BAGHDAD, March 16 (Reuters) – Iraqi forces have besieged a camp housing Iranian exiles in Iraq, residents and a security official said, after the national security adviser reiterated a vow to shut the place down.
A source at Iraq’s Interior Ministry said Iraqi soldiers surrounded Camp Ashraf on Thursday after residents resisted an attempt to clear them out of one building inside it. The soldiers were blocking fuel and medicines getting in, he said.
National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie pledged in January to close the camp, home to 3,500 people, by late March.
“Iraqi forces have made a siege around the camp. No one is allowed to enter or leave,” the source said late on Sunday. “We have instructions from Mowaffaq al-Rubaie to seal it off.”
Rubaie was not available for comment but an official in his office, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak, denied that security forces had surrounded the camp.
On a visit to Iran on Jan. 23, Rubaie said Camp Ashraf would be “part of history within two months”. In a statement on Friday, his office reiterated his intention to shut it.
“The government will not go back on its decision to close down the camp … residents have the choice between returning to Iran or going to a third country,” the statement said.
Leaders of the Iranian opposition group, which has been based at Ashraf north of Baghdad for around two decades, said Iraqi security forces hit residents with electric batons.
“They threatened them to leave, blocked basic necessities from coming in and sending trucks back: these are violations of the Geneva Convention,” Shahriar Kia, spokesman for the People’s Mujahideen of Iran (PMOI) in the camp, said by telephone.
The interior ministry official also said Iraqi troops beat residents before U.S. forces helping guard the camp stepped in.
The fate of Ashraf’s residents has been in limbo since Iraq took it over from U.S. forces this year. Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslim leaders are friendly with Tehran, which wants the camp closed and a list of wanted PMOI members handed over for trial.
Human rights groups say driving residents out against their will would violate international law.
The government views the PMOI as terrorists, as do the United States and Iran. Last month the European Union agreed to take it off its list of terrorist organisations.
The PMOI began as a group of Islamist leftists opposed to Iran’s Shah but fell out with Shi’ite clerics who took power after the 1979 revolution. (Reporting by Tim Cocks and Wisam Mohammed; Writing by Tim Cocks)
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