In Southern Iran, Was It the Beginning of the End?

by Hugh Fitzgerald

As tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia could break out into war at any time, here is some background on how tensions got this high. It has now been a year since “at least 29 people were killed and 70 wounded in an attack on a military parade in the Arab Ahvaz region” of southern Iran. “President Hassan Rouhani has called on the country’s security forces to determine who was behind the attack amid competing claims of responsibility.” The full story is here.

Heavily armed gunmen rained automatic weapons fire for over ten minutes on participants of the parade Saturday in Khuzestan province. Most of the victims reportedly belonged to Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard.

Iranian TV showed ambulances ferrying dozens of victims to nearby hospitals while survivors could be seen helping those who were injured.

Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander in charge of Khuzestan province Hassan Shahvarpour told Iranian TV that two of the parade attackers were killed on the spot, one died from his wounds at a hospital and a fourth was arrested.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and other top officials were shown on Iranian TV leaving another military parade in Tehran, immediately after they were told about the attack in Khuzestan.

Parades were held across the country in commemoration of the start of Iran’s 1980-1988 war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

There are conflicting reports over who was responsible for the attack, but both the Islamic State group and a group calling itself the “Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz” claimed responsibility.

Iran accused Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates of being behind the attack, supporting the Arab separatists of the “Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz.” According to the Iranians, ISIS had nothing to do with it. Nor was Israel initially blamed (which did not prevent an Iranian spokesman from threatening retaliation, too, against the Jewish state). And behind the Saudis and the Emiratis, the Iranians saw the United States.

The ASMLA’s spokesman Yaqoub Hur al Tastari told the BBC Persian Service the group “did not target civilians,” although Iranian media claimed that several children and journalists were among the casualties.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohamed Javad Zarif wrote in a tweet that “terrorists recruited, trained, armed and paid by a foreign regime” were responsible for the Ahvaz attack. He also claimed that Tehran would hold “regional terror sponsors,” and what he called “their US masters accountable for such attacks.”

The spectacle, caught on tape and put on Facebook, of Revolutionary Guards not responding the gunfire but crouching down in fear, with members of the Revolutionary Guards band even hiding in a sewage ditch, caught on tape and broadcast, was a major humiliation for the regime. It vowed revenge to erase the shame.

What “foreign regime” would have recruited, trained, armed, and paid separatist Arabs in Ahwaz to attack Iranian soldiers in Khuzestan? And what regime has, in Iran’s view, “US masters”? Zarif was, of course, referring to Saudi Arabia, which was already locked in a proxy war with Iran in Yemen. In Iran, the oilfields are located in the southern area of Khuzestan, which is populated by ethnic Arabs. If the separatist Arabs of Khuzestan were to successfully break away from Iran, that would mean the loss to Tehran of almost all of its major oilfields; that can never be allowed to happen.

Iranian media reportedly has accused both Israel and Saudi Arabia of responsibility for the attack, but gave no direct evidence to support the claims.

In later reports, Iran no longer blamed Israel, and accused Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States of being behind the attacks by local Arab separatists.

Iranian President Rouhani made no accusations, but called on the country’s security forces to “determine who was behind the attack,” according to Iranian media.

Iran has been a state sponsor of terrorism for a long time, mainly through its support, military and financial, of the Shi’a terrorist group Hezbollah. There are more than 150,000 short-range missiles aimed at Israel from Lebanon, all of them given to Hezbollah by Iran. Yet in this instance, Iran’s own military became the object of a spectacular terrorist attack inside Iran, in its most vulnerable territory, where almost all of the ethnic Arabs in Iran live. The apparent success of this attack only whetted the appetites of the Arab separatists of Khuzestan.

The Iranian military, meanwhile, is still smarting at the humiliation they endured by their panicky ducking for cover. The ferocity of their response — the roundups of Arabs began quickly — only resulted in more anger against their Persian masters by the local Arabs. The Saudis, well satisfied with this attack, were happy to continue to supply their fellow Arabs in Ahvaz with weaponry and financing. It was a most cost-effective way to tie down large numbers of Iranian troops.

Iran is only 61% Persian, and has many disaffected ethnic minorities. These minorities in Iran — including the Balochis, Kurds, Azerbaijanis — could take heart from the Arab attack in Ahvaz.

The Balochi people live in both Iran and Pakistan, and are ill-treated in both countries. They have started a social media campaign against Iran’s mistreatment of the Balochi people, “to highlight the systematic genocide of Baloch nation by the Iranian regime in occupied western part of Balochistan. Lately, the Iranian Shiite Regime has accelerated its atrocities against Baloch people in Iranian occupied Balochistan. The Iranian forces crimes in Balochistan include summary execution of political activists, extra-judicial killings, torture to death, random abduction of political activists, and keeping them incommunicado and subjecting to targeted killings, subjecting the general public to collective punishment. Hundreds of Baloch are languishing in Iranian jails without any access to the due justice system and waiting for their turn to be arbitrarily executed. Hardly there goes a day by that Baloch activists are not killed by unbridled Al Quds, IRGC and Mersad forces of Persian religious regime of Iran.”

Separatists of the Free Balochistan Movement have demonstrated in front of the U.N.; Balochi separatists have been shot dead in Iranian Balochistan. But for the most part the Balochis in Iran have been conducting only a low-level insurgency, nothing for Tehran to worry about. However, that could change quickly.

As for the Iranian Kurds, they are now able to receive arms and other assistance from fellow Kurds in both Syria and Iraq. These arms were either supplied by the American military to their Kurdish allies, to be used against ISIS, or they were weapons that had been left by the Iraqi army in Mosul when it first fled from ISIS, and subsequently were appropriated by Iraqi Kurds when ISIS, in turn, was driven out of Mosul. Iran has been intent on suppressing its Kurds, even bombing a meeting of leaders of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan in Koya, Iraq. This was reported in the Western press as “sending a message” to Washington, Riyadh, and Jerusalem about Iran’s ability to strike at its enemies, but it was also meant to send a message to Iran’s Kurds: don’t even think about rebelling. It’s not a message they have taken in.

