Iranian dissidents at a camp north of Baghdad allege that the Iraqi government is preparing a “concentration camp” to which they are to be relocated under a United Nations-brokered plan.
Iraq's troubled start to life without U.S. forces calls into question the Obama administration's assertion that it has wound down America's long war responsibly: at least 78 killed in blasts across the country in a single day last week, a protracted political crisis with no end in sight, top political leaders accusing each other of monstrous criminality.
Is Iran serious in threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz or is this simply saber-rattling? Whatever the motives, inaction is not an option - not any more.
A security official said militants fired a Katyusha rocket at a camp housing several thousand Iranian exiles in northeastern Iraq.
The United Nations and the Iraqi government have reached a deal to transfer more than 3,000 Iranian dissidents living in a camp north of Baghdad, potentially averting what international observers have warned would be a massacre.
U.S. officials condemned Thursday's wave of bombings that killed at least 69 people in Baghdad and fed fears that renewed sectarian violence will fill a security vacuum created by the departure of the last U.S. combat troops from Iraq on Sunday.
Iraq's vice president says that Iran is "definitely" behind Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's move to jail him on terror charges, saying it is "not a coincidence" that his arrest warrant was announced the day after the last U.S. troops left Iraq.
The Iraqi government lost more than a fighting ally when the last U.S. troops left the country Sunday.
The formal end of the U.S. war in Iraq on Thursday enhanced neighboring Iran as a major, unpredictable factor in the U.S. presidential election of 2012. First, a look back: Iran's mullahs already had one opportunity to affect American politics, in 1980. Their seizure and occupation of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran for 444 days haunted President Carter's re-election campaign and - thanks to such developments as yellow ribbons, a "Rose Garden" strategy, a failed rescue operation and ABC's "America Held Hostage" program - contributed to his defeat.
