Category Archives: NSA Spying

Brennan and his Kill Drone Operation

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Catch him if you can, as speeches to one audience are very different from those to another audience. CIA Chief, John Brennan is the designer of the Obama drone program and ‘that’ kill list.

In part: No one else was double-checking the administration’s work, and making sure that what Brennan called the “surgical” approach was only killing bad guys and not simply peasants with guns, civilians whose deaths might prolong the conflict. It was a secret program with an ad hoc structure and no real oversight or outside checks — only John Brennan. The courts weren’t interested even when Americans started showing up on the kill lists, and Congress was lost in a confused thicket of jurisdictional limitations surrounding covert action in the military and CIA. As one congressional staffer told me last year, “No one has a 360-degree view of this.” That left only public opinion, and the White House had a strategy for that. *** Almost a year later, in May 2012, the New York Times revealed that the U.S. had developed a new way of counting casualties. Instead of two categories, the U.S. had only one: militant. The U.S. assumed that every adult male who was killed — whether their names were known or not — was guilty. There were no innocent among the dead. The whole thing was an accounting trick.

But, Obama declared he has a pen and a phone. He can change anything, and does. Meanwhile, the family of Dr. Weinstein, the USAID worker killed in the drone strike, did pay a ransom to get him released. So that pesky and common question remains often, what did the White House know and when did it know it?

President Obama secretly granted the Central Intelligence Agency more flexibility to conduct drone strikes targeting terror suspects in Pakistan than anywhere else in the world after approving more restrictive rules in 2013, according to a published report.

The Wall Street Journal, citing current and former U.S. officials, reported that Obama approved a waiver exempting the CIA from proving that militants targeted in Pakistan posed an imminent threat to the U.S. According to the paper, under that standard, the agency might have been prevented from carrying out a Jan. 15 strike that killed an American and an Italian who were held hostage by Al Qaeda-linked militants.

The deaths of Dr. Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto have renewed debate in Washington over what, if any, new limits should be put on the drone program. After announcing the deaths of Weinstein and Lo Porto on Thursday, Obama said that he had ordered a “full review,” but said the strike that killed the hostages was “fully consistent with the guidelines under which we conduct counterterrorism efforts in the region.”

The CIA conducts drone strikes in Pakistan as well as in Yemen, where it works alongside the military. The Pentagon has also conducted drone strikes in Somalia.

Drone strikes carried out by the CIA fall into two categories. Specific terror leaders are targeted due to their presence on a so-called “kill list.” Strikes that target anyone on a “kill list” must be approved personally by Obama. The second type of operation is a so-called “signature strike”, which does not need the president’s approval and can be carried out against any suspected group of militants. It was the latter type of operation that resulted in the hostages’ deaths on Jan. 15.

The Journal reports that while Obama issued a directive in 2013 aimed at eventually eliminated “signature strikes” in an effort to cut down on civilian deaths, officials say many of the changes specified in the directive either haven’t been implemented or have been works in progress.

The paper also reports that the CIA’s Pakistan drone strike program was initially exempted from the “imminent threat” requirement until the end of U.S. and NATO combat operations in Afghanistan. Officials told the Journal that waiver was extended when Obama decided to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond the original withdrawal date of December 2014, though it is not clear exactly when this happened.

If the “imminent threat” requirement had been extended to Pakistan, the Journal reports, the CIA would have had to carry out more surveillance of the suspected militants, possibly preventing the fatal Jan. 15 mission from being launched.

In addition to Weinstein and Lo Porto, the drone strike also killed two Americans who had leadership roles with Al Qaeda. U.S. officials told the Associated Press late last week that the compound was targeted because intelligence showed it was frequented by Al Qaeda leaders.

Late Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that heat sensors and other surveillance tolls indicated that there were only four people at the compound, not the six who were ultimately killed. Analysts tell the paper that they now believe Weinstein and Lo Porto were kept underground, either in a basement or a tunnel, which would have prevented them from being detected by heat sensors.

Obama’s Emails Hacked, Russia’s Cyberwar

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Russian Hackers Read Obama’s Unclassified Emails, Officials Say

WASHINGTON — Some of President Obama’s email correspondence was swept up by Russian hackers last year in a breach of the White House’s unclassified computer system that was far more intrusive and worrisome than has been publicly acknowledged, according to senior American officials briefed on the investigation.

