Iran Rebel Attacks Cloud Peace Move : Iraqi-Backed Guerrillas Seize Base, 2 Towns as U.N. Truce Talks Begin

Heavy fighting was reported deep in Iran on Tuesday, and a group of Iraqi-backed Iranian rebels said they had captured two Iranian towns and a military base.

Despite the clashes, which come one week after Iran’s acceptance of a U.N. cease-fire plan, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz left Baghdad for U.N. headquarters in New York in an effort to work out the details of a truce.

Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, who is already in New York, held two lengthy sessions with U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar and said afterward that they had “very constructive and fruitful talks.”

Perez de Cuellar said he will confer separately with the two officials today. In an apparent quickening of the negotiating timetable, the secretary general said he dispensed with formalities and began talks one day ahead of schedule because the Iranian envoy was already on the scene.

Tuesday’s reports of fighting in Iran appeared to cloud the recent movement toward peace. Last week, Iran announced that it was accepting U.N. Security Council Resolution 598, adopted a year ago, which calls for a cease-fire in the nearly eight-year-old Iran-Iraq War. But the emergence of the Iranian rebel group, the Moujahedeen, as an apparently major element in the fighting in Iran introduces a new and potentially complicating factor.

The Moujahedeen organization predates the ouster of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran in 1979. Last year, the rebels--known primarily as an Islamic socialist guerrilla organization--formed an Iraq-based paramilitary wing known as the National Liberation Army. Believed to number about 10,000, the NLA has joined the Iraqi army in fighting the regime of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader. The group is supplied and financed by Iraq.

During the current offensive, the Iranians at first reported that it was Iraq’s forces that were pouring across the border on the central front east of Baghdad. But they later acknowledged that among the Iraqi casualties were “counterrevolutionaries and traitors.”

News Agency Report

Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency admitted that enemy forces had occupied the town of Eslamabad, formerly known as Shahabad, about 60 miles inside the border. IRNA reported that the town of Karand had also fallen but said it was retaken by Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guards.

The attacks caused such an uproar in Tehran that the government announced that the Majlis, Iran’s Parliament, was being closed temporarily so that members could rush to the front.

A communique issued in Baghdad by the NLA said its forces were advancing on Bakhtaran, formerly Kermanshah, a city of nearly half a million people about 80 miles from the border.

The rebel communique said several divisions of its troops had taken a Revolutionary Guards base called Beheshti and defeated the 27th Mohammed Division on the main highway from Eslamabad to Bakhtaran.

The loss of Bakhtaran would be a stunning blow to the Iranians, who in the past three months have suffered such military setbacks that they were forced to accept the U.N. cease-fire plan.

Iraqi Offensives Take Toll

Last Friday, Iraq launched offensives along a broad front in the central sector, with the stated aim of recapturing Iraqi territory still in Iranian hands and taking large numbers of prisoners.

Iraq announced Sunday that it was withdrawing its troops from Iran. On Tuesday, Baghdad Radio said Iraqi soldiers had pulled out of two Iranian towns, Gilan-e Gharb and Salehabad. According to the Iranians, the Iraqis were driven out of those towns.

Iraq’s information minister, Latif Jasim, said that Iran, in accusing Iraq of new attacks, was engaging in “lies and fabrications.” He insisted that Iraq would withdraw its troops as promised.

According to Western diplomats in the region, the presence of Moujahedeen fighters in the current offensive complicates the problem of arranging a cease-fire. Because they are based in Iraq, the Baghdad government might be held responsible for any cross-border military activity after a truce is signed.

Thus, the Moujahedeen may be attempting to win a foothold in Iran in order to obtain a place at the negotiating table and to enable Iraq to say that the problem is solely an internal Iranian conflict.

Iran Backs Kurds

There is a somewhat similar situation in the north, where Iran has been supporting an insurgency by Iraqi Kurdish tribesmen for several years. The Kurds move freely out of bases in Iran and attack Iraqis in the northeastern Kurdistan region.

Diplomats said that while Iran appeared to be defeated last week, the impetus of a new invasion might force the Tehran regime to resume fighting, wrecking the U.N. peace initiative before it really begins.

In the U.N. talks, which Perez de Cuellar said he hopes to finish within a week, the secretary general will hold separate sessions with each side, trying to work out agreements that would enable him to set a “D-day” for the establishment of a cease-fire and a U.N.-supervised truce.

The two sides will not meet directly. Since Iran--after years of resistance--agreed last week to begin peace talks, Iraq has proposed that the talks be face to face, but the Tehran government has refused.

Laying the groundwork for the truce framework, a team of observers sent to the region by the secretary general was in Tehran on Tuesday and is to visit Baghdad later in the week.

Times staff writer Don Shannon at the United Nations contributed to this article.