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Iran is gloating now that it has seized its public enemy No. 1. On Feb. 22, Iranian agents allegedly intercepted Abdolmalek Rigi, leader of Jundallah, a Sunni extremist group that has waged a low-level war against Tehran for the better part of a decade, killing hundreds. According to state media, Rigi, 27, was on a flight bound for Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, from Dubai when the Iranians forced the plane to land at the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. A day later, Iran's Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi hailed Rigi's arrest as proof of "the power of the Islamic Republic...
...Istanbul court Thursday to testify to their involvement in the alleged coup plot - are arrested pending trial. "Turkey is clearly in uncharted territory now and it is very difficult to predict how this crisis could evolve," Wolfango Piccoli, an analyst for the London-based think tank Eurasia Group, wrote in a report on Wednesday. (See pictures of Obama in Turkey...
What's more likely - and more intriguing - is the tacit involvement and cooperation of Pakistan. Jundallah, which means "Soldiers of God" in Arabic, has operated since 2002 in the borderlands between Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Tehran has long suspected that the group receives tactical support from forces within Pakistan, including the same elements in the country's notorious military intelligence that helped form the Afghan Taliban. If Islamabad was involved in Rigi's capture, the move, combined with recent arrests of senior Taliban leaders living on Pakistani soil, could be a sign of the country's new seriousness at getting...
Jundallah draws its recruits from the Baluch, an ethnic group whose historical homeland lies on both sides of Iran and Pakistan's desert border. The group says its aim is to fight for Baluch economic and political rights in Iran's marginalized southwest. But they are set apart from other Baluch outfits warring on the Pakistani side against Islamabad by their staunchly religious character. "The Baluch nationalists aren't really sectarian," says Syed Adnan, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School for International Studies in Singapore. "Jundallah sees itself fighting a Sunni war against the Shi'a Islamic Republic...
That religious zeal has led some analysts to speculate whether Jundallah has organizational links with al-Qaeda. The group raised its profile in 2005 by kidnapping a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and supposedly launching a botched assassination attempt on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Jundallah cemented its terrorist credentials in the past two years, with three bombings, two of which were suicide attacks. The most recent blast, last October in the Iranian border city of Pishin, killed at least 40 people, including many civilians. It also convinced Tehran that Jundallah was Iran's greatest internal security threat...