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Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeev Hed who wrote (1560)	2/3/2002 9:00:32 PM
From: Scoobah	Respond to of 32591

US says Iran helped al-Qaeda Iranians responded angrily to earlier US accusations United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has accused Iran of letting al-Qaeda and Taleban members escape from Afghanistan. Speaking on the US television network ABC, Mr Rumsfeld said that Tehran had given Washington's opponents free passage across the two countries' border. We have any number of reports that Iran has been permissive and allowed transit through their country of al-Qaeda Donald Rumsfeld He also accused Iran of supplying weapons to factions within Afghanistan, thereby contributing to instability. The accusations come days after Iran was named in President George W Bush's State of the Union address - along with Iraq and North Korea - as part of an "axis of evil" developing weapons of mass destruction. BBC Washington correspondent John Leyne says that the main purpose of the remarks is not to threaten war but rather to increase Iran's diplomatic isolation. Hatred of Taleban Iran has traditionally been an enemy of the Taleban, though it has always had strong links with parts of Afghanistan. The Taleban were Iran's traditional enemy On Friday Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, head of the powerful Guardian Council, said Iran and the Taleban "hated each other and had nothing in common". But Mr Rumsfeld said that Iran, unlike Pakistan, had failed to put troops along its border with Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda and Taleban fighters from escaping. "There isn't any doubt in my mind that the porous border between Iran and Afghanistan has been used for al-Qaeda and Taleban to move into Iran and seek refuge," he said. "We have any number of reports that Iran has been permissive and allowed transit through their country of al-Qaeda," he added. But US Secretary of State Colin Powell failed to endorse all of Mr Rumsfeld's accusations. New front fears There has been mounting international concern about President Bush's grouping together of Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Rumsfeld: Iran should have put troops along its border Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov of Russia, which sees all three as falling within its sphere of influence, questioned whether there was evidence to label the three an "axis of evil". There have been angry responses from the countries themselves, while several allies of the US have expressed fears that it is preparing to open a new front in its war against terrorism. Mr Bush maintained his tough stance on Friday, saying "all the three countries I mentioned are now on notice that we intend to take their development of weapons of mass destruction very seriously". Meanwhile the British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, has said Britain will continue its dialogue with reformists in Iran, while sending what he called "strong messages" to hard-line elements within the government. The European Union also has a policy of engagement with the authorities in Tehran, which the BBC's Middle East analyst Roger Hardy says they have no intention of abandoning.

To: Zeev Hed who wrote (1560)	2/3/2002 9:22:38 PM
From: Haim R. Branisteanu	Respond to of 32591

Zeew, there was not a Shia / Ismaili sect called Assassin in what is now Syria / Iran ? At the same time, within the crusading-culture of a pre- and early-modern Europe, the Syrian and Persian Nizaris took shape as Muslim mercenaries-cum-fanatics who murdered their victims while high on opium or hashish. If this propagandist concoction of a 'stoned' assassin fails to fit the complex reality of the discipline and training required for committing what was always an explicitly political act, the popular notion of Nizaris as a community of killers also denies their rich, multivalent culture. Yet "by the middle of the fourteenth century," Daftary remarks, "the word assassin, instead of signifying the name of a sect in Syria, had acquired a new meaning in Citeian, French, and other European languages: it had become a common noun describing a professional murderer" (121). Dante (1265-1321) first uses the word "Assassin" in this way in the nineteenth canto of the Inferno in his Divina Commedia.