Then there are the 15 to 20 million Azerbaijanis. who are the largest minority in Iran. In fact, there are more Azerbaijanis in Iran than there are in Azerbaijan itself. If they chose to rise up, given their numbers, it would be a hellish task for the Iranians to suppress them. They could also receive weapons from the Azerbaijanis in Azerbaijan itself, across a porous border, one impossible for Iranian (Persian) troops to control. Weapons could also be supplied, from Azerbaijan, from the Saudis, or the Israelis, or the Americans, all of them eager to see the Iranian theocracy collapse.

The Iranians’ greatest nightmare would be coordination between the four minorities with separatist ambitions — Arabs, Azerbaijanis, Kurds, and Balochis — so that they might rise up simultaneously. Iran is plagued with troubles. It has suffered the worst drought in half a century. Agricultural production has plummeted; livestock are dying. The rial lost 60 percent of its value last year. The cost of Iran’s military ventures in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon keep rising. Iranians, fed up with the expense of  these ventures, have taken to streets in major cities, shouting “Death to Palestine,” “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon,” “Syria, Palestine are the cause of our misery,” as well as “Death to Khamenei” and “Reza Shah.” These are not what the ruling clerics want to hear. But they won’t, they can’t, pull back. The war in Yemen grinds expensively on, but they cannot now abandon the Houthis and allow the Saudis to triumph. They may have to settle for an endless stalemate, with each side using up resources, but no definitive conclusion to the conflict. In Syria, with Assad in sight of victory, the Iranians now want some recompense for all they did to help Assad. They want to establish bases in Syria, closer to the Israeli enemy. But Israel is just as determined to foil those plans, and has conducted more than 100 air raids on Iranian sites in Syria, destroying vast amounts of expensive weaponry, especially ground-to-air missiles. Israel has made clear, in statements by its leaders and in its behavior, that it will not hesitate to attack Iranian sites anywhere in Syria.

This is  a time of tremendous economic pressure on Iran. There are the tens of billions in agricultural and livestock losses because of the unprecedented drought. There is the renewal of American sanctions that have prevented Iran from buying $40 billion in American airplanes (which its airlines desperately need), and from selling its products (such as pistachios and carpets) on the world market. The cancelling, by many foreign companies, including Daimler, PSA (which makes Peugeots and Citroens) and Renault, of planned investments in Iran, have also dealt a heavy blow to the economy. Meanwhile, these renewed sanctions have also led to a  collapse of Iran’s oil exports, from 2.7 million barrels per day in May 2018 to 1.5 million barrels per day at the end of September 2018, as former buyers shied away from Iran because of their fear of American sanctions threatened against anyone who buys Iranian oil.

That’s why the successful attack in Ahvaz on an Iranian military parade was so frightening for the regime. While there were street protests in many Iranian cities, these were focused mainly at the regime’s spending abroad. They were not demonstrations of  ethnic discontent and separatism. The attack in Ahvaz was the first major blow against Iran’s military by a disaffected ethnic group. Only 61%  of Iran’s population of 80 million is Persian. The rest consist of more than a dozen ethnic minorities, with the most important being Azerbaijanis (16%), Kurds (10%), Lors (6%), Arabs (2%), and Balochis (2%). All of them, with the exception of the Lors people, have shown separatist desires. The worry for Iran is that, should Arabs in Khuzestan succeed in launching other attacks, this revolt might naturally inspire the Azerbaijanis, the Kurds, and even the Balochis (who, in addition to their ethnic differences, are mostly Sunni and treated badly on that score as well by the Persians) to do likewise.

All of these minorities can call for help from other members of the same ethnic group living outside Iran. The Arabs in Khuzestan obviously have many fellow Arabs to count on, notably in Saudi Arabia, to supply weapons and money to be used against the hated Persian Shi’a. The Azerbaijanis have the independent state of Azerbaijan next door, no longer controlled from Moscow, with a porous border through which weapons, and soldiers, can flow. The Balochis of Iran have fellow Balochis in Pakistan — again, with a porous border — who might, though quiet now, offer support, and if need be refuge, to Iranian Balochis. The Kurds in Iran know there are millions of fellow Kurds, many now well-armed and battle-hardened, just across Iran’s border, in Syria and Iraq. This moment provides a unique opportunity for the Kurds. In Syria, the civil war has sapped the strength of the regime in Damascus, which used to have no trouble keeping its Kurds under tight control. Having enjoyed several years of autonomy, as America’s closest ally against ISIS in Syria, the Kurds in Rojava (in eastern Syria), are not about to relinquish it. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s Arab soldiers killed 182,000 Kurds in Operation Anfal. There was no possibility then, in the late 1980s, of Iraqi Kurds helping Kurds in Iran; they could not even protect themselves against mass murder. In 1991, however, the Americans established an air umbrella over Iraqi Kurdistan, providing cover against air attacks, and when Saddam was overthrown, Iraqi Kurdistan enjoyed an autonomy that it still possesses. The Kurds turned out to be, both in Iraq and Syria, America’s most effective allies against the Islamic State. Supplied both with American weapons, and what they recovered from ISIS, they could help the Iranian Kurds become a potent threat to the regime.

Was the attack on the military parade in Ahvaz a unique event, or is it, as many still hope, and as the Iranian clerics fear, the first shot in a series of separatist volleys to be fired by Arabs, and Kurds, and Balochis, and Azerbaijanis, against an increasingly desperate, improvident, and frantic regime?

First published in Jihad Watch.