The hackers, who also got deeply into the State Department’s unclassified system, do not appear to have penetrated closely guarded servers that control the message traffic from Mr. Obama’s BlackBerry, which he or an aide carries constantly.

But they obtained access to the email archives of people inside the White House, and perhaps some outside, with whom Mr. Obama regularly communicated. From those accounts, they reached emails that the president had sent and received, according to officials briefed on the investigation.

White House officials said that no classified networks had been compromised, and that the hackers had collected no classified information. Many senior officials have two computers in their offices, one operating on a highly secure classified network and another connected to the outside world for unclassified communications.

But officials have conceded that the unclassified system routinely contains much information that is considered highly sensitive: schedules, email exchanges with ambassadors and diplomats, discussions of pending personnel moves and legislation, and, inevitably, some debate about policy.

Officials did not disclose the number of Mr. Obama’s emails that were harvested by hackers, nor the sensitivity of their content. The president’s email account itself does not appear to have been hacked. Aides say that most of Mr. Obama’s classified briefings — such as the morning Presidential Daily Brief — are delivered orally or on paper (sometimes supplemented by an iPad system connected to classified networks) and that they are usually confined to the Oval Office or the Situation Room.

Still, the fact that Mr. Obama’s communications were among those hit by the hackers — who are presumed to be linked to the Russian government, if not working for it — has been one of the most closely held findings of the inquiry. Senior White House officials have known for months about the depth of the intrusion.

“This has been one of the most sophisticated actors we’ve seen,” said one senior American official briefed on the investigation.

Others confirmed that the White House intrusion was viewed as so serious that officials met on a nearly daily basis for several weeks after it was discovered. “It’s the Russian angle to this that’s particularly worrisome,” another senior official said.

While Chinese hacking groups are known for sweeping up vast amounts of commercial and design information, the best Russian hackers tend to hide their tracks better and focus on specific, often political targets. And the hacking happened at a moment of renewed tension with Russia — over its annexation of Crimea, the presence of its forces in Ukraine and its renewed military patrols in Europe, reminiscent of the Cold War.

Inside the White House, the intrusion has raised a new debate about whether it is possible to protect a president’s electronic presence, especially when it reaches out from behind the presumably secure firewalls of the executive branch.

Mr. Obama is no stranger to computer-network attacks: His 2008 campaign was hit by Chinese hackers. Nonetheless, he has long been a frequent user of email, and publicly fought the Secret Service in 2009 to retain his BlackBerry, a topic he has joked about in public. He was issued a special smartphone, and the list of those he can exchange emails with is highly restricted.

When asked about the investigation’s findings, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, Bernadette Meehan, said, “We’ll decline to comment.” The White House has also declined to provide any explanations about how the breach was handled, though the State Department has been more candid about what kind of systems were hit and what it has done since to improve security. A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment.

Officials who discussed the investigation spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the hacking. While the White House has refused to identify the nationality of the hackers, others familiar with the investigation said that in both the White House and State Department cases, all signs pointed to Russians.

On Thursday, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter revealed for the first time that Russian hackers had attacked the Pentagon’s unclassified systems, but said they had been identified and “kicked off.” Defense Department officials declined to say if the signatures of the attacks on the Pentagon appeared related to the White House and State Department attacks.

The discovery of the hacking in October led to a partial shutdown of the White House email system. The hackers appear to have been evicted from the White House systems by the end of October. But they continued to plague the State Department, whose system is much more far-flung. The disruptions were so severe that during the Iranian nuclear negotiations in Vienna in November, officials needed to distribute personal email accounts, to one another and to some reporters, to maintain contact.

Earlier this month, officials at the White House said that the hacking had not damaged its systems and that, while elements had been shut down to mitigate the effects of the attack, everything had been restored.

One of the curiosities of the White House and State Department attacks is that the administration, which recently has been looking to name and punish state and nonstate hackers in an effort to deter attacks, has refused to reveal its conclusions about who was responsible for this complex and artful intrusion into the government. That is in sharp contrast to Mr. Obama’s decision, after considerable internal debate in December, to name North Korea for ordering the attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, and to the director of national intelligence’s decision to name Iranian hackers as the source of a destructive attack on the Sands Casino.

This month, after CNN reported that hackers had gained access to sensitive areas of the White House computer network, including sections that contained the president’s schedule, the White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, said the administration had not publicly named who was behind the hack because federal investigators had concluded that “it’s not in our best interests.”

