As if having alleged Mossad agents smothering Hamas leaders wasn't enough, Dubai found itself in the eye of another spy storm last month, writes Graham Usher in New York "Dubai has a smeared hand in this scandal that shows the Zionist regime wants to turn the region into a safe haven for terrorists with the help of America and Europe," railed Iran's Intelligence Minister, Haidar Moslehi, at a press conference in Tehran last month. Moslehi wasn't referring to the extra-judicial execution in a Dubai hotel on 19 January of Hamas official, Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, almost certainly by Israeli Mossad agents masquerading as British, Irish, French, Australian and German tourists. Nor was he referring to Dubai's recent decision to install American Patriot anti-missile systems against the "threat" posed by a potentially nuclear Iran, a move that has strained relations between the Gulf Emirate and Islamic Republic. He was trumpeting the capture on 23 February of Tehran's most wanted fugitive in Iranian airspace en route from Dubai to the Central Asian Republic of Kyrgyzstan. As Moslehi vitriol tells, the abduction strained ties even more. It also deepened Dubai's increasingly dodgy reputation as a regional cockpit for other peoples' wars. Abdel-Malek Rigi is the leader of Jundallah (Soldiers of God), a Sunni militant group that has spearheaded an insurgency in Iran's south east Sistan-Baluchistan allegedly out of bases in Pakistan's sister Baluchistan province. Since 2003, Jundallah has claimed several attacks against the Islamic Republic, killing hundreds of civilians and dozens of soldiers. The latest -- and most notorious -- was a suicide bombing in eastern Iran on 18 October that killed 40 Iranians, including 15 members of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). It was the deadliest hit inside Iran since the 1979 revolution. Despite its Jihadi-like name, Rigi says his group is a nationalist movement fighting for an independent Sistan Baluchistan, a mainly Sunni province in the majority Shia state. In recent months Jundallah has called on Iran's other minority groups -- Kurdish, Sunni and Arab -- to "rise up" against Iran's sectarian regime. Rigi seems quite a catch. In Tehran Moslehi brandished a photograph which he said showed Rigi at a United States military base in Afghanistan 24 hours before his arrest. Rigi was in possession of an Afghan passport supplied by the United States, said the minister. In April 2008 he supposedly met in Kabul with Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO's then military chief. While in Dubai -- according to a "confession" aired by Iranian state TV -- Rigi said he had met with CIA agents who offered arms, training and a base "along the border with Afghanistan next to Iran". In return they urged Jundallah and other "anti-Iran" groups to "wage war and create difficulty for the Islamic system...The Americans said their main problem at present was Iran, not Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Iran was going its own way," said Rigi. Finally, Rigi said he was travelling to Kyrgyzstan to meet no less a person than Richard Holbrooke, US special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan. In the past Iran has accused Jundallah of being in the pay of the CIA, British intelligence, Mossad, Al Qaeda and Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) agency. His arrest is thus a "great defeat for the US and UK," said Moslehi. As usual, Tel Aviv made no comment on Tehran's charges; London "unreservedly" welcomed the arrest of a "terrorist responsible for despicable attacks that killed many innocent Iranians". And Washington said claims of American collusion with Jundallah -- whether in Afghanistan, Dubai, Kyrgyzstan or Iran -- were so much "garbage". But there may be some nuggets of truth among the trash. In recent years Jundallah has not only bombed the IRGC but claimed an attack on a mosque during Iran's presidential election campaign last year and, in 2006, a suicide bombing that killed 22 government employees. Elsewhere such actions would be dubbed terrorism. Yet Jundallah has yet to be included in US State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organisations. In 2007 the American ABC News ran a story, citing US and Pakistani intelligence sources, alleging that Jundallah had been "secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005" to sow disorder in the Islamic Republic. Also in 2007 American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in the New Yorker that Congress had approved George W Bush's request for $400 million to fund covert operations against Iranian regime. Tehran charges that Jundallah, together with the Kurdish PJAK and Mojaheddin-e-Khalq operating out of Iraq, is a major recipient of that cash. It also notes that President Barack Obama has never rescinded the order. Squeezed by sanctions over its nuclear program from without -- and domestic challenges from within -- the Iranian regime has increasingly projected itself as defender of the Islamic Republic and custodian of Shia identity. Since the contested presidential elections, it is not only democratic critics that have borne much of the repression: so have groups representing Iran's ethnic and sectarian minorities. In the last eight months two Kurdish activists have been hanged and 11 others put on death row. Last year 14 charged with membership of Jundallah were executed, all of them Sunni. The US -- along with other states -- may be fishing in these troubled waters. They did the same thing in pre-occupied Iraq. But they can find allies because such minorities and regions hold real grievances. Sistan-Baluchistan is Iran's most impoverished province. Together with Kurds from Iran's north-west, its Sunnis suffer the worst discrimination. Jundallah almost certainly offers no redress for their plight. But neither so far has the Iranian government.
