The fate of some 2,400 Iranian dissidents kept in a camp near Baghdad is unfinished business left over from the U.S. ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime that needs to be resolved, former officials told lawmakers Wednesday.
The dissidents belonging to the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, a group that was on the U.S. list of banned terrorist organizations until 2012 and remains controversial, have been a persistent, though low-profile, problem for Washington since Hussein was unseated by the 2003 U.S. invasion.
The group, also known as the MEK, supported Saddam’s regime and opposed Iran’s ruling Shiite Muslim theocracy. The United States disarmed its members and took the group under its protection during the occupation of Iraq, and secured Iraqi guarantees of their safety after the 2011 withdrawal, which have not been kept.
“I just find it unbelieveable that this problem had not been resolved three to four years ago,” former National Security Adviser James Jones told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“I just think the United States should show more responsibility for the commitment we made.”
Jones, also a former U.S. Marine Corps commandant, is a member of a bipartisan group that has been lobbying for years on behalf of the dissidents, who are held at Camp Liberty, a former U.S. base near Baghdad.
The dissidents have been caught up in a tangled web of international politics. Iran sees them as terrorists and is seeking extradition of some of its members. The United Nations sees them as refugees and has called for them to be resettled outside of Iraq. Baghdad’s post-Saddam government wants them gone from Iraq, and the United States still maintains restrictions on allowing them to immigrate. Some have been resettled to third countries, but the process has been slower than expected.
The issue was one of the most significant left unsettled when U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq at the end of 2011, and lawmakers from both parties are pressuring the Obama administration to bring it to a close.
“The U.S. government and military made a commitment to protect thousands of people who surrendered their weapons and came under our protection as a result. And that commitment has not been met,” said Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., who called Wednesday’s snap hearing to raise awareness of the issue.
McCain and others suggested that it was a mistake to trust Iraq’s Shiite-led government to ensure the dissidents’ safety, because of its vulnerability to Iranian influence.
“If the Iraqi government can’t do it the United States government should offer to do it,” former Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., told the panel.
