IRANIAN armed forces yesterday said they had concluded their military operations deep inside the Western protected Kurdish enclave of Northern Iraq. But the raid represented another, almost contemptuous, display of Iran's steadily growing influence there.
According to reports from Kurdistan, Revolutionary Guards estimated at between 1,000 and 2,000 men entered Iraqi territory on Saturday night at various points and converged on the historic town of Koisinjak, 50 miles from the frontier. Refugees were reportedly still fleeing their advance yesterday.
Their objective was to destroy a camp belonging to the anti Iranian Kurdish resistance. Exiled Iranian Kurdish leaders and their families were living there under the nominal protection of Iraqi Kurds. Iran recently accused them of making attacks inside Iranian territory. It claimed yesterday to have killed dozens of "counter revolutionaries".
The raid's main significance lies in the larger strategic reality it dramatises on the ground, Iran is now the main player in the "liberated" Kurdish territory which, since the Gulf war, the western allies have been protecting from the air.
"This," said a pro-western Iraqi politician, "is the idiotic end result of US policies toward Saddam. `Provide Comfort' code name for the Turkey based air sorties has come to mean providing a platform for the mullahs to do as they please."
Among other things, the mullahs can give whatever support they choose to anti Turkish PKK guerrillas, strongly entrenched in the enclave, and they are well placed to deny the US a part in managing President Sad dam's overthrow and shaping the succession to him.
Yesterday, the Iranian backed Iraqi opposition leader, Ayatollah Bakr Hakim, confirmed reports that President Sad dam recently foiled a US Jordanian military putsch against him. "The real meaning of his statement," said the pro-western Iraqi politician, "is the message it conveys to the US if you have the right to try and overthrow Saddam, so does Iran and better means too."
It was the fratricidal struggle between the two main Kurdish parties Mr Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Mr Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan which furnished Iran with its great opportunity in northern Iraq. The US failed to mediate an end to their conflict.