Baghdad - Iraqi President Jalal Talabani on Monday told
Iran's former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani that Iraq prohibits
the presence of foreign militants and terrorist organizations such as
the People's Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI).
He was speaking a day after Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei called for the expulsion of Iranian rebels from Iraq.
'The Iraqi Constitution prohibits the presence of foreign
militants in Iraq and the Iraqi people know that the People's
Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI) is a terrorist organization that helped
Saddam Hussein in his fight against the Iraqi people,' Talabani
told a joint press conference.
The Ashraf Camp for refugees in Iraq, situated some 60 kilometres
north of Baghdad, is the official headquarters of the PMOI, the
largest Iranian opposition group. It was originally set up during the
Iran-Iraq war to give shelter to opponents of the regime of Iran's
Ayatollah Khomeini.
After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US military was
responsible for protecting the group in the face of sectarian
violence throughout Iraq. But in the summer of 2008, this
responsibility was handed over to the Iraqi army.
'Closing down Ashraf and exerting pressures on Ashraf residents is
not what the Iraqi people want. This is the most hideous
interference of Iranian regime in the internal affairs of Iraq,'
PMOI spokesman Shahriar Kia told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Rafsanjani, who arrived in Baghdad early on Monday, chairs the
the Assembly of Experts, the authority in charge of electing the
supreme leader of Iran.
Relations between Iran and Iraq improved after the US forces
ousted Iraq's former president Saddam Hussein in 2003.
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