By contrast, in the North Korea case, he said, investigators concluded that “we’re more likely to be successful in terms of holding them accountable by naming them publicly.”

But the breach of the president’s emails appeared to be a major factor in the government secrecy. “All of this is very tightly held,” one senior American official said, adding that the content of what had been breached was being kept secret to avoid tipping off the Russians about what had been learned from the investigation.

Mr. Obama’s friends and associates say that he is a committed user of his BlackBerry, but that he is careful when emailing outside the White House system.

“The frequency has dropped off in the last six months or so,” one of his close associates said, though this person added that he did not know if the drop was related to the hacking.

Mr. Obama is known to send emails to aides late at night from his residence, providing them with his feedback on speeches or, at times, entirely new drafts. Others say he has emailed on topics as diverse as his golf game and the struggle with Congress over the Iranian nuclear negotiations.

George W. Bush gave up emailing for the course of his presidency and did not carry a smartphone. But after Mr. Bush left office, his sister’s email account was hacked, and several photos — including some of his paintings — were made public.

The White House is bombarded with cyberattacks daily, not only from Russia and China. Most are easily deflected.

The White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies put their most classified material into a system called Jwics, for Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. That is where top-secret and “secret compartmentalized information” traverses within the government, to officials cleared for it — and it includes imagery, data and graphics. There is no evidence, senior officials said, that this hacking pierced it.

An American Among the Dead in the U.S. CT Operation

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An American and an Italian held hostage by Al Qaeda were accidentally killed in a U.S. counterterrorism operation earlier this year, the White House said Thursday, in a stunning and tragic admission.

The White House also revealed that two American terror operatives were killed, but the revelation that hostages died — in an apparent drone strike — is leading to what President Obama called a “full review.”

Obama, speaking from the White House, expressed “grief and condolences” for the deaths of the hostages, American development expert Warren Weinstein and Italian national Giovanni Lo Porto.    

“As president and commander-in-chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations — including the one that inadvertently took the lives of Warren and Giovanni,” Obama said. “”I profoundly regret what happened. On behalf of the United States government offer our deepest apologies to the families.”

The White House said both men were “accidentally killed” in the operation in January. A senior defense official told Fox News the hostages were killed in a drone strike.

“No words can fully express our regret over this terrible tragedy,” the White House said in a statement.

“The operation targeted an Al Qaeda-associated compound, where we had no reason to believe either hostage was present, located in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” the White House said.

The White House revealed that two Americans working with Al Qaeda were killed, as well. Ahmed Farouq, an American Al Qaeda leader, was killed in the same operation in which the hostages died. American-born Al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn was killed in January in a separate incident, according to the White House.

The White House says Farouq and Gadahn were not targeted in the operations, and the U.S. did not have specific information indicating their presence at the sites.   

Weinstein, 73, was an American contractor working in Lahore, Pakistan, when he was snatched outside his home on Aug. 13, 2011, by Al Qaeda operatives. The Maryland resident and professor at State University of New York at Oswego was later seen in four “proof-of-life” videos, the most recent of which was released in December 2013. In that video, Weinstein appeared in a tan track suit with a wool cap and pleaded with the U.S. to come to his aid.

“And now, when I need my government, it seems that I have been totally abandoned and forgotten,” Weinstein says, apparently reading from a script. “I again appeal to you … to negotiate my release,” he said on the tape.

In a written statement, Weinstein’s wife, Elaine Weinstein, said “there are no words to do justice to the disappointment and heartbreak we are going through.”

“We do not yet fully understand all of the facts surrounding Warren’s death, but we do understand that the U.S. government will be conducting an independent investigation of the circumstances. We look forward to the results of that investigation,” she said. “But those who took Warren captive over three years ago bear ultimate responsibility. I can assure you that he would still be alive and well if they had allowed him to return home after his time abroad working to help the people of Pakistan.”

Gadahn, 36, the first widely known American to join Al Qaeda, grew up in Orange County, Calif., in a family with Christian and Jewish roots. He converted to Islam at age 17, and began studying Islam at the Islamic Society of Orange County. Gadahn reportedly moved to Pakistan in 1998, where he married an Afghan refugee and later joined Al Qaeda.

