Jundallah versus the mullahtariat

THE ROVING EYE

By Pepe Escobar

Fasten your seat belts; it’s gonna be a bumpy ride. As a crucial subplot of the New Great Game in Eurasia, Balochistan – on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border – promises turbulence aplenty. Welcome to United States General Stanley McChrystal’s self-fulfillment prophecy – “Chaos-istan” in action.

There are few doubts the deadly (as many as 49 fatalities) suicide bombing on Sunday in Pishin, near Sarbaz, in the deserted, impoverished Iranian province of Sistan-Balochistan, was carried out by Pakistani Balochistan-based Jundallah (“Soldiers of God”).

This is being billed by Iranian state-controlled media as the worst suicide bombing ever in the country. Key casualties include the number two of the armed forces of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Brigadier Nour-Ali Shoushtari, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the provincial IRGC commander and assorted Sunni and Shi’ite tribal leaders.

The IRGC – the key component of the dictatorship of the mullahtariat currently in power in Tehran – is seething, to say the least. It is one thing to repress student protests in Tehran; but how could they not see this coming, and how could they not prevent it, considering their allegedly good ground intelligence on Jundallah’s support by the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia?

Ibrahim Raisi, the vice president of Iran’s judiciary, says there’s evidence the US and Britain support Jundallah not only with intelligence but with weapons. Conservative paper Resaalat denounces “Saudi money” and “American spies” who “have tried for years to raise ethnic tension in the region”.

Tehran’s paranoia does contain an element of truth: Iran is in effect encircled by the US in invaded Iraq and occupied Afghanistan, and it is a victim of terrorist attacks from outfits based in third countries. The head of the IRGC, General Mohammad-Ali Jafari, said that an Iranian team would go to Islamabad to “prove” that Jundallah was “supported by American and British intelligence services and unfortunately the Pakistani intelligence service”.

Meet the new contras

Jundallah was founded in 2003 by Nek Mohammad Wazir – a top, charismatic Pakistani Taliban commander killed by Islamabad’s forces in 2004. Its current leader is the youthful Abdel Malik Rigi, who studied at the famous Binori mosque in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi, the alma mater of many a Taliban luminary.

Approximately 2,000 strong, Jundallah claims to represent the Sunni Balochi struggle against the centralizing power of Tehran. Nonsense: pan-Balochi aspirations actually are better represented by other Balochi nationalist groups, such as the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) in Pakistan. Jundallah for its part does not threaten Islamabad; it is an ultra-sectarian, anti-Shi’ite outfit immersed in the intolerant Deobandi interpretation of Islam.

Jundallah has its headquarters in Karachi and bases in both Balochistans. It does have a firm connection to the South Waziristan tribal areas; it has been connected to the hardcore Sunni and viscerally anti-Shi’ite Lashkar-e-Jhangvi; and is definitely tactically connected to al-Qaeda, “talking” if not to the historic leadership ensconced, in theory, in South Waziristan, at least to the “new generation” al-Qaeda.

AT

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