What is going on? 15 British soldiers captured by Iran
OK, 15 British naval soldiers were captured by Iran. Iran claims that they were committing agression in Iranian waters, and that they confessed to being in Iranian waters. Britain disputes this, claiming they were in Iraqi waters.
What is going on here? Is this an Iranian provocation? A misunderstanding behind which Iran has decided to stand to score "defying the imperialists" points? Is this a case of one Iranian faction acting out of line, or did this come from the top (and when I say "the top", I mean the Supreme Leader Khamenei, not President Ahmadinejad whom everyone's been obsessing about recently. The Iranian president doesn't control the military.) Were the British in fact provoking Iran? Why would they do that? The facts we know so far could support all different kinds of scenarios.
Could this be the explanation:
Juan Cole:
What is going on here? Is this an Iranian provocation? A misunderstanding behind which Iran has decided to stand to score "defying the imperialists" points? Is this a case of one Iranian faction acting out of line, or did this come from the top (and when I say "the top", I mean the Supreme Leader Khamenei, not President Ahmadinejad whom everyone's been obsessing about recently. The Iranian president doesn't control the military.) Were the British in fact provoking Iran? Why would they do that? The facts we know so far could support all different kinds of scenarios.
Could this be the explanation:
The sailors, taken at gunpoint Friday by Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Al Quds soldiers were captured intentionally and are to be used as bargaining chips to be used for the release of five Iranians who were arrested at the Iranian consul in Irbil, Iraq by US troops, an Iranian official told the daily paper Asharq al-Awsat on Saturday.Apparently, there's some dispute as to where the border between Iraqi and Iranian waters is in this area:
"The problem is that nobody knows where the border is," Potter said. "The British might have thought they were on their side, the Iranians might have thought they were on their side."I'm going to try to dig more on this.
Juan Cole:
There is speculation that the Iranian action is related to Saturday's expected vote at the United Nations Security Council on imposing sanctions on Iran because it declines to halt its uranium enrichment attempts.Apparently, something like this has happened before:
"This may well be a misunderstanding. We're certainly treating it as such at the moment. We're looking for the mistake to be corrected," a British government source said.
It mirrored a similar event in 2004 when Iran seized eight British servicemen in the narrow waterway that separates Iran from Iraq and held them for three nights.
Then, as now, the Iranians accused the British of straying into Iranian waters, a charge Britain rejected.
Comments
The current internationally recognized border between Iraq and Iran is the centerline of the river, as demarcated on March 6, 1975 via the Algiers Accord between Iraq and Iran. This was repudiated by Saddam Hussein who claimed the entire waterway, thus sparking the Iran-Iraq War, but at the end of that war, the Algiers border was again recognized.
The problem to modern navigators is that this part of the river system carries huge amounts of silt from the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karun River systems. As silt is deposited and eroded away, the river, and thus its centerline is constantly shifting from year to year.
http://tinyurl.com/2x37ss
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