Iran guards 'killed in clash' on Pakistan border

[Bosonic]

Source: BBC

Fourteen Iranian border guards have been killed in a clash with gunmen on the border with Pakistan, the official Iranian news agency Irna says.

The clashes took place on Friday night in a mountainous region outside Saravan, a border town in south-east Iran.

Five border guards were wounded in the attack, Irna said.

An unnamed official quoted by the agency blamed "bandits or rebels opposed to the Islamic republic".

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24682729

[1000words]

1. Heavy casualties for "bandits or rebels."

Is the Baloch insurgency that capable?

[bemildred]

5. People have been know to help them from time to time.

As with the Kurds on the West. They (the Balochi resistance) have not given much evidence that I have seen of either winning or going away, on either side of the border, again like the Kurds.

Ethnic and religious boundaries rarely follow the colonial political borders drawn 100 years ago, and this is a continuing problem for the colonial successor states.

[JI7]

2. a sunni shiite conflict ?

[bemildred]

3. That area is home to a long-standing separatist movement on both sides of that border.

It is also a "busy" area "geostategicallly", lots of people sticking their stick in and stirring a bit. This seems to be well organized, the perps gave a good account of themselves in the fight, if I was to guess, it is designed to stir up trouble, stave off peace, and things of that sort. But religious nuts are a possibility too. Often hard to tell them apart.

[Igel]

6. IIRC, currently we're in the 3rd wave of this kind of thing.

It's been going on for a couple of decades. There have been periods of this kind of insurgency before.

It's what happens when you get tired of being the objects of somebody else's empire. (We think of the US as being imperialist when it comes to Iran--but it's real easy to forget that the current Iran is the rump of a formerly larger empire and still contains subject peoples. Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs, Balochs, Tadzhiks ... They were conquered, occpuied, partly settled, and still kept in check when they dare to get uppity and dare to resist their Aryan overlords.)

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Update at link: Iran hangs 16 rebels 'in reprisal for border deaths'

Sixteen rebels have been hanged in Iran in retaliation for the deaths of at least 14 border guards in an ambush, say Iranian news agencies.

The rebels were "linked to groups hostile to the regime", the attorney general of Sistan-Baluchistan province was quoted as saying.

They were hanged in prison in Zahedan, north-east of Saravan, where the border deaths took place overnight.
...
One report suggests they may already have been tried and convicted, but their executions brought forward following the ambush.