Surprised to learn that the leading terrorist state (according to Bush) is suffering terrorist attacks? Don’t be:
Two grenades exploded Monday in a southwestern Iranian province known for unrest among its Arab population, wounding at least four people, the official Iranian news agency reported.
The grenades went off in restrooms in local government offices in Abadan and Dezful in Khuzestan province, the Islamic Republic News Agency said, citing official sources.
The agency described the blasts as “terrorist acts,” saying they wounded two people in each town.
Oil-rich Khuzestan has a history of violence involving members of Iran’s Arab minority. Several bombs exploded in the provincial capital of Ahvaz in January and last year.
An Iranian Arab insurgent group, the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz, claimed responsibility for the Jan. 24 blasts, which killed six people and wounded 46. The Iranian government blamed the bombings on Britain and United States, which denied any involvement.
An Iranian insurgency in Iran’s oil rich province of Khuzestan? I wonder where that comes from. Well, for some strange reason, Iran thinks it comes from us and our good friend Tony Blair:
Iran blames U.S., Britain for bombings
By Nasser Karimi, Associated Press Writer | January 25, 2006TEHRAN, IRAN –Iran’s president on Wednesday blamed “the occupiers of Iraq” — inferring the United States and Britain — for two bombings that killed at least nine people in the southwestern city of Ahvaz.
The foreign minister said the bombers were supported by the British military, which is based in southern Iraq. Ahvaz has a history of violence involving members of Iran’s Arab minority.
Now I wonder where they got that idea?
On Tuesday, Iran’s Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi said the attacks in Ahvaz were foreign-inspired and related to last year’s bombings in the same city.
In October, Iran blamed Britain for two blasts at an Ahvaz shopping mall that killed six people and wounded dozens.
Tehran also blamed June bombings that killed at least eight people on Iranian Arab extremists with ties to foreign governments, including British intelligence.
Britain has denied any connection to the Khuzestan unrest.
Tensions between the two countries have flared recently over Britain’s opposition to Iran’s resumption of nuclear activities.
Of course, there was also this story, which certainly adds fuel to the suspicion that the British forces may have been training and supplying Arab terrorists in Khuzestan:
In Basra on September 19, British troops clashed with Iraqi police and Shi’ite militia, who had ironically welcomed the toppling of Saddam two years ago. The police had arrested two British undercover commandos who possessed suspicious bomb-making materials. British troops launched an armored raid on the jail to free their agents, fighting the same Iraqi police they had earlier trained. Iraqis had thought it strange that British agents would be caught with the types of bombs associated with insurgents attacking “Coalition” troops, and some assumed that the agents were trying to pit Iraqi religious groups against each other.
Yet at the same time, bombs were going off across the border in Khuzestan. In June, a series of car bombings in Ahvaz (75 miles from Basra) killed 6 people. In August, Iran arrested a group of Arab separatist rebels, and accused them of links to British intelligence in Basra. In September, explosions hit Khuzestani cities, halting crude oil transfers from onshore wells. On October 15, two major bomb explosions in an Ahvaz market killed 4 and injured 95. A November 3 analysis in Asia Times blames Iraqi Sunni insurgents for the bombings.
Iranian officials accused Britain of backing the attacks, and tied the rebel bombs to the British commando incident in Basra. The Daily Star of Beirut reported on October 17 that Iranian officials “point to Western collusion in the sudden spike this year in ethnic unrest in the strategic, oil-producing province of Khuzestan and describe it as proof of a shadowy war that is receiving far less coverage in the international press than events in Iraq. Since the beginning of 2005, riots and a bombing campaign timed to coincide with the June presidential elections rocked Khuzestan’s major cities.”
And who can forget (assuming you learned of it in the first place) that British commandos have previously been seized by Iran after crossing into Iranian waters in 2004:
“This morning, three British boats with eight people on board entered Iranian territorial waters. The Iranian navy, in accordance with their duties, seized these boats and arrested the crew,” spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said in a statement.
“They are currently being interrogated and an investigation is under way,” he added. Official sources said the small patrol boats were armed with heavy machine-guns, and identified the detained Britons as Royal Navy commandos.
It seems we are already at war with Iran, a war by proxy, using terrorists that we have trained, deployed, sheltered and exploited for “intelligence” on Iran’s nuclear program.
MEK has long been controversial because of its history of violent attacks in Iran, its relationship with Saddam’s regime and its background as a quasi-religious, quasi-Marxist radical resistance group founded in the era of the late Iranian shah. In 1997, the Clinton administration put MEK on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist groups. MEK’s U.S. supporters, among whom at one point numbered dozens of members of Congress, charged that the Clinton administration only labeled MEK as a terrorist group as part of an ill-conceived attempt to improve relations with the ayatollahs who currently run Iran. However, the Bush administration added two alleged MEK front organizations to the State Department’s terrorist list in 2003.
Despite the group’s notoriety, Bush himself cited purported intelligence gathered by MEK as evidence of the Iranian regime’s rapidly accelerating nuclear ambitions. At a March 16 press conference, Bush said Iran’s hidden nuclear program had been discovered not because of international inspections but “because a dissident group pointed it out to the world.” White House aides acknowledged later that the dissident group cited by the president is the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), one of the MEK front groups added to the State Department list two years ago.
Efforts at regime change by Bush and Blair have been in full force for some time now. Remember how they attempted to wrong foot Iraq? Do you think that these “provocations” might follow that same modus operandi, i.e., as a means to justify an attack or an invasion of Khuzestan? We’ll have to wait and see, but I don’t see anything at this point that indicates Bush has backed off his long standing effort to expand the war on terror to Iran.
