Iran guards 'killed in clash' on Pakistan border
Source: BBC
Fourteen Iranian border guards have been killed in a clash with gunmen on the border with Pakistan, the official Iranian news agency Irna says.
The clashes took place on Friday night in a mountainous region outside Saravan, a border town in south-east Iran.
Five border guards were wounded in the attack, Irna said.
An unnamed official quoted by the agency blamed "bandits or rebels opposed to the Islamic republic".
Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24682729
1000words
(7,051 posts)Is the Baloch insurgency that capable?
bemildred
(90,061 posts)As with the Kurds on the West. They (the Balochi resistance) have not given much evidence that I have seen of either winning or going away, on either side of the border, again like the Kurds.
Ethnic and religious boundaries rarely follow the colonial political borders drawn 100 years ago, and this is a continuing problem for the colonial successor states.
JI7
(89,264 posts)bemildred
(90,061 posts)It is also a "busy" area "geostategicallly", lots of people sticking their stick in and stirring a bit. This seems to be well organized, the perps gave a good account of themselves in the fight, if I was to guess, it is designed to stir up trouble, stave off peace, and things of that sort. But religious nuts are a possibility too. Often hard to tell them apart.
Igel
(35,356 posts)It's been going on for a couple of decades. There have been periods of this kind of insurgency before.
It's what happens when you get tired of being the objects of somebody else's empire. (We think of the US as being imperialist when it comes to Iran--but it's real easy to forget that the current Iran is the rump of a formerly larger empire and still contains subject peoples. Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs, Balochs, Tadzhiks ... They were conquered, occpuied, partly settled, and still kept in check when they dare to get uppity and dare to resist their Aryan overlords.)
muriel_volestrangler
(101,361 posts)The rebels were "linked to groups hostile to the regime", the attorney general of Sistan-Baluchistan province was quoted as saying.
They were hanged in prison in Zahedan, north-east of Saravan, where the border deaths took place overnight.
...
One report suggests they may already have been tried and convicted, but their executions brought forward following the ambush.