{"id":10235,"date":"2019-10-21T10:06:48","date_gmt":"2019-10-21T06:36:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/?p=10235"},"modified":"2021-01-21T19:28:24","modified_gmt":"2021-01-21T15:58:24","slug":"mek-and-war-agenda-in-trump-admin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/posts\/10235","title":{"rendered":"MEK and War Agenda in Trump Admin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trying to Exploit Iran\u2019s Diverse Ethnic Population to Advance a War Agenda<\/strong><\/p>\n

On September 25, during the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI)\u2014a pro-Israel, anti-Iran lobby group\u2014held a \u201csummit\u201d in New York that was attended by, among others, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer, and Sigal Mandelker, the outgoing Under Secretary of Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, as well as diplomats from Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. As usual, tough rhetoric was uttered by all the speakers, and threats were made.<\/p>\n

The day before the summit, another meeting was held that had allegedly been organized by Mark Wallace, the CEO of UANI, although it is widely believed that UANI was behind the meeting. The participants in the meeting were supposedly representatives of various Iranian opposition groups in exile, as well as ethnic secessionist groups. The meeting was, however, dominated by the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a group that until 2011 was listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization and is despised by all Iranians due to its alliance with the regime of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War and other acts viewed by virtually all Iranians as treason. Also present were the National Council of Resistance of Iran, MEK\u2019s political arm, and the Organization of Iranian American Communities, another MEK front group. A fourth group, the U.S. Foundation for Liberty and Human Rights, appears to be linked with MEK, as the content of its website uses the same rhetoric as the MEK. Representatives of six ethnic groups also attended the meeting, none of which has any significant support inside Iran as best one can tell.<\/p>\n

One of the groups participating in the gathering was the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA). Ahwaz, or Ahvaz, is the provincial capital of Khuzestan, the oil-rich province in southwestern Iran near the border with Iraq. ASMLA claims to represent the minority Iranian Arabs in Khuzestan who are supposedly suppressed by Tehran. The group, founded in 1999, has carried out several terrorist attacks in Iran over the past fifteen years, including in January 2006, in May 2015, in June 2016, in January 2017, and in October 2018.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the first time in history, since the Iranian revolution in 1978 and 1979, that such a broad cross-section of the leaders and delegates from Iranian dissident \u2026 groups have gathered in a convention for Iran\u2019s future.\u201d Wallace boasted despite the fact that those same \u201cleaders\u201d are either little known or are virtually universally despised in Iran.<\/p>\n

This is not the first time that the U.S. far right has tried to exploit Iran\u2019s diverse ethnic population in order to stir trouble in the country and advance its anti-Iran agenda. In fact, this practice has a long history that goes back to practically the 1979 revolution and the hostage crisis of 1979-1981. Since April 1980, when Washington cut diplomatic relations with Iran, successive U.S. administrations and the U.S. far right have seen exploiting ethnic grievances in Iran as a key route toward destabilizing the country.<\/p>\n

The Clinton administration imposed a package of sanctions against Iran in 1996 that the Bush administration renewed in 2001 and again, indefinitely, in 2006. After preventing the European trio of Britain, France, and Germany from reaching an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program in summer of 2005, the Bush administration launched its efforts to exploit Iran\u2019s ethnic minorities and the dissident groups that supposedly represent them, in order to either break up Iran into multiple weak states, or, at the very least, to stir up trouble and destabilize the country.<\/p>\n

That strategy has a long history in the Middle East. Washington, for example\u2014acting at the behest of the Shah of Iran\u2014backed a Kurdish insurgency in Iraq until 1975. It has been best exemplified in the ways in which Israel has applied it to some of its Arab neighbors. In February 1982, three months before Israel invaded Lebanon in support of the Christian Falange militia, the Likud strategist Oded Yinon published an article [in Hebrew, whose translation was published by Israel Shahak, the Israeli academic and civil-rights advocate] in which he called on Israel\u2019s leadership to adopt a policy of fragmenting the Arab world into a mosaic of ethnic and confessional groupings. \u201cEvery kind of inter-Arab confrontation would prove to be advantageous to Israel,\u201d he argued, urging that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the Balkanization of the surrounding Arab states into smaller and weaker states.<\/p>\n

Building on Yinon\u2019s analysis ten years later, neoconservative historian Bernard Lewis\u2014who would become a key informal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney in the run-up and immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq\u2014wrote in an essay in the journal Foreign Affairs:<\/p>\n