In 2001, he cut off contact with his family in California, and in the years following the 9/11 attacks, became a prominent spokesman for the terrorist group, appearing under the name “Azzam Al-Amriki” with Al Qaeda founder and 9/11 mastermind Usama bin Laden in videos justifying and threatening further attacks.

In 2006, Gadahn was placed on the Bureau of Diplomatic Security Rewards for Justice Program list of wanted criminals and indicted by a California federal grand jury on charges of treason.

In a 2007 Internet video called “Al Qaeda Video Warning to U.S. by American Adam Gadahn,” the homegrown radical imposed a list of demands on America, including an end to all support for the “bastard state of Israel.”

“Your failure to heed our demands and the demands of reason means that you and your people will – Allah willing – experience things which will make you forget all about the horrors of September 11, Afghanistan and Iraq.”

More details that began in 2011.

 

Warren Weinstein Begged Obama to Save Him Four Years Before U.S. Drone Killed Him

It was before dawn the morning of Aug. 13, 2011, when a group of men armed with assault rifles knocked on Warren Weinstein’s front gate in the Lahore suburb of Model Town, an upscale neighborhood where Benazir Bhutto is said to have had a house. Weinstein was working as country director for J.E. Austin Associates, a consulting firm based in Arlington, Va., that contracts with the Pakistani government. The 70-year-old was helping to create small businesses in tumultuous regions in conjunction with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

It was the beginning of more than two years in captivity for Weinstein, who was accidently killed by a U.S. drone strike in January, the Obama administration announced Thursday.

Shortly after he was taken captive, Weinstein appeared in a video and directly addressed President Obama.

“My life is in your hands,” he told Obama. “If you accept the demands, I live; if you don’t accept the demands, I die,” Weinstein said, referring to a list of demands made by al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri last year that included an end to American strikes in Pakistan and the release of al Qaeda and Taliban militants detained at Guantánamo Bay.

The day he was captured, three men arrived at the front of Weinstein’s house in Pakistan and offered his security guards gifts of food, a common practice among Muslims during Ramadan. At the same time, five men forced their way into the house from the back, overpowering Weinstein’s guards and gagging them. The assailants then made their way to Weinstein’s room, where they pistol-whipped him before taking him to a getaway car.

Weinstein was reportedly in the final hours of his time in Lahore and had packed his bags to leave Pakistan for good.

Weinstein had a house in Rockville, Maryland where he had lived with his wife and daughter for 35 years. Over the course of the five or six years he was working in Pakistan, Weinstein is said to have traveled back and forth to Maryland from time to time.

“We are devastated by this news and the knowledge that my husband will never safely return home,” Elaine Weinstein, his wife said in a statement. “We were so hopeful that those in the U.S. and Pakistani governments with the power to take action and secure his release would have done everything possible to do so and there are no words to do justice to the disappointment and heartbreak we are going through.”

Mrs. Weinstein criticized the administration that ended up killing her husband.

“Unfortunately, the assistance we received from other elements of the U.S. government was inconsistent and disappointing over the course of three and a half years. We hope that my husband’s death and the others who have faced similar tragedies in recent months will finally prompt the U.S. government to take its responsibilities seriously and establish a coordinated and consistent approach to supporting hostages and their families.”

Nevertheless, Mrs. Weinstein put the blame for her husband’s death on Al Qaeda.

“But those who took Warren captive over three years ago bear ultimate responsibility. I can assure you that he would still be alive and well if they had allowed him to return home after his time abroad working to help the people of Pakistan. The cowardly actions of those who took Warren captive and ultimately to the place and time of his death are not in keeping with Islam and they will have to face their God to answer for their actions.”

After Weinstein’s abductors made their escape from Lahore, they are thought to have transported their captive from safe house to safe house across Pakistan over a period of months. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the kidnapping after Weinstein’s August disappearance, and Pakistani officials found themselves without a real lead for months.

In late August, Lahore police chief Malik Ahmed Raza Tahir made a hasty announcement that Pakistani police had found and freed Weinstein in the city of Khushab, but only hours later said that his statement had been incorrect. Responding to Tahir’s mistake, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad tweeted at the time that “we have no information that would confirm recovery of Warren Weinstein, but we are hoping for a positive outcome.”
Al Qaeda finally declared itself responsible for the attack on Weinstein, and sources within the Taliban told reporters that over the intervening months the Pakistani branch of Al Qaeda had cooperated with Al Qaeda to secret Weinstein away to a tribal area of the country near the Afghan border. The Taliban commanders told reporters that they had kept quiet to improve their hand, a strategy that warded off pressure from Pakistani authorities and kept American officials at bay.

