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Co-ordinating committee of Workers Left Unity - Iran
The common aim of supporting the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan has speeded up the rapprochement between the terrorist Islamic state in Iran and the United States making a mockery of claims that this is a war against terrorism. On Sunday the 11th of Nov, Donald Rumsfeld the US secretary of Defence admitted that Iranian and US military advisers are working side by side with Afghan opposition forces trying to bring down the Taliban: “There are places in that country where there are some Iranian liaison people, as well as some American liaison people.” Rumsfeld added that as a nation bordering Afghanistan, Iran has “a legitimate interest in what happens in that country and can influence events on Afghan soil.” On the 12th of Nov news agencies reported that Iran and US’s foreign ministers Powell & Kharazi have ‘brief but friendly exchange at UN’ and between the 10-12th Nov Iran’s ‘reformist’ president who is visiting the US appeared on various TV channels to present the acceptable face of Islamic fundamentalism. Reporters didn’t ask about serial political murders ordered by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence, no one mentioned the fact that women were stoned to death in Iran in 2001, no reporter questioned why so many teenage girls are flogged every week in Tehran for not covering every strand of their hair under their veil. After all this week’s good fundamentalist could not be challenged about the appalling human rights record of the government he has presided over for the last 4.5 years. The recent developments are not surprising. Iran has long been the main backer of the very forces that today the US and UK claim to be the liberators of Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance. This Alliance whose record of human rights violations equals if not surpasses that of the Taliban and its ally the Taliban government of Iran are responsible for many attrocities in Afghanistan in the early 1990s following the defeat of the pro Soviet regime. Over the last 24 hours they have already started summary executions and torture of prisoners of war in Harat, Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul. Workers Left Unity Iran condemns the coming to power of the new Taliban in Afghanistan: the Islamic forces of the Northern Alliance We remind all that this was only achieved with relentless bombing by US, military and financial support from fundamentalists in Iran, a situation that will unleash a new era of civil war in one of the world’s most impoverished countries. The US rapprochement with the terrorist Islamic Republic of Iran proves once more that this war had nothing to do with fighting terrorism, especially state terrorism. |