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Iran: The smugglers of Iran's Kurdistan
20.2.2007
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February 20, 2007
PAVEH, Iran-Kurdistan (Western Iran),--
Learning English was a hard struggle for Hassan
Arinadi. The thickly bearded son of a respected
dervish [1] grew up in an isolated Sunni-dominated
Kurdish village that is also a mystical center for
Iran's remote and volatile Kurdistan province. Long
days and nights of study paid off, and now Arinadi
is the local English teacher, imparting long strings
of grammatically sound if old-fashioned English
sentences to his Kurdish pupils.
When a rare foreign visitor passes through his
village, Arinadi is the first port of call.
Squatting in the kitchen of the village khaneqah
(Sufi meeting house), he prepares an endless stream
of small glasses of tea for the 100 dervishes who
come every Friday for the weekly ceremony. But since
being harassed by Iranian intelligence a few years
ago, he can speak far less than he might have liked
to.
Arinadi remains vague on the details of his brush
with Iran's feared VAVAK (Vezarat-e Etelaat va
Amniat-e Keshvar) intelligence apparatus. All he
will say is that it followed his hosting of a group
of European tourists at the Sufi retreat of which
his family are caretakers. Contacts between foreign
tourists straying beyond Iran's urban tourist
triangle - Tehran, Esfahan and Shiraz - and Iran's
often-pressured ethnic minorities are frowned on.
While visually stunning - it ought to be on the
tourist trail - the village's position next to
civil-war-torn Iraq and restive Sunni Muslim Kurdish
inhabitants dictates its isolation. The prevailing
government philosophy ever since a Kurdish rebellion
soon after the 1979 Iranian revolution was violently
suppressed is out of sight, out of mind. During
Ashura, Shi'ite Islam's most important festival and
the commemoration of the slaying of the Prophet's
grandson Hossein by his political opponents, there
were none of the black shrouds of mourning,
self-flagellating crowds that filled most of Iran's
other cities.
It is a time when the struggle by Iraq's already
autonomous Kurds for their own state is providing
inspiration to Kurds in neighboring countries. In
the region, a simmering Sunni-Shi'ite enmity has
spilled over into a covert war. So it is
unsurprising that Iranian Kurdistan's Sunni Kurds
inhabit one of the least developed areas of the
country and are politically unrepresented in Tehran.
"If there was a Shi'ite shrine here, the government
would have built a huge mosque on its site and
asphalted all roads leading to it," said Abu Bakr,
the driver of an antique Nissan flatbed truck as he
negotiated the snowed-in mountain paths connecting
far-flung mountain villages.
In Paveh, the biggest city in the area, the state
makes its presence felt through the armed guards
standing sentry at the fortress-like police station
built atop a hill close to the center of town. Most
public signs are in Persian and Shi'ite imagery and
names are given to schools and hospitals with
predominantly Sunni pupils and patients. Many of the
Revolutionary Guards entrusted to control the
frontier from the rampant smuggling in goods that
cuts across Iran and Iraq come from Iran's dominant
Persian ethnic majority.
"Guerrillas from the Komala or Democrats [banned
anti-Islamic Republic Kurdish secessionist groups]
would throw stones at our sentries at night to bait
them out in order to shoot at them," said a Kurdish
soldier who served in Paveh in the early 1990s
ferrying water to the border outposts. He was
dismissed from duty after his superiors discovered
that he had been selling water to locals whose
villages had yet to have piping installed.
Many of the politically active Kurds are forced to
lie low or flee across the border to Iraq. There,
they can pick up military training and political
indoctrination at a camp run by Pejak - the Party of
Free Life in Kurdistan - on the inaccessible Mount
Qandil. Pejak subscribes to the teachings of
now-imprisoned Abdullah Ocalan, the former leader of
Turkey's banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
Pejak's cadres are mostly educated male and female
activists, and it emerged as a force in northern
Iraq as a result of the collapse of the Iraqi state.
Ever since then, reports have emerged linking US and
Israeli covert operations with these anti-Tehran
groups.
"If reports are true that we have third-party agents
and even a few Special Forces teams of our own
inside Iran, why isn't Tehran screaming bloody
murder about that?" asked Ray Close, a former US
Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Saudi
Arabia. "Perhaps in the past this was because they
were embarrassed to admit that they had not caught
any of our agents. But now that we have done so in
Iraq, wouldn't you expect that the Iranians are
probably launching a major campaign to grab some
American and display him on TV as an infiltrator?
Stay tuned."
Last May, a top Kurdish guerrilla threatened to
launch hit-and-run attacks on Iran after Iranian
artillery shelling of Mount Qandil.
"We have the right to launch attacks against Iranian
forces," said Cemil "Cuma" Bayik, the de facto
leader of the PKK, a quasi-socialist rebel movement
entrenched in a decades-long guerrilla
war for independence in the majority-Kurdish
southeast of Turkey. In 2005, Pejak killed at least
120 Iranian soldiers in Iran, according to the
Jamestown Foundation. In 2006, the guerrilla attacks
continued undiminished. Also active is the left-wing
Komala (Revolutionary Toilers of Iran) group that
was founded in 1969 and was affiliated with the
also-banned Communist Party of Iran. Last year, a
senior Komala representative, Abdullah Muhtadi,
traveled to Washington for a conference of Iranian
minority groups amid speculation that the US
administration was exploring a way of working with
the group against Tehran.
