West must not ignore Iran's 'blatant' sanctions breaches in Iraq, peer demands

The West must stop ignoring 'blatant' sanctions violations by Iran which has sent its terrorist Quds Force into Iraq, a leading British peer has demanded.

The US-led coalition in Iraq may have even been co-operating with Iranian militia in Iraq, in clear breach of United Nations resolutions, Lord Maginnis of Drumglass said.

He wrote in The Daily Caller news website: "In early December UN monitors pointed out that there was substantial evidence of sanctions violations by Iran in Iraq, where the leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force was apparently operating with impunity in spite of a Security Council blacklist barring him from travelling to UN member states.

"By the time of the report of the presence in Iraq of General Qasem Suleimani, the Iranian regime had stopped even trying to conceal this violation.

"By the end of 2014 his contribution to Iran’s supposed fight against the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq had become a sort of PR windfall for the Islamic Republic of Iran.

"Photographs and videos of him on the Iraqi battlefield among Kurdish Peshmerga and Shiite militants were released in Iranian state media and Suleimani was almost exclusively given credit for military victories while the US-led coalition’s air support was derided as ineffectual.

"It is easy to imagine the reason for Suleimani’s sudden publicity was because the Iranian regime had concluded that the UN and its Western member states were unlikely to do anything to enforce the sanctions against the Quds Force commander, especially at a time when the U.S. president was sending secret letters to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei urging cooperation between the two countries against the IS threat in Iraq and Syria."

The Quds Force has been listed as a supporter of global terrorism by the European Union since 2011 and by the United States since 2007, Lord Maginnis said.

He added: "By effectively ignoring last month’s report by the UN sanctions monitors, the UN member states have given the green light to military and political influence by a recognized terrorist leader."

The National Council of Resistance of Iran also revealed in December that the Quds was present in Iraq, he wrote.

Lord Maginnis, a prominent member of the British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom, said: "Not only is the West aware of this involvement but many experts have concluded that for such bombings to have taken place, there had to have been a significant measure of coordination and cooperation between Iran and the US-led coalition operating in the skies over Iraq.

"Not only have the US, the EU and the UN been ignoring the presence of a recognized terrorist group inside a supposedly allied country for the past month, they have been systematically ignoring it for much longer.

"his is at once a disturbing precedent for the current conflict and a disturbing reminder of past conflicts in which we’ve trusted dubious paramilitary forces, only to see them develop into the major threat sometime down the line.

"Given the volume of anti-American rhetoric coming out of the Iranian regime even at a time when it is presumably coordinating militarily with Western powers, and its unabated nuclear ambition, it is very easy to imagine that we face a similar danger in this case."