Word: baluchistan
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...Baluchistan, the cooperation of old has shifted to a more guarded mutual distrust. On Oct. 18, Jundullah, a Baluch militia based on Pakistani soil struck the Iranian border city of Pishin, killing 41, including a number of senior figures in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. A week later, Pakistani troops detained 11 Iranian agents who had infiltrated across the border, possibly in a mission aimed against Jundullah. They were eventually released, but the incidents spotlighted the uncomfortable place Baluchistan occupies in both Tehran and Islamabad's internal affairs - and their dealings with each other...
...shadow of this "Af-Pak" frontier, another conflict has grown new life in recent years and, according to experts, poses a possibly greater existential threat to the Pakistani state. The province of Baluchistan, situated along Pakistan's west and northwest borders with Iran and Afghanistan, comprises more than 40% of Pakistan's landmass but less than 5% of its people. Its unforgiving deserts nearly annihilated the armies of Alexander the Great as they marched home. The native Baluch, descendants of nomadic tribes who roamed these arid wastes, number around five million and have for years complained of marginalization and mistreatment...
...problem, and it's not a velvet revolution or Israel's threat to bomb its nuclear facilities. No, what really keeps the mullahs up at night is the specter of ethnic and sectarian conflict - more attacks like the bombing on Oct. 18 in the remote southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan, which killed 42 people, including five senior officers of the Revolutionary Guards Corps. The country's leaders cannot help but worry that the same divisions ripping apart Afghanistan and Pakistan are about to visit them...
...leaders that was organized by the Revolutionary Guards to improve dialogue between the two communities. A second bomber struck a vehicle containing several Guards officers. The dead included the lieutenant commander of the Guards' ground forces in all of Iran as well as the Guards commander of the Sistan-Baluchistan region...
...been a favorite target of insurgents. In February, John Solecki, the head of the U.N. refugee agency's office in Baluchistan, was kidnapped by Baluch separatist fighters and held for two months before being released. In June, the U.N. was forced to pull its staff out of Peshawar, the capital of the lawless North-West Frontier Province, after a vehicle laden with explosives slammed into the side of a hotel in the city, killing 17 people. Just hours after Monday's attack, the U.N. said all of its offices in Islamabad would be closed indefinitely. That could severely hamper relief...