HALABJA: Islamic State may be on the wane in Iraq and Syria but for Iran,the threat is still strong, centred on Kurdish communities along theIraq-Iran border where militants have operated in recent years.
The locals even have a nickname for the area, “Tora Bora”, after themountain hideout al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden fled to after the UnitedStates invaded Afghanistan in 2001, a senior Iraqi security official in theborder region said.
In late January, three Revolutionary Guards were killed in the Bamo regionfighting 21 Islamic State militants who had sneaked in from Iraq. Threemilitants detonated suicide vests and two others were killed in the clash,the Guards said.
Days earlier, Iran’s intelligence ministry found a weapons cache in thetown of Marivan on the Iranian side of the border that included TNT, C4,electronic detonators, grenades, ammunition clips for AK-47 machine gunsand rocket propelled grenades.
The clash and discovery indicate that Islamic State still has the abilityto penetrate the tightly controlled security net of the Islamic Republic,which has largely managed to avoid the devastation wrought by the group inneighboring countries.
“Today (Islamic State) does not control a country … in order to assert thatthey exist, they may carry out an attack any day,” Hossein Dehghan, aformer defence minister and now an adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah AliKhamenei, said in a recent interview with the semi-official Tasnim newsagency.
Halabja, the largest town on the Iraqi side, is most often remembered for achemical attack ordered by then-President Saddam Hussein in 1988 which leftthousands dead.
The presence of religious militants in the area around the town is not new:at the city’s entrance hang portraits of Iraqi Kurdish security forces,known as Peshmerga, killed in the battle against Islamic State.
Prior to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, thejihadist largely blamed for stoking a civil war between Iraq’s Sunnis andShi’ites, led a group in the area called Ansar al-Islam, which merged withIslamic State in 2014.
Many of the Iranian and Iraqi Kurds now fighting with Islamic State arepart of a second generation of militants largely influenced by Zarqawi’sdeadly legacy, Iraqi security officials and Peshmerga commanders familiarwith the matter say.
Sunni IS militants see Shi’ites, who make up the majority of Iran’spopulation, as apostates and have repeatedly threatened to carry outattacks in the Islamic Republic. Kurds make up about ten percent ofIranians and are predominantly Sunni.
Hamai Hama Seid, a senior Peshmerga commander and member of the IraqiPatriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party, said Kurdish IS militants takeadvantage of their knowledge of the language and region as well as strongcross-border ties.
“There are definitely ties between the Iranian and Iraqi extremists on thetwo sides of the border,” Seid told Reuters in the Iraqi border village ofTawila, only a few hundred meters from the Iranian border. He added:
“The militants exploited this area because it’s mountainous, difficult andwooded.”
Many of the young men are poorly educated and have few economicopportunities, allowing extremist recruiters to flourish, Iraqi securityofficials and Peshmerga commanders say.
June attack: Iranian authorities say the arms cache found on the border wasgoing to be used to attack civilians in public areas, a follow-up to theshocking assault on the parliament in Tehran and the mausoleum of thefounder of Iran’s revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, last June thatleft at least 18 people dead and dozens wounded.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for that assault and threatened more.The Revolutionary Guards responded by raining missiles on the militants inSyria and arresting dozens of suspects in Iran.
The June attack was conceived by an Iraqi militant using the nom de guerreAbu Aisha, a senior commander in a unit of Islamic State fighting in Iraqand Syria made up exclusively of Kurds, according to the Iranian ministryof intelligence.
The Tehran attackers fought in Mosul and Raqqa and trained outside Iran,the ministry said.
Photos posted online show Abu Aisha, a member of Ansar al-Islam prior tojoining Islamic State, beheading Peshmerga soldiers while wearing atraditional Kurdish outfit.