“Al Qaeda won’t kill Weinstein,” Mohammed Imran, a Pakistani security analyst said several years ago based on updates from militants. “It will keep him as healthy as possible in the circumstances.”

In the video, Weinstein assured his wife that he was in good health. “I’m getting all my medications, I’m being taken care of.”

Hillary Clinton Foundation and Uranium

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Primer:

The Russian reset via Hillary appears to be uranium and Putin’s control of the same. Reminder, Russia sells uranium to ahem….Iran.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=rA-vSIIyz9I#t=51

Sheesh, almost by the hour news breaks on the Clinton Foundations(s) where fraud and collusion are bubbling to the surface.

Last week Newsweek broke a story about InterPipe owned by Victor Pinchuk of Ukraine whose financial worth is estimated at $4.2 billion. He is quite close to the Clintons and generous with his money to their Foundations in exchange for policy decisions at the State Department. As an aside, Pinchuk is tied to Tony Blair, Paul Krugman, Shimon Perez, Dominique Strauss Khan, Larry Summers and well yes, even Elton John.

When it comes to Hillary’s run for the Oval Office, these actions may be coming out too soon given election day in November of 2016, but this could all be a good thing as money going into her campaign may slow to a crawl. It should also be noted that the Gowdy Benghazi Commission reports are not slated to be published either until the height of the election season in 2016.

Now let us move on to uranium and Hillary.

Gifts to Hillary Clinton’s Family Charity Are Scrutinized in Wake of Book

State Department sat on panel that approved sale of mine involving contributor to foundation

Hillary Clinton’s State Department was part of a panel that approved the sale of one of America’s largest uranium mines at the same time a foundation controlled by the seller’s chairman was making donations to a Clinton family charity, records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show.

The $610 million sale of 51% of Uranium One to a unit of Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear agency, was approved in 2010 by a U.S. federal committee that assesses the security implications of foreign investments. The State Department, which Mrs. Clinton then ran, is one of its members.

Between 2008 and 2012, the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative, a project of the Clinton Foundation, received $2.35 million from the Fernwood Foundation, a family charity run by Ian Telfer, chairman of Uranium One before its sale, according to Canada Revenue Agency records.

The donations were first reported in “Clinton Cash,” a new book by Peter Schweizer, an editor-at-large at a conservative news website, about the financial dealings of Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton. A copy of the book, set to be released next month, was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The book is to be published by HarperCollins, a division of News Corp. NWSA 0.23 % , which also publishes the Journal.

The book adds fresh details to previous reporting by the Journal and others about potential conflicts between Mrs. Clinton’s private charitable work and her public activities as secretary of state. The Journal reported in February that at least 60 companies that lobbied the State Department during her tenure donated a total of more than $26 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Josh Schwerin, a campaign spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, the front-runner for Democratic presidential nomination, said the Uranium One sale “went through the usual process, and the official responsible for managing CFIUS reviews has stated that the secretary did not intervene with him. This book is twisting previously known facts into absurd conspiracy theories.”

The campaign on Wednesday also provided a comment from Jose Fernandez, a former assistant secretary of state who served as the department’s principal representative on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which reviewed the sale. “Secretary Clinton never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter,” Mr. Fernandez said.

In response to past questions about possible conflicts, Mrs. Clinton has said she is proud of the foundation’s work. Earlier this week, she called the book a distraction from real campaign issues.

Mr. Telfer, in an interview Wednesday, said he made the contributions not for the sake of the Clintons, but to support his longtime business partner, Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining executive and longtime Clinton friend who co-founded the program to spur development in poor countries.

“The donations started before there was any idea of this takeover,” Mr. Telfer said. “And I can’t imagine Hillary Clinton would have been aware of this donation to this growth initiative,” he added.

The Fernwood contributions don’t appear on the Clinton Foundation website, as was required under an agreement between the foundation and the Obama administration. A Clinton Foundation spokesman referred questions to the Clinton-Giustra program spokeswoman in Canada, who didn’t respond.

