Iran has to face Daesh militants at home

It was a warm summer morning in Tehran when Daesh militants — some dressed as women — staged a rare attack in the Iranian capital, opening fire at the nation’s parliament and outside the shrine of its revolutionary leader, The Washington Post reported.

The assault in June, stunning in both its symbolism and execution, left 18 people dead and caught Iranian security forces off-guard. It was the first Daesh attack in Iran, whose Shiite Muslim majority the militants regard as apostates.

In recent months, Daesh has stepped up its efforts to target Iran, releasing a stream of propaganda, vowing more bloodshed and boosting recruitment among Iran’s minority Sunnis, some of whom carried out the June attack.

Iran is a target for the cash, guns and troops it has poured into the battle against the jihadists, whose lightning ascent in Iraq and Syria three years ago threatened Iran’s security. Last week, Iranian authorities arrested more than two dozen people they said planned to bomb religious sites with smuggled explosives. Daesh then threatened to “cut the necks” of Iran’s Shiites in a new video featuring a Farsi-speaking militant.

The escalation could inflame a region already beset by conflict, and stoke domestic instability in Iran. There, marginalized Sunnis have grown increasingly receptive to the Islamic State’s appeal. Situated along Iran’s porous borders, the communities, which make up about 10 percent of Iran’s population of 80 million, may make fertile ground for a jihadist group working to replenish its ranks.

“Iran is fighting Daesh on multiple fronts, and Iraq and Syria is certainly one of them,” said Dina Esfandiary, a MacArthur fellow at the Center for Science and Security Studies at King’s College London. “But the fight against the Islamic State inside Iran has become even more important.”

Suffering decades of neglect, Iran’s Sunni communities are “a good target for Daesh,” said Esfandiary, who co-wrote a paper on Iran’s policies toward the militants. “It’s a population ripe for recruitment,” she said.

Indeed, Iran’s Sunni populations hail mainly from two ethnic minorities, including the Kurds who live along the Iraq border in the west, and the Baloch community in the southeast near Pakistan. In both places, poverty, repression and black market economies have allowed Sunni radicalism to creep in and take root.

Baloch areas in particular are “severely underdeveloped,” according to the State Department’s 2016 human rights report on Iran, and unemployment hovers at about 40 percent. In Kurdish communities, residents complain of widespread discrimination and arbitrary arrests. Rights groups have slammed Iran for the detention and execution of dozens of Sunni Kurds, often for unspecified crimes.

It is unclear how many Iranians have joined Daesh, but estimates from Kurdish media and analysts vary from dozens to hundreds. In the group’s first Persian-language video, released in March, at least one of the militants identified as Baloch.

According to a report from the International Center for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague, seven Iranians carried out suicide operations for Daesh from November 2015 to December 2016.

“The Iranians do have to worry about it. The numbers aren’t insignificant,” said Alex Vatanka, senior fellow and Iran expert at the Middle East Institute in Washington. Even if only a few end up radicalized, he said, “once they have the support of Daesh machinery to carry out attacks, they can do real harm, as we’ve seen with the attack in June.”

At least four of the five assailants came from the same Kurdish town in western Iran, about 10 miles from the Iraq border, officials said. The attackers had all belonged to local Islamist militant groups before traveling abroad to fight for Daesh.

Source : Mena