BAGHDAD – A rocket attack on an Iranian exile group housed at a camp near Baghdad on Saturday caused fatalities, a United Nations spokeswoman said, the second deadly attack on the camp this year.
“I can confirm that there was a deadly attack,” UN spokeswoman Eliana Nabaa said.
“We don’t have the figures but yes, people were killed and injured.” A police colonel, speaking on condition of anonymity, put the toll at three dead and 11 wounded from six mortar blasts. It was not immediately clear who was behind the assault.
Shahriar Kia, a spokesman for members of the People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, or the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), at Camp Liberty, said more than a dozen “missiles” hit the camp, setting fire to multiple trailers. “There have been casualties, but I do not have a toll for now,” he said. Kia criticized the United Nations for not agreeing to move Liberty residents back to their original base at Camp Ashraf near the border with Iran.
MEK members were moved to Camp Liberty late last year at Iraq’s insistence from Ashraf, their historic paramilitary camp of the 1980s. Saturday’s attack was the second assault this year on Camp Liberty, which has some 3,000 residents. In February, dozens of mortar rounds and rockets fired at the camp killed six people, according to the US State Department.
Camp Ashraf was the base that now-executed dictator Saddam Hussein allowed the group to establish in Diyala province during Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran.
The MEK was founded in the 1960s to oppose the shah of Iran, and after the 1979 revolution that ousted him it took up arms against Iran’s clerical rulers. It says it has now laid down its arms and is working to overthrow the regime in Iran by peaceful means.
Britain struck the group off its terror list in June 2008, followed by the European Union in 2009 and the United States in September last year. MEK members in Iraq are in the process of being resettled.
Last month, 14 of its members headed for Albania, which has offered to take in more than 200 people. – AFP
