by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
In the early 1970s the shah, via his intelligence organisation SAVAK, the CIA and the Israeli MOSSAD, sponsored a sustained “covert war” of Iraqi-Kurdish factions under the leadership of Mustafa Barzani against the Ba’thist leadership in Iraq which led to bombings of oil installations in Kirkuk and other infrastructural facilities with civilian use and subsequently to a full-fledged insurgency. Amongst us, we may deem the methods employed by the Kurdish movement “terroristic”. But this was certainly not the official view in Washington (or Britain, Iran and Israel). A White House Memorandum authored by Henry Kissinger and dated 5 October 1972 (White House Memorandum 1972, p. 1) refers to ‘Mustafa Barzani’s Kurdish resistance movement’. In the same memo (p. 1) it is indicated, that CIA Director Richard Helms reports the delivery of ‘money and arms . . . to Barzani via the Iranians without a hitch. More money and arms are in the pipeline’, it is stated. ‘Barzani received the first two monthly cash payments of each for July and August . . . By the end of October, the Iranians will have received for onward shipment to the Kurds 222,000 pounds of arms and ammunitions from Agency stocks and 142,000 pound from [Retracted].’ Note also that since its inception in 1979, the Iraqi government was put on the US State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. The country was taken off that list in 1982 in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war and at a time when the Reagan Administration was aware of Saddam Hussein’s directives to use chemical weapons against advancing Iranian army units and Iraqi civilians who resisted his regime (Adib-Moghaddam, 2006, 2008). Iraq was put on that list again after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Ultimately then, the allocation of the terror label shifted with the particular political context in which it was employed.
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