Another possibility, which could even be precipitated by [Islamic] fundamentalism, is what as of late has become fashionable to call \u2018Lebanonization.\u2019 Most of the states of the Middle East \u2013 Egypt is an obvious exception \u2013 are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates \u2013 as happened in Lebanon \u2013 into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties. If things go badly and central governments falter and collapse, the same could happen, not only in the countries of the existing Middle East, but also in the newly independent Soviet republics\u2026<\/p>\n

In their infamous \u201cA Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,\u201d the policy document written in 1996 for Benjamin Netanyahu, the then-newly elected Prime Minister of Israel, Richard Perle et al. suggested that Israel should \u201cwork closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll-back some of its most dangerous threats [meaning Iran and Iraq].\u201d David Wurmser, one of the authors of the same report who served on Cheney\u2019s national security staff from 2003 to 2007, went further, writing in a lengthier report that Syria and Iraq could easily fragment into separate ethno-sectarian segments, \u201ca development that would enhance the security of Israel and the West.\u201d<\/p>\n

These ideas were clearly picked up by the Bush administration and later applied to Iran. \u201cIn the past six months, Israel and the United States have also been working together in support of a Kurdish resistance group known as the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan [known as PJAK or PEJAK],\u201d Seymour Hersh reported in November 2006. \u201cThe group has been conducting clandestine cross-border forays into Iran, I was told by a government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon civilian leadership, as `part of an effort to explore alternative means of applying pressure on Iran.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In February 2007, the Telegraph of London reported that:<\/p>\n

CIA officials are understood to be helping opposition militias among the numerous ethnic minority groups clustered in Iran\u2019s border regions. In the past year there has been a wave of unrest in ethnic minority border areas of Iran, with bombing and assassination campaigns against soldiers and government officials\u2026 Funding for their separatist causes comes directly from the CIA\u2019s classified budget but is now \u2018no great secret,\u2019 according to one former high-ranking CIA official in Washington.<\/p>\n

In the same month, Cheney himself traveled to Pakistan and met with its then-president, General Pervez Musharraf. Pakistani government sources said at the time that the secret campaign against Iran by Jundullah was on the agenda when the two met. Jundallah was a Baluch terrorist group that for years staged terrorist attacks in Iran from its bases in Pakistan. In an interview later that month, Cheney referred to the Jundallah terrorists as \u201cguerrillas\u201d in an apparent effort to lend them legitimacy.<\/p>\n

In April 2007, ABC News reported that, according to Pakistani and U.S. intelligence officials, Jundallah had been secretly encouraged and advised by U.S. officials since 2005.<\/p>\n

In an interview with National Public Radio in June 2008, Hersh explained how the Bush Administration\u2019s policy of \u201cmy enemy\u2019s enemy is my friend\u201d led it to support Jundallah and MEK. The next month, Hersh quoted Robert Baer, a former CIA clandestine officer who had worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, as saying, \u201cThe Baluchis [a small ethnic minority group residing in Iran\u2019s and Pakistan\u2019s provinces of Baluchistan] are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda. These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers\u2014in this case, it\u2019s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we\u2019re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.\u201d Baer repeated those assertions in the fall of 2008 at a symposium co-organized by this author on U.S.-Iran relations at the University of Southern California.<\/p>\n

In the same article, Hersh also stated that the MEK received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the U.S., and that PJAK, \u201cwhich has also been reported to be covertly supported by the United States,\u201d operated against Iran from bases in northern Iraq for at least three years. PJAK used Iraqi Kurdistan as its base to carry out multiple raids into Iran that killed many civilians, as well as soldiers and policemen. At the time, the Bush administration denied helping PJAK, despite the fact that the group\u2019s chief, Rahman Haj-Ahmadi, had traveled to Washington around the same time, reportedly to gain financial and military support for his militia. In 2009, the Obama administration declared PJAK a terrorist organization.<\/p>\n

PJAK is still active in the border area between Iran, Turkey, and Iraq. When in December of 2017 there were scattered demonstrations in several Iranian cities against the terrible state of the Iranian economy, PJAK issued a statement asking people to rise up. It carried out terrorist attacks inside Iran on 27 July 2019 that killed and injured scores of people.<\/p>\n

In December 2009, Selig Harrison reported in the New York Times that the Bush administration had provided support to Jundallah, as well some Kurdish groups operating in western Iran. According to his report, that assistance was sent through Pakistan\u2019s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, while the Kurdish groups received their support through Israel\u2019s Mossad.<\/p>\n

