Mar 2, 2009, 16:49 GMT
Baghdad - Iraqi President Jalal Talabani on Monday told Iran's former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani that Iraq prohibits the presence of foreign militants and terrorist organizations such as the People's Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI).
He was speaking a day after Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called for the expulsion of Iranian rebels from Iraq.
'The Iraqi Constitution prohibits the presence of foreign militants in Iraq and the Iraqi people know that the People's Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI) is a terrorist organization that helped Saddam Hussein in his fight against the Iraqi people,' Talabani told a joint press conference.
The Ashraf Camp for refugees in Iraq, situated some 60 kilometres north of Baghdad, is the official headquarters of the PMOI, the largest Iranian opposition group. It was originally set up during the Iran-Iraq war to give shelter to opponents of the regime of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini.
After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US military was responsible for protecting the group in the face of sectarian violence throughout Iraq. But in the summer of 2008, this responsibility was handed over to the Iraqi army.
'Closing down Ashraf and exerting pressures on Ashraf residents is not what the Iraqi people want. This is the most hideous interference of Iranian regime in the internal affairs of Iraq,' PMOI spokesman Shahriar Kia told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Rafsanjani, who arrived in Baghdad early on Monday, chairs the the Assembly of Experts, the authority in charge of electing the supreme leader of Iran.
Relations between Iran and Iraq improved after the US forces ousted Iraq's former president Saddam Hussein in 2003.
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