Under the terms of the sale, the company said it wouldn’t seek an export license to send uranium out of the country, and that executives at the U.S.-based unit would control the mine, according to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission report. Uranium One, now a fully owned subsidiary of the Russian nuclear agency, owns a 300,000-acre mine in Wyoming and could produce up to half of the U.S. output of uranium this year. Some members of Congress at the time wrote to the committee calling on it to block the sale.

The Journal confirmed some other instances detailed in the book about Mrs. Clinton’s official activities and her family charity.

In June 2009, the Clinton Giustra initiative received two million shares in Polo Resources, POL 1.33 % a mining investment company headed by Stephen Dattels, a Canadian businessman, according to a Polo Resources news release. About two months later, the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh pushed the energy adviser to that nation’s prime minister to allow “open pit mining,” including in Phulbari Mines, where Polo Resources has a stake, according to a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks. The company seeking to develop the mine is still waiting for government approval, according to the firm’s website.

It isn’t known whether the Clinton-Giustra program still owns the shares. Neither Mr. Dattels nor his foundation nor Polo Resources are listed as donors by the Clinton Foundation website. Mr. Dattels, who retired in 2013, and representatives for Polo Resources couldn’t be reached for comment.

Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien, who heads a mobile-phone network provider called Digicel, won a $2.5 million award in 2011 from a program run by the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development to offer mobile money services in post-earthquake Haiti. The firm won subsequent awards. Funds for the awards were provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, while USAID administered the program, with a top Clinton aide directly overseeing earthquake aid.

Mr. O’Brien has given between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation since its launch. It is unclear whether Mr. O’Brien gave while Mrs. Clinton was at the State Department because of the way the foundation discloses its donations.

A USAID spokesman said the company met the criteria laid out in the Haiti Mobile Money Initiative. A spokesman for Mr. O’Brien said he couldn’t be reached and declined to comment. The Clinton campaign didn’t respond to request for comment on Polo Resources or Mr. O’Brien.

Write to Rebecca Ballhaus at [email protected] and Peter Nicholas at [email protected]

It is Iran Stupid…

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A partial list of where Iran has their proxies: Venezuela, Argentina, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan…..there is more. Armed tribes and there is no dispute, Iran has a financial network in the United States giving validation to the notion that Iran is the country where the global terror banking system resides.

 

The White House, the National Security Council, the State Department, the U.S. Treasury, the FBI and ODNI as well as the CIA all have tangible proof of the machinations of Iran, yet still the diplomatic process continues with impunity.

Iran’s increasingly active involvement in the region’s proxy wars increases domestic separatist terrorism risk

Key Points

  • Although protests by Ahwazi Arabs are fairly routine, the participation of sympathisers from other Arab states indicates the potential for ethnic and religiously motivated unrest and insurgency to evolve.
  • Ahwazi Arab militants in Khuzestan and Jaish al-Adl militants in Sistan-Baluchistan province have increasingly positioned their separatist narratives in the context of the regional Iran-Saudi conflict, indicating their receptiveness to external support, potentially from Iran’s regional rival Saudi Arabia.
  • Although IHS has no evidence of current Saudi involvement, Saudi support for these groups is a likely retaliatory option, in the event of perceived Iranian dominance in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, but this would likely be limited to funding and non-attributable low-capability weaponry. A sustained and high capability insurgency is unlikely in the one-year outlook.

EVENT

Hundreds of Ahwazi Arabs, along with Syrian, Iraqi, Palestinian, Lebanese, and Yemeni sympathisers, gathered on 17 April outside the European Parliament in Brussels to protest Iran’s “occupation of al-Ahwaz” in the country’s Khuzestan province.

Iran’s perceived successes in the Sunni-Shia regional conflict make it more likely that Iranian-backed groups will challenge Saudi Arabia’s regional authority, and increase the pressure on the Kingdom to confront Iran more directly. However, regardless of whether Saudi Arabia is backing insurgent groups in Iran, any such attack or protest by regional-based groups are likely to be attributed by Iran’s government to Saudi Arabia, not least as a way of deflecting relevance from domestic opposition.