The Bush administration was not the only one that was trying to exploit the dissatisfaction of some of Iran\u2019s ethnic groups to destabilize the country. Israel and Saudi Arabia were also participants. In January 2012, Mark Perry reported how Mossad agents, using U.S. passports and posing as CIA agents, tried to recruit members of Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran.<\/p>\n

Jundallah\u2019s leader, Abdolmajid Rigi, was captured by Iran\u2019s security forces and executed in June 2010. The Obama administration put Jundallah on the terrorist list in November 2010. The group then split into Pakistani and Iranian branches. The former attacks Shiites in Pakistan, while the Iranian branch, known as Jaish ul-Adl, continues to carry out terrorist attacks and kidnappings in Sistan and Baluchistan province in southeastern Iran, near the border with Pakistan. It is widely believed in Iran that Jaish ul-Adl is supported by Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.<\/p>\n

The Kurds and Baluchis are not the only ethnic groups that the Bush administration and its allies tried to exploit. In a July 2008 article, Hersh also mentioned possible U.S. support for separatists in Khuzestan province. As already pointed out, over the past 15 years, Iranian-Arab separatists have carried out bombing and terrorist attacks in Khuzestan, the latest of which took place in October 2018, when they attacked during a military parade. An armed group, Ahvaziya, claimed responsibility for the attacks. Ahvaziya is part of the ASMLA group that participated in the Washington meeting of Iranian separatist groups.<\/p>\n

Iran has accused Saudi Arabia of funding, arming and training the group. After the attacks, Abdulkhalegh Abdulla, a former adviser to the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, wrote in a tweet that the attack was not terrorism because it was against Iran\u2019s military, and that the attacks were part of what Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, had threatened in May 2017, namely, that Saudi Arabia is \u201cnot waiting until there becomes a battle in Saudi Arabia,\u201d and so it \u201cwill work so that it becomes a battle for them in Iran.\u201d His tweet created deep anger in Iran.<\/p>\n

As the author recently reported, the Trump administration has decided to continue what the Bush administration began. Before he was appointed as Trump\u2019s national security adviser, in his \u201cmanifesto\u201d for getting the U.S. out of the nuclear agreement with Iran, John Bolton advocated U.S. support \u201cfor Kurdish national aspirations, including Kurds in Iran\u201d and providing \u201cassistance to Balochis, Khuzestan Arabs, Kurds, and others\u2026\u201d After his appointment, Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Brian Hook\u2014who is the State Department\u2019s Special Representative for Iran and directs its \u201cIran Action Group\u201d\u2014met with some of the leaders of Iran\u2019s Kurdish groups. Last June, Abdullah Mohtadi and Mustafa Hijri\u2014who lead, respectively, the Iranian Communist Kurdish group Komala and the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran [KDPI]\u2014travelled to Washington, with Mohtadi reportedly meeting with Pompeo and Hijri meeting with State Department officials. Komala\u2019s office in Washington has registered with the Justice Department as a lobbying group to \u201cestablish solid and durable relations\u201d with the Trump administration.<\/p>\n

Both groups have carried out terrorist attacks inside Iran, and, under the guise of calling for a federal system, both have separatist tendencies. The separatist nature of the KDPI became clear when, back in 2012, Hijri asked the U.S. to declare Iran\u2019s Kurdistan province a \u201cno-fly zone,\u201d so that his forces could attack government forces freely and eventually secede from Iran. Hijri has also called for \u201cregime change\u201d in Iran, and has declared the Islamic Republic \u201ca common enemy\u201d of the Kurds and Israel, asking the Jewish state for support.<\/p>\n

The attempt by UANI, a group that reportedly receives a lot of its funding from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to provoke ethnic strife in Iran may well lead to more bloodshed, but it will likely ultimately fail. Iranians of diverse backgrounds have lived together side-by-side and have preserved their nation for thousands of years. Iran\u2019s true opposition inside the country\u2014the reformists, religious-nationalists, secular leftists, labor groups, human rights activists, and others\u2014and its supporters in the diaspora reject discrimination against minorities, ethnic tensions, economic sanctions, military threats, and foreign intervention. In the democratic Iran that the true opposition will eventually achieve, all Iranians, regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or gender, will be equal.<\/p>\n

Muhammad Sahimi is a Professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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