RPT-ANALYSIS-Iran cracks down as Baluch rebels step up campaign

Mon Jul 20, 2009 7:40am BST


(Repeats story with no changes to text)

* Ethnic-sectarian tension simmers in southeast Iran

* Jundollah militants seen escalating armed struggle

* Three more rebels to be executed soon - ISNA agency

* No proof Baluch group has links to al Qaeda



By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent

BEIRUT, July 19 (Reuters) - Iran, plunged in post-election turmoil, is also grappling with ethnic and religious tensions in a volatile southeastern province where the authorities have responded to attacks by Sunni rebels with a spate of hangings.

The executions last week of 13 men accused of membership of Jundollah (God's soldiers), an obscure ethnic Baluch Sunni group, followed the bombing of a Shi'ite mosque on May 28 that killed 25 people and wounded over 120 in Zahedan, capital of Sistan-Baluchistan.

Three more Jundollah militants, including a brother of the group's leader, Abdolmalek Rigi, will be executed soon, Iran's ISNA student news agency said on Sunday.

Jundollah, whose precise ideology and affiliations are uncertain, is intensifying its struggle and make take it beyond its remote, impoverished desert heartland near the Pakistan border, according to a forthcoming report by CTC Sentinel.

"Given the group's steady escalation in terms of its execution of tactics and choice of targets in recent months, the next step in Jundollah's evolution may result in attacks outside of Iranian Baluchistan," Chris Zambelis wrote in the article for the U.S.-based Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.

"Indeed, the international focus on Iran during the run-up to the recent election and the attention paid to minority issues during the campaign may have also emboldened the group to escalate its fight," Zambelis wrote.

Three people were hanged in public on May 30 for involvement in the Zahedan mosque bombing, claimed by Jundollah. Two more were hanged on June 2. A few days after the bombing, at least five people were killed and dozens wounded in clashes sparked by rumours of an attack on a Sunni cleric, Iranian media said.

Sectarian violence is relatively rare in Iran, whose leaders reject allegations by Western human rights groups that the Islamic Republic, dominated by its Persian Shi'ite majority, discriminates against ethnic and religious minorities.

Ethnic Baluch, many with tribal links to their restive kin in neighbouring Pakistan and Afghanistan, make up an estimated one to three percent of Iran's 70 million people.

Rigi, Jundollah's chief, said in a 2007 interview quoted by CTC Sentinel that his group was fighting for the rights of the Baluch people facing "genocide" in Iran, but denied that it harboured any separatist or radical sectarian agenda.



NEW TACTICS

Until recently the militants had used ambushes, abductions and bombings to target Iranian security forces, who also combat drugs and arms smugglers in the lawless border province.

"Jundollah's decision to target a prominent Shi'ite mosque in Zahedan signifies a new and more dangerous phase in (its) war against the Iranian government," wrote Zambelis, noting that the attack on a civilian target coincided with a Shi'ite holy day.

Iran says Jundollah is part of the Sunni Islamist al Qaeda network -- which has spread the use of suicide bombings in other insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Tehran also accuses the United States and its allies of backing the group.

Washington has rejected charges by an Iranian official that it was involved in the Zahedan mosque blast.

Zambelis argued there was no evidence linking Jundollah to al Qaeda or other Sunni militant movements with a global agenda.

Its links with the Taliban in Pakistan's Baluchistan province were less clear, but more likely to be based on collaboration in opium smuggling than on ideology, he added.

Jundollah has evolved through shifting alliances with various parties, including the Taliban and Pakistan's ISI intelligence service, who saw the group as a tool against Iran, according to Lahore-based Pakistani analyst Ahmed Rashid.

Rashid, author of a book on the Taliban, said that while Jundollah had sprung from a milieu of ethnic Baluch nationalism, this had never been a strong core of their beliefs.

"They seem to be more mercenaries. Nobody quite knows what they believe," he said. "No secular Baluch group would have sought sanctuary with the Taliban before 9/11, but they did. No Baluch group would have worked with the ISI, but they did."

Rashid did not discount Tehran's accusation that Jundollah had received U.S. backing as part of clandestine efforts during President George W. Bush's administration to subvert Iran.

"It's a very confusing picture. I think these guys have been used by everyone at some stage or another," Rashid added.

Jundollah, which also calls itself the Iranian People's Resistance Movement, launched its armed campaign in 2005.

Popular support for its activities is hard to gauge, but it operates in a deprived region where Baluch have long complained of ethnic, religious and cultural discrimination by the state.

Drought-stricken Sistan-Baluchistan had Iran's worst indicators for life expectancy, adult literacy, primary school enrolment, access to improved water and sanitation and infant and child mortality, according to a U.N. assessment in 2003.

Amnesty International, which highlighted what it said was a rise in human rights violations against Iran's Baluch minority in a 2007 report, had urged Tehran not to carry out last week's hangings, saying the accused had not received a fair trial.

(Editing by Richard Balmforth)



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