Word: jundallah
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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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...
...cracking down on Jundallah, for all of Iran's own extensive intelligence networks, proved difficult. "There are a lot of ungoverned spaces along this border," says Kamran Bokhari, regional director for the Middle East and South Asia at Stratfor, a global intelligence firm based in Austin, Texas. Like other groups in the region, Jundallah exploited illicit smuggling routes between Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, possibly trading in arms and narcotics. Though there's little clear evidence, analysts suspect Jundallah received support and succor from a web of shadowy sources, including perhaps Saudi, Pakistani, Israeli and even U.S. intelligence agents...
Experts say Jundallah may have served, for a time, as a tool of strategic depth for Islamabad, much in the same way it has allowed the anti-Indian terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba and the leadership of the Afghan Taliban to exist in safe havens in Pakistan. "Rigi was a lever with which to have some leverage with Iran, a check Pakistan could cash in," says Bokhari...