Iran vows revenge over suicide bombing

Michael Theodoulou, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: October 19. 2009 6:17PM UAE / October 19. 2009 2:17PM GMT

A wounded man arrives at a hospital in the southeastern Iranian city of Pisheen following a suicide attack during a meeting of the elite Revolutionary Guards. AFP

Iran’s armed forces last night accused the United States and Britain of involvement in the worst terrorist attack in the Islamic republic in many years and warned of revenge after a suicide bomber assassinated five senior Revolutionary Guards commanders and killed at least 37 other people.

The attack came at an acutely sensitive time for Iran, which is still dealing with the fallout from post-election political turmoil and today resumes delicate nuclear negotiations with major world powers in Vienna.

At least 42 people died in the bombing in a lawless and turbulent south-eastern province bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan that has been at the centre of a simmering Sunni insurgency.

Jundallah, a shadowy local Sunni terrorist group led by Abdulmalik Rigi, 26, who is Iran’s most wanted man, claimed responsibility.

His group, which is thought to have between 100 and 1,000 armed fighters, has carried out other deadly attacks in the past on the 120,000-strong Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). But the elite force and state media yesterday also accused the “global arrogance”, which is official parlance for the United States, and Britain of involvement. The accusations will raise tensions during the nuclear negotiations.

The United States swiftly condemned the “act of terrorism” and said it mourned the “loss of innocent lives”. A state department spokesman said: “Reports of US involvement are completely false.”

The headquarters of Iran’s armed forces blamed the bombing on “terrorists” backed by “the Great Satan America and its ally Britain”, according to a statement reported by the country’s semi-official Fars news agency. “Not in the distant future we [Iran] will take revenge.”

The bombing follows a major shuffling of senior commanders in the IRGC and its affiliated Basij militia this month. The loss of several top figures in the force yesterday will mean more restructuring.

Among those killed were the IRGC’s deputy head, Gen Nourali Shoushtari, and the force’s commander in Sistan-Balochistan province, Gen Rajabali Mohammadzadeh, Iranian media said. Shoushtari was also a senior commander of the elite Qods (Jerusalem) Force, an IRGC special operations unit that handles activities abroad.

The United States accuses the Qods Force of backing militants in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan.

The bomber detonated his explosives belt when IRGC officers were heading to a meeting with local tribal leaders to promote unity between local Shia and Sunni communities, Iranian reports said. “The plotters had a religious motive – to prevent any such rapprochement,” an Iranian analyst, who declined to be named, said in an interview.

Iran’s interior ministry said: “The martyrs include several innocent Shia and Sunni people, tribal chiefs and commanders of the Guards.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president, vowed to strike back at the perpetrators: “The criminals will soon get the response for their anti-human crimes,” he said, while accusing unspecified foreigners of involvement.

Jundallah’s campaign is one of several small-scale ethnic and religious insurgencies in Iran that have fuelled sporadic and sometimes deadly attacks in recent years – although none has amounted to a serious threat to the government.

But the latest strike on Iran’s most powerful military institution is a blow to the regime’s attempts to foster an image of stability following the post-election unrest. The IRGC and Basij quelled the huge street protests against Mr Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election in June.

The political challenge, however, remains: Mir Hossein Mousavi, the opposition leader, declared yesterday that he would press ahead with efforts to reform the republic despite the crackdown.

Some suspect the Iranian establishment will use the terrorist attack to intensify its repression against the opposition. But other experts say influential conservatives want to avoid alienating the opposition further. Internal unity, they may argue, is needed to confront the Jundallah threat, which the regime portrays mainly as a western-driven external one.

Yesterday’s attack also enables Iran, which the United States has long accused of sponsoring terrorism, to argue that it is a victim of terrorism itself. The bombing will heighten Iran’s concerns about Sunni extremism spilling into its Sistan-Balochistan province. Tehran says Jundallah has ties to Sunni Islamist militants linked to al Qa’eda and the Taliban who operate across the province’s borders in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Jundallah claims it is struggling against official discrimination of Sunnis in impoverished Sistan-Balochistan by Iran’s Shiite rulers.

Iran’s ethnic Balochs are estimated to number between 1.5 million and two million. Most of them are Sunnis and are a majority in the province. Iran rejects allegations by western human rights groups that it discriminates against its ethnic and religious minorities.

Iran’s long border area with Pakistan and Afghanistan has long been afflicted by drug trafficking, smuggling, banditry and kidnapping. Iran has lost thousands of security forces in recent years, fighting heavily armed drug traffickers smuggling Afghan-produced heroin and opium to markets in Europe.

Jundallah has killed many Iranian security forces and civilians in south-eastern Iran since it burst onto the scene six years ago. In February 2007, a booby-trapped car struck an IRGC bus in Sistan-Balochistan, killing 13 people: Jundallah was said to have claimed responsibility.

In May this year, the group also claimed responsibility for a suicide bomb attack in Zahedan, the provincial capital, that killed 25 people. Jundallah boasted that its intention was to undermine stability before Iran’s presidential elections in June. It sought to justify the mosque carnage by claiming that the victims were Basij militiamen meeting secretly to co-ordinate election strategy. Several Jundallah members were convicted in the attack and hanged in July in what Tehran hoped would deal a crippling blow to the group.

In an interview with Al-Arabiya television in December, the Jundallah leader threatened attacks in the Iranian capital if the government did not grant Iran’s Sunnis their “full rights”. If Tehran complied, he said, Jundallah would lay down its weapons and “engage in political life”. He also denied his group is connected in any way to the United States.

Mr Rigi’s captured brother, Abdolhamid, was due to be executed with those hanged in July. It was thought his life was spared to use him as a pawn in any negotiations with Jundallah.

mtheodoulou@thenational.ae