Ahwazi Arabs

Iran has accused Saudi Arabia of supporting Ahwazi Arab militants based in the oil-rich Khuzestan province, southwest Iran, although this claim has not been substantiated, and nor has Iran specified the extent of such support. The Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA) has carried out a series of successful attacks on Iran’s oil and gas pipelines using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Khuzestan, with the most recent wave of such attacks occurring in 2012 and 2013. Although the long remote stretches of pipelines are potential targets for further IEDs, Iran has since enhanced pipeline security and there have been no successful attacks reported since 2013. The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) foiled a bomb plot on the Abadan-Mahashahr oil pipeline in November 2013, which the IRGC later claimed was by the ASMLA.

The ASMLA is likely to be receptive to external support from Iran’s opponents, principally Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the presence of Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Yemeni sympathisers at the 17 April Ahwazi protest rally held in Brussels indicates the group’s increasing alignment with those disaffected by Iran’s influence in those countries’ internal conflicts. Although Ahwazi Arabs are overwhelmingly Shia, the ASMLA dedicated the August 2013 attack on a gas pipeline to their Syrian ‘brothers-in-arms’, positioning the group’s agenda against Iran as part of the larger regional conflict. Moreover, the head of the ASMLA met with Mohammad Riad al-Shaqfeh, head of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, in September 2012, indicating their potential co-operation. Nevertheless, the extent of Ahwazi Arab support for the ASMLA and militancy is unclear. Despite having economic grievances, Ahwazi Arabs sided with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988).

Jaish al-Adl

IHS monitoring of Jaish al-Adl’s social media accounts shows that the group is increasingly reaching out to an Arabic-speaking audience, probably to secure funding from Gulf donors. It released a video purportedly showing the 6 April attack in Negur, Sistan-Baluchistan province, in which eight Iranian border guards were killed. The video included Arabic subtitles. Publishing videos of successful attacks is used by some Syrian militant groups to secure donor funding. Jaish al-Adl’s social media accounts also increasingly report on regional conflicts, particularly Yemen, marking a shift in its rhetoric from an exclusively Baluchi nationalist one to one that positions itself within the regional Sunni-Shia conflict.

Although there is no evidence to prove existing Saudi support for Jaish al-Adl, if this did occur it would most likely be through Pakistan, where the group’s core leadership is based and which has a history of support for the group. The Iran-Pakistan border is porous and the group can move across the border with relative ease. For its part, Pakistan’s unwillingness or inability to supply weaponry or forces to the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen might well create pressure on Pakistan to facilitate Saudi support for Jaish al-Adl in Iran, however even this might well prove problematic, given Pakistan’s interest in securing gas from Iran via a planned pipeline.

Kurds

Kurdish separatists have traditionally been active in their homeland of Iran’s northwestern provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan, but there has been little recent activity by its main group, Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (Partiya Jiyana Azada Kurdistane: PJAK). However, at least one faction of PJAK is likely to have been radicalised after Iran ignored the group’s call for negotiations in May 2014. A possible indication of such radicalisation was an alleged plot by ‘Islamist extremists’ to blow up a mosque in January 2015 in Mahabad, West Azerbaijan province, which Iranian authorities claimed to have foiled. The Iranian deputy interior minister Hossein Zolfaqari also claimed in March 2015 that Iran’s security forces have also dismantled several Islamic State-affiliated cells in the past year. The Islamic State has separately claimed to have Iranian Kurds among its recruits, although IHS has no evidence to substantiate this claim. Even if there is an appeal for Islamic State-inspired militancy in these provinces, Iran’s pervasive intelligence network is likely to mitigate risks of successful attacks. Meanwhile, as with Jaish al-Adl, it is quite probable that Iran will attribute alleged Islamist militancy amongst Iranian Kurds to external, principally Saudi, involvement, particularly in the event of fatalities amongst Iranian security forces or civilians.

FORECAST

Although Saudi Arabia has some incentive to provide limited support to opposition or insurgent/militant groups in Iran in the context of its regional proxy war with Iran, such support is likely to be confined to funding and non-attributable light weaponry. Even if this option were adopted, Iran’s transit routes are heavily guarded by the IRGC, and arms shipments through the Iraqi border or the Gulf coast would very likely be intercepted. Transfers of weaponry would be easier across the porous Pakistan border, but even then, Jaish al-Adl has not demonstrated the capability to move beyond the border area, much less transfer weaponry to Khuzestan. However, regardless of whether Saudi support is forthcoming, Iran would probably attribute blame to Saudi or other Gulf actors in the event of an increase in the frequency or capability of attacks in its peripheral provinces, which would also exacerbate the state of hostility between the two countries.