Why have the Baloch picked up arms against the Iranian state?

On January 16, Iranian combat drones and missiles hit targets inside neighbouring Pakistan. The attack was aimed at a little-known armed group Jaish al Adl (the Army of Justice). A day later, Pakistan responded with its missile strike inside Iran, threatening to escalate tensions across a volatile border.

Security analysts offered various explanations, mostly centered around the Iranian leadership’s attempt to project power at a time when it is facing domestic protests and international scrutiny over its ties with groups like the Houthis in Yemen.

But ask regional analyst Stephane A. Dudoignon and he points his finger at the Hamun Lake for being one important source of the trouble.

The lake and its associated wetlands are located in Iran’s southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan province. For years, they have been drying up, damaging the local economy on which the ethnic Baloch people rely upon. Tehran has done little to help them.

“We spoke all over the world in the 1990s about the disappearance of the Aral Sea (in Central Asia). But nobody spoke of the disappearance of the Hamun, which had an equally catastrophic consequence for the population for the whole area,” says Dudoignon, author of The Baluch, Sunnism and the State in Iran.

“Seasonal fishing, which was an extremely important activity in the system, has almost completely disappeared.”

Jaish al Adl is made up of ethnic Baloch men. The Baloch are a minority in Iran but constitute a majority in Sistan-Baluchistan.

For over a century they have complained of systematic discrimination under various governments.

Tehran has imposed restrictions on the Balochi language and names. Baloch people don’t get government jobs, poverty is rampant in their areas and hundreds have been executed on flimsy smuggling allegations, rights groups say.

Baloch also happen to be Sunni Muslims, whereas the Islamic Republic of Iran adheres to the Shia faction of Islam, with Shia clergy shaping the country’s domestic and foreign policies since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

“When you go to the post office of Sistan-Baluchistan, for example, you realise that most of the time the entire staff is made of Shia, Persian-speaking people, which for many Baloch is a sign of the perpetuation of colonialism,” says Dudoignon, who has traveled across Iran for research.

A Sunni cannot become Iran’s president and important government and administrative positions are often reserved for Shia Iranians, adding to the sense of alienation among the Baloch people, he says.

Baloch tribes straddle the mountainous region on the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

While a lot has been written on the Baloch militancy in Pakistan, the decades-long insurgency in Iran often gets relegated to a footnote in the greater regional rivalries of Iran with Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Not the usual terrorist

The Iranian attack on Jaish al Adl came days after the January 3 bombings in Kerman city in which at least 90 people were killed. Suicide bombers detonated among crowd of thousands of people who had gathered to mark the fourth death anniversary of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani.

Iran reacted by carrying out deadly strikes in Iraq and Syria. But the Kerman suicide bombings were claimed by Daesh and carried out by the Daesh chapter based in Afghanistan.

Jaish al Adl was not involved. Yet, Iran decided to attack the group’s alleged hideouts in Pakistan’s Balochistan province.

Jaish al Adl is an offshoot of Jundullah, an armed organisation that emerged in Iran in 2002-03. Since then it has posed the most significant internal security threat to Tehran by carrying out a series of deadly bomb attacks on Iranian military checkposts.

“We don't really know exactly which foreign powers were behind Jundullah, but for sure Jundullah would have had some sponsors outside of Iran's borders,” says Alex Vatanka, the founding Director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

“The Iranian regime always blamed some Gulf countries to support the Baloch militants with money and maybe arms as part of the regional competition.”

Iran also accuses Pakistan for giving sanctuary to Jaish al Adl. But Islamabad denies it, drawing attention to its military efforts towards containing violent insurgency in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, which shares a porous 904 kilometer-long border with Sistan-Baluchistan.

Tehran has painted Jundullah and Jaish al Adl as 'Sunni extremist groups'. But experts who have studied the region and the various armed movements say that such projection is incorrect.

Analysis of the attacks carried out by Jundullah and Jaish al Adl shows that 95 percent of their targets were military, says Dudoignon, who is also a senior research fellow at the Paris-based School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS).

“I think that we must be very careful, especially in our comparisons between different guerrillas in the region.”

Unlike Daesh or Al Qaeda, which have a transnational ambitions based on spreading their ideology, Jaish al Adl - formerly Jundullah - has mainly focused on targeting Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), says Dudoignon.

Even when Jundullah attacked a place of worship - like the 2009 bombing of Amir al-Momenin mosque in Zahedan - it was primarily to assassinate IRGC commanders who were praying inside, he says.

“This is fundamentally different from the attack against the sanctuary of Qasem Soleimani in Kerman in early January with a lot of civilian victims.”

This distinction is important because Baloch movements have largely been secular and left-leaning in both Iran and Pakistan.

Abdolmalik Rigi, the young Baloch man who founded Jundullah, was probably drawn to militancy because of Tehran’s policy to favour some Baloch tribes over the others, says Dudignon.

“And this rejection of the Rigi tribe or part of the Rigi tribe played probably some role in the engagement of some of its youngest members, including Abdolmalek Rigi, to join guerrilla activity.”

Iranian authorities captured and executed Rigi in 2010.

Jaish al Adl, which emerged after Rigi’s execution, says it is not seeking independence for Sistan-Baluchistan but greater rights and autonomy.

Faced with country-wide public unrest over poor economic conditions and clampdown on freedom of expression, the Iranian authorities appear to have let loose their pent-up anger upon the Baloch.

At the height of the Masha Amini protests, Iranian forces perpetuated the single most deadly massacre in Zahedan on September 30, 2022, when they opened fire on Baloch protesters outside a Sunni Muslim mosque, killing at least 60 people.

That same year Iran executed 582 people. Around 30 percent or 174 of them belonged to the Baloch minority, which makes up only 5 percent of the total population.

Iran’s attack inside the Pakistani territory came at a time when Tehran-linked Houthis in Yemen were being bombed by the United States and its allies.

The US continues to impose economic and financial sanctions on Iran for pursuing alleged nuclear weapons programmes and arming proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Poverty-stricken people continue to suffer in Sistan-Baluchistan where malnutrition among children and iron deficiency among pregnant women remains higher than the national average and where drug addiction among unemployed men has become endemic.

“The government in Iran is much more focused on this sort of bigger battle against the West, against the United States and Israel,” says Vatanka of the Middle East Institute.

“And as a result, it devotes sources to campaigns outside in a region while neglecting campaigns that they should be pursuing inside of Iran.”