Aid to radical groups in Iran comes directly from the CIA's budget
By: Emile Tayyip
The U.S. has long been believed to be secretly funding separatist and radical groups to create chaos inside Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the government to give up its nuclear programme. CIA officials are helping opposition militias among the numerous ethnic minority groups clustered in Iran's border regions. The controversial campaign involves dealing with movements that use terrorist methods in pursuit of their goals against the Iranian regime.
And recently ABC News uncovered more scandals involving the matter: "He 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," Alexis Debat, a senior fellow on counterterrorism at the Nixon Center and an ABC News consultant, has been quoted recently as saying, in reference to Abdel-Malik Regi, alleged leader of Pakistani terror groups hired by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to carry out a series of deadly terrorist attacks inside Iran.
The CIA is supporting and funding a group, called Jundullah, which includes members of the Baluchi tribe, and responsible for many terrorist acts and violence in Iran. They operate from Pakistan's province of Baluchestan, just across the border from Iran, and have carried out kidnappings and terror raids, in which scores of civilians’ lives in Iran were lost.
Soldiers and officials in Iran were also target of some of those attacks.
According to the ABC report, which cited U.S. government sources, the CIA has been in close contact with the terror group’s leader since 2005. Regi has admitted to have personally executed some of the Iranian captives, according to the ABC News report.
Jundallah, a shadowy armed group, had been planning to assassinate Sunni and tribal leaders in an effort to spark tensions between the Shia and Sunni citizens in Sistan-Baluchestan province.
His groups has admitted carrying out an attack in the Iranian city Zahedan in February involving an explosive-laden car that ripped through a bus belonging to ground forces of Iran's
Revolutionary Guards Corps, killing at least 11 people and injuring 31 others.
Following the attack, the semi-official Fars news agency, which cited an "informed source", reported that explosive devices and arsenals used in a terrorist attack in the southeastern Iranian city of Zahedan came from the United States Also documents, photographs and film footage, showed that the explosives and arsenals used in the attack were American.
Iranian television had broadcast confessions by those responsible for the bus attack.
According to Pakistani government sources, the CIA’s covert terror campaign against Iran was on Vice President Dick Cheney’s agenda when he met with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf two months ago.
The past year witnessed a series of attacks targeting ethnic minority border areas of Iran. Relentless violence, including bombing and assassination campaigns against soldiers and government officials, resulted in a chaotic situation in the country that left a negative impact on the image of the current government.
Aid to separatists and radical groups comes directly from the CIA's classified budget but is now no great secret.
