Posted on 04/03/2007 3:34:02 PM PDT by Alter Kaker
A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News.
The group, called Jundullah, is made up of members of the Baluchi tribe and operates out of the Baluchistan province in Pakistan, just across the border from Iran.
It has taken responsibility for the deaths and kidnappings of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials.
U.S. officials say the U.S. relationship with Jundullah is arranged so that the U.S. provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order or "finding" as well as congressional oversight.
Tribal sources tell ABC News that money for Jundullah is funneled to its youthful leader, Abd el Malik Regi, through Iranian exiles who have connections with European and Gulf states.
Jundullah has produced its own videos showing Iranian soldiers and border guards it says it has captured and brought back to Pakistan.
The leader, Regi, claims to have personally executed some of the Iranians.
"He used to fight with the Taliban. He's part drug smuggler, part Taliban, part Sunni activist," said Alexis Debat, a senior fellow on counterterrorism at the Nixon Center and an ABC News consultant who recently met with Pakistani officials and tribal members.
"Regi is essentially commanding a force of several hundred guerrilla fighters that stage attacks across the border into Iran on Iranian military officers, Iranian intelligence officers, kidnapping them, executing them on camera," Debat said.
Most recently, Jundullah took credit for an attack in February that killed at least 11 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard riding on a bus in the Iranian city of Zahedan.
Last month, Iranian state television broadcast what it said were confessions by those responsible for the bus attack.
They reportedly admitted to being members of Jundullah and said they had been trained for the mission at a secret location in Pakistan.
The Iranian TV broadcast is interspersed with the logo of the CIA, which the broadcast blamed for the plot.
A CIA spokesperson said "the account of alleged CIA action is false" and reiterated that the U.S. provides no funding of the Jundullah group.
Pakistani government sources say the secret campaign against Iran by Jundullah was on the agenda when Vice President Dick Cheney met with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in February.
A senior U.S. government official said groups such as Jundullah have been helpful in tracking al Qaeda figures and that it was appropriate for the U.S. to deal with such groups in that context.
Some former CIA officers say the arrangement is reminiscent of how the U.S. government used proxy armies, funded by other countries including Saudi Arabia, to destabilize the government of Nicaragua in the 1980s.
While that's technically true, it seems to miss the forest for the trees. The same Baluchi tribesmen who are attacking (right now) only military targets in Iran are, in neighboring Pakistan harboring large numbers of Taliban and Al Qaeda.
It seems a bit odd (and perhaps myopic) that the US would be supporting the same people in Iran whom it is fighting in Pakistan. Remember that Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are both Pakistani Baluchis.
The Baluchis are Sunni extremists and I fail to see how they are in any way preferable to Shi'ite extremists (the Iranian Revolutionary Guard).
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Not likely. This area of iran is awash in weapons, drugs, bandits and remnants of the Taliban. Our CIA doesn't operate everywhere and our 'ally' Pakistan considers this version of jundallah (as opposed to the pali version) a terrorist threat.
All recognized sources (Jamestown, Stratfor, etc) posit that this jundallah is not looking to topple tehran but wants to establish a taliban-style autonomous region that would be supported by the opium traffic that runs unhindered through there now.
I would love to see the President dispatch an army of Federal Marshals to occupy the offices of the damned new networks. Then Jail the maggots responsible for these stories and the editors for treason.
Thats right. That's what makes them very good at what they do. We are not proposing to give Iran to the Baluchis - Oh maybe a few thousand square miles of sand in Southwestern Iran for helping in the overthrow - but not the reigns of power over all of Iran and its nuke program.
And thats what makes the Baluchi more desirable than the IRG....the Baluchis are a tribe, given at times to terrorist acts, but generally they want to be left alone.
The Iranians on the other hand are a State power, developing nukes, have a full blown military, have ICBM's of 2500km range ready for warheads(which they are developing concurrently with nuke bomb development) and have vowed to push Israel into the sea...and bring terrorism to the heartland of America. They support Hezbolla in Lebanon and, no doubt Hezbolla cells in the US.
I'm not sure the Baluchi's and the Taliban are buddies. KSM may have been an exception, swayed by bin Laden. The Baluchi, as I understand, inhabit an area where Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan all meet. That is not close to the Wazeristan area of the Paki/Afghan border where the Taliban are holed up. But I realize that geography isn't everything. Yousef, in fact, may have been working for Saddam's secret service, the Mukhabarat. After the 1993 WTC bombing he traveled on an Iraqi passport with a cover name that came from a Kuwaiti killed in Saddams invasion. [Google "Who Is Ramzi Yousef and why it is important" written by Laurie Mylorie in 1995, a Clinton Middle East adviser who is one of the brightest lights on terrorism and written several books critical of Clinton! Its long...but fascinating. Traces the probable history of Ramzi. The Clinton administration sought to bury Mylorie's testimony to the 911 Commission]
Bottom line: the enemy of my enemy is my friend and Iran is a far greater threat than the Baluchi tribe.
They don't need our help and we don't need to be in bed with them. They enemy of our enemy is not always our friend, sometimes it is just another enemy.
I know of no other way to deal in the Middle East. We are in a war for "respect"....and "fear" is what substitutes for respect in the Middle East.
oh...it should be ethical.
The Democrats wanted to see the Reagan Administration to go down...but that survived.
Did Ollie North go to jail?
We all want to see the Democrats take over in 2008. They will become the most incompetent administration since Jimmy Carter....watch it...they will tear down the Patriot Act and put up the Gorelick wall again.
We don’t have to rely on ABC, NBC or CBS for our news anymore.
No, but he was despised by the left and his name was the new four-letter word for Democrats (much like Newt later on) and he disappeared off the radar for some time until the dust settled. If I recall correctly, the onset of the Persian Gulf War, and with the help of FOX News, he started making his way back into the talk show green rooms as an expert analyist.
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