U.S. plans to disarm Iranian resistance

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Acting on a decision by President Bush, U.S. commanders in Iraq have begun efforts to disarm an Iranian opposition group whose status had been the subject of weeks of review at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

U.S. military officials have been meeting in recent days with leaders of the group, the Mujahedeen Khalq, to work out arrangements for taking the group's weapons and ensuring that it can no longer operate in Iraq.

The Mujahedeen Khalq has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, but under the terms of an April 15 cease-fire agreement with the military, the group has been allowed to keep most of its weapons. The group maintains camps near the Iranian border, and before the war it operated with the support of Saddam Hussein's government.

The cease-fire deal was supported by U.S. military commanders in Iraq, who were looking for a practical way to deal with the group without saddling already burdened U.S. forces. At the same time, the agreement provided an opening for civilians at the Pentagon who argued that it should be followed by a decision to amend or eliminate the group's terrorist designation. Then, the argument went, it could be used by the United States as a check against potential Iranian meddling inside Iraq.

Administration officials and military officers in Baghdad said Friday that the issue was not completely resolved until this week, when the question of the group's status was debated by the so-called principals' committee of Bush's top security advisers and was then ultimately decided by the president himself.

State Department officials said the question of whether to disarm the Mujahedeen Khalq had been the subject of sharp debate with Pentagon officials. But Douglas J. Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said Friday night that the "characterization was not accurate." He said the Pentagon's position has consistently been that the group "is a terrorist organization and should be disarmed."

The Iranian group has no known ties to al-Qaida, but its members killed several U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors in the 1970s and supported the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. It has carried out dozens of bombings that were aimed at Iranian military and government workers but that also killed civilians.

Still, the group has dozens of supporters on Capitol Hill who have suggested that designating it a terrorist organization, first done by the Clinton administration in 1997, was a political decision meant as a gesture to Iran that could legitimately be reversed given new concerns about the situation in Iraq.

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