations in Iraq, and his assistant, Brigadier Qayim, and three of their aides in Irbil, and the subsequent abduction of Jalal Sharafi, the representative of the Intelligence Ministry at the Iranian diplomatic mission in Baghdad, in addition to the disappearance of Colonel Amir Muhammad Hussein Shirazi in Turkey. Sources said he has defected but Iran says he was kidnapped. He is one of the most important intelligence officers in Al-Quds Brigade in Iraq.

The Revolutionary Guards intelligence had submitted to the joint chiefs of staff of the Iranian armed forces early in March a plan to abduct a number of American and British military to exchange them for the detained Iranian officers, who total 15 officer and intelligence agents. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff called for giving the issue more time and allowing room for diplomatic contacts between the Iraqi and Iranian Foreign Ministries. It was learned that Foreign Minister Manouchehr Muttaqi received promises from his Iraqi counterpart Hushyar Zebari that the five officers arrested in Irbil might be released before the Nowruz feasts (Iranian New Year). But Nowruz was celebrated in 21 March and no news came about the said officers except for a phone call one of them had with his wife in the presence of a representative from the International Reed Cross. It was then that instructions were issued to the units of the Guards and the Marine Base at Khurramshahr to implement the first part of the plan by laying siege and detaining one of the British Navy patrols charged with combating smuggling. The Revolutionary Guards Navy had undertaken a similar act in June 2004 when it detained two British officers and six soldiers in two boats. They were released on 21 June 2004 after high-level contacts between London and Tehran.

An Iranian military source said that the Guard Command will not relinquish easily the card of the 15 detained Britons. The British Embassy in Baghdad has warned the Iranian Embassy of the consequences of continuing to detain the 15 soldiers.

[kelt]

Nu we met een beetje afstand naar deze zaak kunnen kijken moeten we concluderen dat enkele overijverige "revolutionaire commandanten" hun eigen regering in Teheran een lelijke peer gestoofd hebben..Uit de persberichten kunnen we distilleren:

Reeds uren nadat de 15 "opgepakt" werden toen ze een vrachtschip (Indisch) aan het verlaten waren (dat ze zonet geinspecteerd hadden)- was er diplomatiek kontakt...

Daarbij ging de Britse diplomatie ervan uit dat het om een vergissing ging(iedereen maakt fouten,zeker in zo een kritische zone).Daarbij werden de Iraniers GPS-data(niet deze op die foto,die van wat later zijn),zowel als positie-data van het zonet geinspecteerde vrachtschip,(logboekgegevens), aan de Iraniers getoond...De uitdrukkelijke bedoeling was om het zaakje NIET op de spits te drijven en Iran de mogelijkheid te geven de "easy way out" te bewandelen...


Niet dus,Iraanse vertegenwoordigers betwistten de gegeven informatie en gaven zelf coordinaten,er moeten blijkbaar "carrieres" binnen de Iraanse marine beschermd worden! ...Pijnlijk detail was dat de door de Iraniers opgegeven coordinaten nog steeds binnen de IRAAKSE territoriale wateren lagen...

Toen kwamen de Iraniers nog met een derde set coordinaten.De Britse diplomatie heeft al deze zaken netjes gedocumenteerd en besloten dat Iran hier ongeloofwaardig is...

Als Iran nog iets aan Groot-Brittanie wil mededelen dan moet het gaan:

a) ...over de vrijlating van alle militairen
b)....moeten "grote" mededelingen via de Turkse diplomatie gebeuren...

In typisch "Midden-Oostelijke" wijze probeert Iran nog te "onderhandelen",in de hoop "hun gezicht" te redden...door het vrijlaten van de vrouwelijke militair.
Te laat denk ik....Ze gaan de 14 anderen moeten vrijlaten of doden....geen opties meer....en Iran mag er nu zelf van uitgaan dat er "tegensancties" zullen komen...

De VS is erg stil,vermoedelijk op vraag van Londen....

Iran moet nu snel handelen,want de "arm van Londen" staat in geen verhouding tot de afmeting van het Verenigd koninkrijk!

[filosoof]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door willem1940NLD

Uit bericht via Nederlandse Radio-1 vandaag lijkt het tamelijk aannemelijk dat de Britten zich niet in Iraans, doch Iraaks territoriaal water bevonden, pakweg 2 mijl van de watergrens.

2 oorlogen tegelijk daar lijkt mij toch voor niemand aantrekkelijk.

Iraaks territoriaal water ?
Daar moesten ze evenmin zijn...