By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer Fri Jan 12, 6:56 PM ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Five Iranians detained by U.S.-led forces were working in a decade-old government liaison office that was in the process of being upgraded to a consulate, the Iraqi foreign minister said Friday.
Tehran condemned the raid in the Kurdish-controlled northern city of Irbil and urged Iraq to push for the Iranians' release.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said the building where the Iranians were detained Thursday had operated with Iraqi government approval for 10 years.
"We are now in the process of changing these offices to consulates," he said. "It is not a new office. This liaison office has been there for a long time."
He also echoed concerns the U.S. and Iran were dragging Iraq into their fight.
"We don't want Iraq to be a battleground for settling scores with other countries," Zebari, a Kurd, told CNN.
The diplomatic tussle came at an unwelcome time for the United States as President Bush faces criticism over his new strategy for ending the violence in Iraq. Bush also vowed to isolate Iran and Syria, which the U.S. has accused of fueling attacks in Iraq.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani plans a trip to Syria on Sunday, the highest-level Iraqi visit to the country in more than 24 years. The neighbors restored diplomatic relations in December that were cut in 1982 amid ideological disputes between Damascus and the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's office, meanwhile, rejected Bush's plan to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq as part of an effort to curb sectarian attacks.
"We reject Bush's new strategy and we think it will fail," said Abdul-Razzaq al-Nidawi, a senior official in al-Sadr's office. He said Iraq's problems were due to the presence of U.S. troops and called for their withdrawal.
Local leaders of al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, which has been blamed for much of the sectarian violence, said they were bracing for an attack and avoiding appearing in public with their weapons.
Zebari's Iranian counterpart, Manouchehr Mottaki, called on the Iraqi government to secure the release of the five Iranians, Iranian state television reported. "Such illegal and adventurous acts by the U.S. should be stopped," the broadcast quoted Mottaki as saying.
Mottaki condemned the raid, saying it contravened the Vienna Convention. "This behavior by the United States contradicts its claims of providing security in Iraq," he was quoted as saying.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin also harshly criticized the detentions, calling them a "flagrant violation" of international conventions.
"It's absolutely unacceptable when the military storms a foreign consular office on the territory of another state," Kamynin said. "The unlawful actions by the U.S. servicemen mark an open abuse of a mandate issued to the multinational forces in Iraq."
The 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations says consular premises are "inviolable," but it was not clear how that would apply as the building was not a consulate.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the detained Iranians were not carrying diplomatic passports and the building "was not a consulate. This was not an officially accredited diplomatic facility."
Pressed to describe the office, McCormack said it was a "building that the Iranians were using, occupying, that was Iraqi territory."
Zebari also said U.S. forces tried to seize more people at the airport in Irbil, 220 miles north of Baghdad, prompting a confrontation with Kurdish troops.
A Pentagon official in Washington said that after troops detained the Iranians, they learned another person might have escaped and fled to the airport. An American team went to the airport, where they "surprised" Kurdish forces, who apparently had not been informed they were coming, said the Defense Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the incident.
Meanwhile, sectarian violence persisted. Suspected Shiite militiamen attacked a Sunni mosque in a religiously mixed neighborhood of Baghdad, prompting clashes that wounded two guards, police said.
Attackers later blew up a Shiite mosque that was under construction in the northern city of Kirkuk, police Col. Anwar Hassan said. No casualties were reported.
At least 19 people were reported killed or dead nationwide, including 10 bullet-riddled bodies found in Baghdad and an Iraqi journalist who was killed in a drive-by shooting in the northern city of Mosul.
Khudr Younis al-Obaidi was the second journalist killed this year. Associated Press staffer Ahmed Hadi Naji was found shot in the back last week.
___
Associated Press writers Pauline Jelinek in Washington and Nasser Karimi in Tehran contributed to this report.
Erbil province in northern Iraq
The U.S. armed forces detained five Iranians working at a "liaison office" located in Erbil, Iraq before dawn on Friday. Sources said that the U.S. forces first landed their helicopters around the building, then broke through the office's gate, disarmed the guards, confiscated some documents and certain objects, arrested five suspected terrorists, and then left for an undisclosed location.

However, there was no raid on the Iranian Consulate General as earlier reported. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told Agence France-Presse that the building raided was "not a consulate or a government building", which appears to be confirmed by the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, who said the Iranians were working at an office that had government approval and was in the process of being approved as a consulate, but was not a Consulate nor the Iranian Consulate General.  The US is strategically insisting that they raided a "liaison office" instead of a Consulate to avoid being found in violation of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Mikhail Kamynin said that the raid was absolutely unacceptable and was a violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The Kurdistan Regional Government also expressed their shock and disapproval of the raid.

On Thursday's hearing on Iraq, Senator Joseph Biden (D-Delware), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the Bush Administration did not have the authority to send U.S. troops on cross-border raids. Biden said, "I believe the present authorization granted the president to use force in Iraq does not cover that, and he does need congressional authority to do that. I just want to set that marker."  After the meeting, Biden sent a follow-up letter to the White House asking for an explanation from the Bush Administration on the matter.

On Thursday morning, Iran's foreign ministry official sent a letter to Iraq's foreign ministry asking Iraq to stop the Bush Administration from interfering with Iraq-Iran relations, and has protested the raid on its liaison office. The official said, "We expect the Iraqi government to take immediate measures to set the aforesaid individuals free and to condemn the U.S. troopers for the measure. Following up on the case and releasing the arrestees is a responsibility of primarily the Iraqi government and then the local government and officials of the Iraqi Kurdistan."