US-Funded Terror Group Kills 31 In Iran

The Iranian terror group responsible for this morning’s attacks that killed 31  people (including some top Iranian  military official officials) and wounded 28 others has received hundreds of millions of dollars from the US government for years, according to Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, ABC News, The Telegraph (UK) and other sources. The group, called Jundallah (also spelled Jundullah,) are ethnically Baluchi, a Sunni minority group, native to Iran, Afghanistan and the Western Frontier Province of Pakistan. The US government paid this group, and others, to create instability in Iran and shake the country’s Sunni leadership. The Atlantic reports that other countries (including Israel and Saudi Arabia) were involved in these covert programs.

Hersh wrote in July of 2008:

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations.

There has been a  significant uptick in violence within Iran, including assassinations, bombings and suicide attacks.  Jundallah was and is particularly active in these operations, carrying out an attack on a mosque last spring that killed 25 and wounded 125.

From ABC News:

[Jundallah is] responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran [and] has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News.

Many of the attacks in Iran are planned in the same part of Pakistan where Al Qaeda plans operations against coalition and government forces in Afghanistan.

Iran is predominantly Shia and the Sunni Jundallah are part of a Baluchi minority, marginalized by Iran’s  cultural and political structure. Since Afghanistan is a mostly Sunni country, the Baluchi haven’t traditionally been engaged in violent insurgency here. But in Iran and Pakistan it’s a whole different story and Baluchi groups like Jundallah have been battling with those governments for years.

Turns out, at least in the case of Iran, they’ve had some help from their Uncle Sam.

We’ll likely never know if US tax dollars paid for today’s blast. When you drop bags of cash on groups like these, it is hard to ascertain exactly where it all ends up. According to Hersh, the US also funds violence by Arab and Kurdish separatist groups, further complicating the money trail.

This strategy was born to fail. Giving Jundallah (and others) hundreds-of-millions to disrupt the Iranian regime will only make Tehran clamp down further on ethnic minorities. And when average Iranian citizens find out that the US (and Israel!) basically paid for these attacks (as Iranians most certainly already have,) they will back their government’s hard-line stance against the US on everything from nuclear disarmament to Russia, despite how unpopular that government may be at home.

And of course there is the possible blowback.

Baluchi separatists are not friends of the United States, even if they do take the US government’s money. Ramzi Yousef, convicted for his role in the 1993 WTC bombing and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the top planners of the 9/11 attacks, are ethnic Baluchi’s and Sunni fundamentalists.

As much as Jundallah fighters probably like killing Iranian soldiers, they would likely much prefer to kill American office workers or commuters. And just where the money comes from doesn’t matter one bit.