By Brett Daniel Shehadey
Special Contributor for In Homeland Security
On Friday morning, Iran fired six mortars in Mashkail, Pakistan, where Pakistanis military security forces are alleged to have fired back in response; at which point, Iran ceased fire, according to open sources.
Iran accuses Pakistan of failing to stop Sunni Jundallah (“Soldiers of God”) attacks on its forces across their border and for the sectarian killing of minority Shiites within Pakistan. Mortar fire from Iran into Pakistan was reported last week but this time Pakistan fired is reported to have fired back in response and warning.
Jundallah is considered to be a terrorist organization by the U.S. as of 2010. The U.S. State Department described their activities as: “resulting in the death and maiming of scores of Iranian civilians and government officials…uses a variety of terrorist tactics, including suicide bombings, ambushes, kidnappings and targeted assassinations.”
Last year, Tehran executed 16 Jundallah terrorists after killing 14 of their kidnapped border guards.Two of Iranian border guards have been killed just last week by the group. In February, five were taken hostage and hid in Pakistan until released.
Cross-border raids by Iranian security officials, as a result of Jundallah cross-border militancy, are a potential spark to a much larger instability factor between the Iran and Pakistan.
This last Saturday, Iranian forces were reported to have killed a Pakistan Frontier Corps guard in Mand district. The Iranian Ambassador to Pakistan was summoned as a result to explain the incident. That same day, Pakistani Army Chief, General Raheel Sharif, told cadets, “Sentiments of good will and amity notwithstanding, let there be no doubt that any aggression against our beloved country will get a befitting response and no sacrifice will be too great in this sacred cause. We desire regional stability and relationship based on equality and mutual respect.” The implied topic of the day was Iranian military activity in the Southwest.
Any prior security cooperation Iran and Pakistan had before, such as the intelligence-sharing gained over the past year, is threatened to fall apart as Iran ignores the concept of borders altogether in dealing with their favorite terrorists. Moreover, this is will appear to be an opportune time for Tehran to play more of an active role and take advantage of an over-stretched Pakistani military, whose forces are dealing with a host of terrorist groups of their own and are positioned strongly along the Pakistan-India border but not enough in the Southwest. They have not taken the Jundallah terrorist group as a serious threat to Pakistan, which operates with a few thousand in and out of the Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan Province and Pakistan’s Balochistan Province. Historically there was no border and they were collectively known as Balochistan/Baluchistan Region, so there are deep historic, cultural and ethnic issues in addition to sectarian conflict. Observers from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan note that in the past 10 years, 300,000 Shiites and Hindus have migrated under threat.
In spite of security officials from both Islamabad and Tehran trying to make the security relationship better through meetings and some recent PR amidst the latest volley of rattling mortars is not enough to quell tensions. Suspicions by Tehran of a proxy war involving the Balochi extremists, dating back to Saddam Hussein’s anti-Iranian efforts, are equally suspicious of the Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharrif and his special relations with the Saudi Royal Family and the Jundallah. Such deep rooted mistrust is bound to be tested more and more over time.
Iran’s Interior Minister said, “If Pakistan doesn’t take the needed steps to fight against the terrorist groups, we will send our forces into Pakistani soil. We will not wait for this country.”
In Central Asia, we are especially seeing more regional states are mimicking the response of hegemons like the U.S. which will likely lead to greater stability. Rather than cooperating to fight the jihadist enemy and perhaps create a neutral zone, for example, Muslim states along sectarian lines would rather fight each other and miss the chance to fight the more insidious and long-term threat or destabilizing element.
Transnational sectarian jihad is flaring up all over. Southwest Pakistan is potentially the fault line of another major sectarian quake at some future date. Most importantly, it is another case that indicates that the boundaries of the traditional state continue to be violently and rapidly challenged by international jihad. Whether it is in the Sinai, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Iraq or Pakistan, how the governments respond to this transnational threat is equally important. In the case of failure or delay to obtain approval or permission by the host state, the threatened state will target and destroy jihadists networks, supply lines and national security threats without it and by an ‘any means necessary’ policy. In the case of Iran, they may take advantage of and create their own luck somewhat like Turkey versus Syria.
Potentially, the transnational jihadist threat leads to the collapse of borders in certain areas and a larger political conflict between neighbors that may eventually lead to them fighting a war against each other rather than the transnational terrorist groups. This must be monitored closely and prevented.
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