On January 16, a commentary by Aref Mohammadzadeh in
the conservative daily Jomhuri-ye Eslami accused
Washington of "devising a strategy against the
Islamic Republic similar to the one which had led to
the collapse of the Soviet Union" and which aims at
"fomenting and strengthening separatist movements
and tribalist groups".
"One of the duties of these [recruited] individuals
is to make connections inside Iran in order to
recruit other people, and also to be in contact with
Western authorities, organizations and institutions
and present false and fabricated reports on the
situation of ethnic groups in Iran," the commentary
said.
Triumphant Iranian soldiers encountered last summer
on the outskirts of Marivan in the Kurdish heartland
claimed to have been involved in a skirmish the
previous night in which "we killed the Khomeini of
the Kurds", a comparative reference to the late
ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But very little news
filters out from Kurdistan, and the Ministry of
Islamic Guidance in Tehran throws bureaucratic
obstacles in the path of foreign journalists seeking
to visit the province.
With the region kept underdeveloped, smuggling
provides a lucrative source of income. The Kurds'
unmatched knowledge of the bandit-infested mountain
passes connecting Iran with Iraq allows them to feed
their neighbor's thirst for gasoline while bringing
in Western electrical goods, weapons and alcohol.
If the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are smuggling
weapons into Iraq, it is more likely to be happening
through the southern border crossing areas of Mehran
and Basra, which connect large Revolutionary Guard
infrastructure projects with majority-Shi'ite,
pro-Tehran southern Iraq. Any arms smuggling
happening through the Kurdish areas is more likely
to be Kurdish- orchestrated and private, rather than
government-led.
"The fact that serial numbers were found [on weapons
in Iraq] and that they could be traced to Iran
production factories is not completely out of the
question," said Paul Sullivan, a professor of
economics at National Defense University in the
Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC. "However,
this does not necessarily prove Iranian culpability.
These could have rather easily been sold on black
markets, smuggled etc."
The Iranian government tries to stop the
fuel-smuggling by posting armed guards at gasoline
stations, noting license plates (a pointless action
as the system is not computerized) and rationing
fuel to 30 liters (half the full-tank capacity of a
Nissan flatbed truck, the smugglers' favorite mode
of transport) per day
"You have to get used to sleeping in the snow at
night when bringing in a shipment," said Umar, a
driver who uses his truck to bring goods into Iraq.
"We know where the checkpoints are and carry the
goods by hand across mountain paths before
depositing them again on the other side of the
checkpoint and bringing the empty truck to carry
them the rest of the way."
Soldiers are also co-opted, and many look forward to
a stint turning a blind eye at mountain checkpoints
or gasoline pumps in Kurdistan as a lucrative form
of income.
"However pure a guard or a fuel attendant is, they
become corrupted within a day when they are given
the opportunity to make in one month enough money to
be able to marry when their duty finishes," said one
Kurdish official who requested anonymity. Many of
the most successful Kurdish smugglers are
collaborators with the government in Tehran. The
state allows them to conduct their own activities
unmolested in return for their loyalty. One Kurdish
family in the inaccessible village of Oraman has
grown wealthy from smuggling but lost one of its
sons, who was in the Revolutionary Guard when he was
killed in a guerrilla attack.
Note
1. The word "dervish", especially in European
languages, refers to members of Sufi Muslim ascetic
religious fraternities, known for their extreme
poverty and austerity, similar to mendicant friars.
- Wikipedia
atimes com
*
Iranian Kurdistan (Kurdish: Kurdistana Îranę or
Kurdistana Rojhilat (Eastern Kurdistan) or Rojhilatę
Kurdistan (East of Kurdistan)) is an unofficial name
for the parts of Iran inhabited by Kurds and has
borders with Iraq and Turkey. It includes the
greater parts of West Azerbaijan province, Kurdistan
Province, Kermanshah Province, and Ilam Province.
Kurds form the majority of the population of this
region with an estimated population of 4 million.
The region is the eastern part of the greater
cultural-geographical area called Kurdistan.
More about Iranian Kurdistan
The use of the term "Kurdistan" is vigorously
rejected due to its alleged political implications
by the Republic of Turkey, which does not recognize
the existence of a "Turkish Kurdistan" Southeast
Turkey.
Others estimate as many as 40 million Kurds live in
Big Kurdistan (Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Armenia),
which covers an area as big as France, about half of
all Kurds which estimate to 20 million live in
Turkey.
The Kurdish flag flown officially in Iraqi Kurdistan but
unofficially flown by Kurds in Armenia. The flag is
banned in Iran, Syria, and Turkey where flying it is
a criminal offence"
Southeastern Turkey:
North Kurdistan (
Kurdistan-Turkey) wikipedia
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